Take Time to Dream
Imagine how your life might change if you did just ONE of these things every day!
The other night I asked Marika if she wanted to plan a vacation with me that we didn’t have to go on. Where do you want to go? Philadelphia, she said, to visit her aunt. And Longwood Gardens, I added. And we’ll invite all of my relatives to meet us at the diner on Roosevelt Blvd, and we can go to that art museum that your mother was talking about. The Barnes Foundation? Yes. And we can get real PRETZELS. And maybe we can go to Baltimore. How far is Baltimore? I’d love to go back to Visionary Museum and they have a great aquarium, too. We could take the train. And a bus to the harbor. It would be an adventure!
It was fun to let our imaginations go wild, to stretch and envision without considering logistics, money, time….to just play.
That afternoon, after spending over an hour helping Marika look for jobs online, she was flipping through an RV supply catalog. She pointed to all kinds of silly things that we could buy for when we are on the road, traveling in the RV. We were both smiling, laughing, lifted from the heaviness of the job hunting. And it was fun!
The next day I was sitting in the hairdresser’s chair and she was telling me how tired she was from all the cleaning and painting she’s been doing at her house.
I asked her, if you could go anywhere on a vacation, where would you go? Paris, she said, and her whole face lifted. What would you do there? Drink wine. and sightsee. Would you go alone or? Oh no, I’d go with a girlfriend. Not my boyfriend. She stayed with the dreaming for a few quiet minutes then said So you remember that when you win the lottery, OK?
Our minds need to dream without limitations. Like kids do. They’re able to imagine all kinds of magical inventions because they never consider if it’s possible. When we explore the edges of our own possibilities, who knows what we will discover.
So, imagine, where would you go on a vacation? What would you do there? Who would you go with? Tell us! Share by clicking on the Comments below!
[ssba]How to Wake Up
This summer my friends Maya Stein and Amy Tingle are bicycling 1,400 miles on a tandem bicycle through America’s heartland, writing free poems & building Little Free Libraries.
They made tiny little books for people to complete and add to the free library. This book was sent to me with blank pages and just the title. It was up to me to write the contents. I am thrilled to share my first published book.
Click on the picture to see the whole book.
And click here for more information of Maya and Amy’s Tandem Poetry Tour
[ssba]What’s Next?
Like with any behavior, thought or pattern we’re trying to release, if we focus on it, it continues to manifest.
But if we shift our thought and attention to what is NEXT, even AND ESPECIALLY if we don’t know what that is, then that first thing loses energy, lessens its hold on us and it eventually releases.
For the last four weeks I’ve been in pain and for the last two, I’ve been writing about it. Because that’s how I needed to move through it. To get to know it, describe it, feel it with words. I needed to engage with it, be with it, learn from it.
And then, at some point, even though pain was still with me, I didn’t want to give it my full and undivided attention anymore. I was ready to release it.
I stopped using the word pain and now I simply notice the different “sensations” when I sit or stand or bend my legs. Sometimes it’s tingly, then more like thumbtacks poking, with fire. But just a small fire, and it goes out quickly, and it doesn’t spread.
When I sit for too long I feel a hard aching on my butt, but it no longer feels like someone’s drilling a hole back there. But the longer I sit, the wider and deeper the ache spreads and then it reverberates like electricity down my leg. But the intensity is much less and it doesn’t last long, especially if I can get on my back, on an ice pack and relieve the pressure on my spine.
On Monday I saw a “real” doctor at a spine and sports medicine practice. She confirmed that I probably have a herniated disk and that yes, 80% of patients get relief in 6-8 weeks without much intervention.
She prescribed neurontin for the nerve pain. We’ll see if it gives me more pain-free sitting time. I’m taking the rest of the week off of work to remove the stress of cancelling, rescheduling and feeling bad about it, and I’m devoting the time to healing.
I’ve been doing gentle hip opening and core building yoga stretches and have added heart openers and balancing poses to my practice.
Yes, I need to be aware of what hurts so I don’t overdo it, but I am ready to begin moving with this new freedom in my hip, to stretch deeper, to stay open to what’s next, even though I don’t know exactly what that is.
I do know what skills and gifts I want to share and with who. I know what I love to do most, and that I really do help people see themselves with eyes of love.
And so, during this week of healing, I’m focusing on what I love, what I’m grateful for, and how I want to feel in my life.
I’m asking myself questions like:
What do I really want?
Why?
What do I already have?
What’s in the way?
What’s the next first step I can take?
And I’m looking forward, eyes and hips and heart wide open.
Share your thought, your own What’s Next! by clicking the comments below!
[ssba]Making Friends with Pain
It is Sunday, day 23 of this sciatica journey and it is still too uncomfortable to sit in a chair for any length of time. So I am lying on my back in bed with the ice pack under my right butt cheek. My computer is propped between my belly and my bent knees and I have two pillows tucked under my neck and shoulders so that I can see the screen.
Yes, everything hurts a LOT less than it did a week ago. I am able to stretch my arms above my head without feeling the clenching in my hip. I can bend at the waist and get up and down from a chair with no pain. I can even lie on my back with both knees tucked into my chest and rock.
But I still can’t sit or stand long enough to drive or enjoy a meal, much less work with a client.
I remind myself how big a shift this has all been, emotionally, physically, even spiritually. And that healing takes time. My muscles and tendons, ligaments and nerves were all so bound up, and my femur actually shifted in the hip socket. So it should be no surprise that it’s going to take a while for everything to calm back down.
And that all I can do is what I can do.
I get up to walk and move every 10 to 15 minutes. I can now get on the floor to stretch at least once an hour, doing leg lifts and hip rotators and gentle twists. I am drinking lots of water, taking the homeopathic anti-inflammatory pills and rubbing arnica cream on my butt and thigh several times a day. And I am breathing.
And I practice sitting. Getting into the chair is painless and easy. I remember to relax and breathe and all is fine. And then I feel the pressure on my butt, like I’m sitting on a fresh black and blue mark. I shift to my weight onto my other side but I still can’t find a comfortable position.
Then I think I am being a baby, that I should be able to sit down even if it hurts, and so I stay. And then I have sat too long and my butt is cramping and the fire is racing down my leg and balling up behind my knee and I can’t get into bed on my back fast enough to relieve the pressure.
I lie there, breathing to relax, until finally I can feel my butt loosen and release, even though it still hurts. I breathe deep into the pain to discern if the edges of the pain circle are any smaller than the last time I checked.
I have asked the pain what it wants, what it needs, how it would like to leave my body. I have invited it to tell me more stories, and I have thanked it for all that it has brought me and taught me. But all it says is, Be patient. Be present. And breathe.
Meanwhile, Marika, who is an RN and skeptical of alternative treatments, would like me to go to a “real doctor” to get an epidural for the pain and to find out if something else is going on.
I assume I’ll need an MRI before anyone will give me the epidural, but
I’m thinking, by the time I get an appointment, get an MRI, etc., I’ll probably be sitting and standing with minimal discomfort. (Which needs to be by Friday, because I’m doing another live presentation.) And that the MRI won’t show anything abnormal.
But what if I’m wrong? Should I go for the MRI just to be sure?
This is the same dilemma I had when Laddy was suddenly so sick and they suggested doing an ultrasound to be sure. I chose NOT to have the ultrasound. I didn’t need the confirmation. I knew it was cancer and that it was time.
And I realize that this is another opportunity to trust myself. My gut knows that it is just going to be a longer than usual healing time. That EVERYTHING has been inflamed and moved and stretched and torqued, and it’s going to take some gentle patience for everything to settle back down. I know this. I trust this. Today’s massage is part of that gentle, patient healing.
I think about people who live with chronic pain, and people whose pain is a direct link to serious disease and big big life questions. And I wonder how they do it. And then I think about how we all live with some form of pain, and that we each get to choose how we deal with it.
We can fight it. We can deny it. We can try to tame it. We can run from it or dance with it. We can meet it like a wary stranger or invite it in as a welcomed guest with stories to tell and gifts to share.
Or we can just breathe. And breathe again. And become one with it.
Tuesday update: Yesterday’s massage worked wonders. This morning I was able to sit outside for breakfast with minimal discomfort for 30 minutes before returning to bed to rest. I can walk with no pain and later today, I will get in the car to see if I can drive. Clients are waiting and I am ready!
Feel free to share your story by clicking on the comments below.
[ssba]Anatomy of a Shift
I have been lying on my back for the last two and a half weeks with the most intense episode of sciatica.
I’ve had lower back pain before that has left me on my heating pad for several days. But this sharp, lightening bolt pain that shoots down my leg is like nothing I’ve experienced before.
But then, this place in my life is like nothing I’ve experienced before either.
Yes, it started with some irritated disks, but, with my back already tender, I didn’t slow down. Instead, I must have moved just enough to tweak something in my piriformis, the muscle that stretches across the lower back between the pelvis and the head of the femur. The muscle tightened and shifted my hip in the socket and somewhere in the midst of all of the shifting, my sciatic nerve got caught in the middle.
It was as if all of the things I was dealing with in my life – a shift in my work, the grief that was triggered with the loss of my first best friend, helping Marika find a new job, transitioning to being in Phoenix- all came to a head like a five car pileup on my right butt cheek.
My whole body tightened up against the pain. I couldn’t sit on the toilet without screaming. I had no appetite. I couldn’t even reach across the bed to pet Mabel. And I was barely breathing. As soon as I noticed how shallow my breath was, I was able to breathe a little space into my back and heart.
My yoga teacher says that women hold a lot of emotion in their hips. My hips have been tight since I began practicing in 2004. Since then, my left hip has opened more but my right hip has continued to be resistant to most stretches. Even in the simple pose with my right ankle resting on my left thigh, my hip has always screamed like it would break if I attempted the slightest stretch.
I looked up Louise Hay’s interpretation of sciatica and she believes that it is related to financial fear, which made me laugh, because there I was, lying on my back, cancelling clients, NOT making money, and being advised not to worry about it. But it made sense on a bigger scale as I am redefining my work in the world and feeling unsure that it will support me. I began repeating her suggested affirmation, “I move into my greater good and I am secure and safe.”
And I started talking to the pain, asking what I could learn from it.
The first message came loud and clear-to love the pain. To not resist it or deny it, but to befriend it, to move with it.
And so, when I shifted from sitting to standing, instead of stopping because the pain was going to take me beyond the top of the pain scale, I willed myself to move with it, through it. I figured it was going to hurt either way, so I might as well move faster.
I screamed, I cried, I sang, I prayed, I cursed, any expression to release the pain, all while telling myself that it would be over once I stood up.
And it usually was. But standing for more than a few minutes brought severe cramping down the back of my leg and I had to get back into bed to relieve the pressure.
Lying there, I could feel how bound up every single muscle was in my butt. I breathed in calm and love and release as I laid on my belly with a pillow under me for support, making microscopic flexing movements with my butt cheeks, imagining they were butterfly wings.
I began moving my pelvis, ever so slightly, to see if I could loosen things up. After a day of these gentle movements, I had a little more range of motion in my hips and I began slow, regular stretches to continue the healing.
And what I noticed was that my hip was now moving without that feeling of breaking. I could feel the stretches in the actual muscles for the first time. My butt still ached like hell, but my hip felt free.
I had been seeing my chiropractor since the episode began and he had mentioned that, in addition to the swelling in my disks and the issues in the piriformis, my femur was turned out. It is no wonder I experienced such excruciating pain while it re-situated itself in the socket.
Life is a spiral, and this has been an opportunity to go deeper into the grief I’ve been holding in my hips all of these years. I’m sure it was triggered by the sudden death of my first ever best friend, even though we were only friends online. I had lost the last connection to someone who knew me before my brother died. While I have done years of work making peace with his death, this time I realized I needed to reconnect with my own six year old self who got lost the day he died.
In the midst of all of this personal work, I am also doing a lot of shifting in my businesses. 2014 is the year that I step higher and deeper into Spark the Heart. This is the year I am writing my book and leading retreats and workshops for ready women. This is also the year that I am doing less Mac training.
I am so grateful for the friends who called and emailed and engaged with me on Facebook. And for my Dad who called and checked up on me daily, offering to bring bagels and lox and anything else I might need. And for my friend Geri who came and worked her massage magic on my buttocks. And for Marika, who kept me on heat and ice and fluffed my pillows and made chicken soup, and took over my football duties and put my socks on for me and sang with me and screamed with me and held my hand when I cried.
I am still far from 100%, but walking and standing are much less painful. It is still uncomfortable to sit for very long, with the pressure on my butt, but I’m hoping that tomorrow’s acupuncture will alleviate whatever is still bound up.
Still, it would be so easy to just stay in bed, on my back, no pressures, minimal discomfort. Just like continuing on my life path as it is would be easier, no pressure, just show up and do the work I’ve been doing for the last 28 years. But I know what my body needs most is to move, to stretch, to realign. And that I need to shift into bigger work.
Life is about challenging ourselves to move past what we know and what is comfortable, to find how we can really make a difference and feel that our work matters. Old stories can’t get us there. Old wounds can’t keep us there. We have to unbind ourselves from our old beliefs and hurts, and release them so that we can move forward with grace and ease to whatever is next.
I will continue to move through this journey with faith and an open heart, trusting that I will be financially supported because this is where my real work is.
[ssba]That Attitude of Gratitude
It is springtime in the Arizona desert and, as I drive the streets that line the bases of the mountains, it is as if the whole earth is lit up with the yellows of poppies and brittle bush and marigolds. Bursts of orange African daisies and purple lupine and verbena appear on the roadsides between stretches of sidewalk and graveled hiking trails.
I tell you this because the last time I spent the spring in Phoenix, I couldn’t tell you what was in bloom, or dormant, or what colors appeared anywhere. I wasn’t really present. I was merely here counting the days until I’d be back at the beach.
This time is different. Completely. I am present. Open to what happens each day. And I haven’t even thought about when I’m heading back to the beach.
Because life happens where we are, in the present moment.
It is in the NOW that we hug our friends and feel the love. It’s being here in the moment where we notice the colors popping and feel the intensity of the sun on our skin.
It’s in the present moment that we feel the sadness too. Being here, I notice how much more I miss Laddy. I’ve been crying a lot, feeling his absence. But I lean in and feel the loss, and that’s living in the now, too.
I’m sure I’m experiencing this big shift because, the day before I left the beach, I set the intention to be grateful for my time in Arizona, fully and completely, with no regrets, and with full presence.
I set things up with my time here differently, too. Yes, I came to town primarily to work with clients. But this time I didn’t jam every single day with work. And I have reserved every Thursday morning for my cherished yoga class. I even gave myself an extra half hour between yoga and my afternoon client so that I can languish in the way my body feels after my practice, and enjoy lunch without rushing.
And I haven’t planned a dinner out with a friend every single evening. Instead, I’m staying home some nights enjoying Marika’s home cooking, and stretching out on the couch watching TV.
Even the warm weather hasn’t really get to me, because I was expecting it.
And I find myself saying thank you a lot. Because when we are present we are more able to be grateful for what is.
I am still in awe of this life I have created that allows me to come back to Phoenix where clients greet me with hugging arms, where friends remember my birthday and treat me to delicious meals, where my home away from home is comfortable, familiar and full of love.
Having an attitude of gratitude may seem like just a silly rhyme. But I invite you to try it. Because it really works!
[ssba]Cause For Applause: Replace But’s With YAYS!
I was listening to one of my coaching clients share some of her weekly successes. She had cleaned out an entire closet, paid her bills early and had scheduled a long-overdue manicure for herself.
She was moving so quickly through the list that there was no pause for honoring her accomplishments. And when she did pause, it was to counter the success with a “but I didn’t….”
I had to stop her.
I gave her a big shout out for each of the successes. And I asked her to join me in a big WOOHOO! YAY! I DID THAT! celebration.
And then she said, “Wow, I didn’t even realize how much I’d done.”
Often we are so focused on plowing through our to-do lists that we don’t honor the work we’re doing.
We don’t take the time to celebrate our successes.
We don’t breathe in how good it feels to accomplish something.
No wonder we still feel overwhelmed with what ELSE we have to do.
And when we counter what we HAVE done with a BUT, (yes, I did that BUT I didn’t do the other thing) we are negating ourselves, dishonoring our success, sabotaging our own power.
I asked my client to pay attention to this pattern and, whenever she hears herself say BUT, to stop and take the opportunity to CELEBRATE what she DID do with a big YAY!
She liked the idea.
Later, in our conversation, she started to go down that BUT road and immediately stopped herself mid-sentence. She didn’t YAY, but I could hear her smile.
How often to you celebrate your accomplishments?
How often do you honor what you’ve taken care of, what you’ve done for yourself?
How often do you give yourself a big high-five YEAH???
Click below on Comments to share your successes, your accomplishments, your YAYS!
[ssba]The Friend Who Knew Me
Several weeks ago I found out that my very first childhood friend had suddenly died. Though we hadn’t seen each other since we were thirteen, we’d recently connected on Facebook and the loss struck me deep and hard. She was one of the last friends who knew me as a child, before my brother died.
I met Ellen in nursery school. She had a playhouse fort in her backyard and she liked to play TV tag. We were inseparable.
We both had older brothers. We both had basements. We both had black cleaning ladies who sometimes stayed overnight in their own rooms.
Her mom, Jackie, had a wide, full, white-teeth smile and thick black hair with what seemed like natural curls, but I’d seen her with pink foam rollers in her hair on the morning after a sleepover.
Jackie let me call her by her first name. She never got mad at us. She always answered the phone “yell-o?” She’d hold the receiver in the crook of her neck while she stirred the pot of Spaghettios on the stove. The long curl of the phone cord stretched across the flower-wallpapered kitchen so we’d have to limbo underneath it to get to the table.
Ellen shared her bedroom with her younger sister Nancy, so we mostly played downstairs in the playroom. We gave our Barbies haircuts in the bathroom sink and played dress-up with her father’s suit jackets and Fedora.
The summer that my brother Lenny died, Ellen and her brother Marc and I went to the Young Traveler’s Day Camp together. We did arts and crafts and learned how to swim. I have a photo of us on Silly Hat Day, waiting for the bus in front of their house on Nassau Avenue.
Ellen was smart. Funny. A tomboy to play with. We both had pixie haircuts. We both wore PF Flyers. Her middle name was even Ruth.
She taught me how to ride a two-wheeler. She joined me and my mom on my sixth birthday to see Betsy Palmer in Peter Pan. We sat up in the balcony and we could see the strings that made everyone fly.
Ellen and I went to the same schools, but we were never in the same class. Still, we rode our bikes together and I invited her to all my birthday parties. But by fifth grade she had a different circle of friends. And then I moved to Arizona when I was fourteen and we lost touch completely.
But our moms wrote back and forth, so I knew that Ellen was living in Topanga Canyon and that she had changed how she spelled her name. And later, that she had gotten married, and her new last name was Belinski. My mother gave me her address in Riverside and I wrote her a letter. I was thrilled when she wrote back, a lovely note, how glad she was to hear from me and a bit about her life with Steve and her young daughter.
When the internet came around, she was the first person I searched for. She was now in Santa Barbara and a master gardener. I wrote again, shared about my 10-year relationship with my partner, Marika. And I didn’t hear back.
I couldn’t believe it, but I assumed my being gay was an issue for her. And then, about a year later she wrote me a letter, explaining that no, she was very happy for me, and that she’d been busy with things – that she’d had another baby!
Fast forward to Facebook, and we finally reconnected a few years ago. I loved seeing pictures of her family, her world travels and her paintings. It was fun to post old photos of her for her birthday. And I was glad to be there when she lost her mom to Alzheimer’s, and then her brother to cancer.
During one of our Words with Friends games, I asked Ellyn what she remembered about my own brother’s death. She didn’t remember much, just that he was there, and then he wasn’t. And that everything seemed pretty normal. She felt bad for not being able to tell me more, but I’m sure that her friendship then really did help make me feel pretty normal.
Last year I was going to be near Los Gatos where Ellyn was having an art show. We were both so excited that we were going to see each other after more than 40 years. But my plans changed and we didn’t meet. And we never did make another date.
To be honest, I had some reservations about meeting, I worried that our lives were too different, that we wouldn’t have anything in common. But, after reading everything her friends shared about the Ellyn they knew and loved, I realized that she was the same Ellen who was my best friend when we were five years old. And suddenly my loss was even deeper, because I missed out on having her as a friend in my adult life.
When Ellyn died, I thought I had lost that one-of-a-kind connection to my own childhood. But then I remembered how Ellyn and I had stayed in touch through all those many years of silence and absence. Because as long as I could see her in my mind’s eye and feel the energy of her being, she was with me.
And so, today, when I think I have lost her, I imagine her smiling face, with that wide, full, white-teeth smile, just like her mom. And she is laughing and happy and radiant. Simply radiant.
[ssba]The Year of the Horse
In Chinese tradition, this is the Year of the Horse, a year of galloping forward, of fast victories, unexpected adventure, and surprising romance. No wonder my new friend is a horse.
He lives on the hill right next to Paradise Park. I watched him all last year from afar, and then he was gone. But a few days ago, on my way to the beach, I saw him and I swear, I squealed, out loud, “The horse is back!”
That night, a little before sunset, he was standing about 30 feet away, on the other side of the old, rusted, falling down, barbed wire fence. I held up a carrot and he trotted over. And I realized that he was actually a she. She ate the carrot and then kept licking my hand. I closed my fingers into a ball and she started to nibble me with her gums. I talked to her, out loud and silently, and we looked each other in the eyes. When I walked away, she followed along the fence until she couldn’t see me anymore.
When I thought she was a male I called him Waldo, because he was always so hard to find on the big hill. Now that I know she is a female, maybe I will call her Jessie, for the stripe of gesso paint on her face. I wondered, what do you call that long slope of the head between the eyes and the mouth?
I found several diagrams online that named the parts of the horse, like coronet, at the top of the hoof, and chestnut, a spot behind the forearm. But there was nothing identifying the area between the forelock and the muzzle.
I have had very little experience with horses. I have a picture of me feeding sugar cubes to the milk man’s horse when I was three. When I was seven I went to Rocking Horse Ranch with my uncle and cousin. They rode horses all weekend and I played in the indoor swimming pool.
None of my friends took riding lessons or dreamed of having a pony. The first time I rode a horse was for a friend’s twenty-fifth birthday. I remember the jerky motion and the saddle and the soreness for days after. Since then, I’ve had no contact, nor have I felt any connection or attraction to a horse.
But in the past three months, I’m suddenly very curious about them. I met some a few weekends ago, waiting in their horse trailer in the parking lot at the beach. There were four sleek, brown horses standing against the open-rails of their trailer and I walked up to them. I looked them in eyes, I talked to them through my heart and they made noises I didn’t understand.
And now, this horse has appeared, right outside my big wide windshield. I saw her several times during the day, grazing up near the water tower, then behind and above the trailer directly across from me. And sometimes I don’t see her at all. I’m guessing she’s behind her feed house or on the other side of the hill.
Yesterday, my neighbor Muriel walked over to the fence with her 12 year old son, Ethan. The horse came right up to them so I joined them. Muriel was raised on a farm and she said the horse is young, maybe three, very friendly, social, alert, interested. And she has good teeth.
She showed Ethan and I how to hold our hands with our palms open, so the horse could check us out. “Hold it like a fist and she thinks it’s an apple. Point your finger and she thinks that a carrot.” No wonder she had started to nibble my closed hand the night before.
Later that morning she talked to our neighbor Mark, who knows everything about everyone in town, and it turns out that this is not Waldo, the horse I watched all those months last year. Waldo was 20 and died about eight months ago. This is a new horse, also owned by Marvin, an old-time cowboy who lives in town.
This morning, Ethan was standing at the fence with binoculars, looking toward the horse’s feed house. I assumed he was watching the horse, but when I followed the line from his binoculars, I saw a hawk perched on a tall, lone pole on the hill, near the house.
I went outside and met Ethan on his way back to his house. “What did you see?” I asked. The hawk was no longer on the pole.
“It was a red-tailed hawk. He’s over there.” Ethan pointed to the grove of trees on the bluff. “See the darker tree? He’s at the very top. On the right.”
I found the bird’s silhouette, a sharp protrusion at the top of the ragged outline of the tree.
“Have you seen the horse?” I asked.
“No, not today.”
I scanned the hill for her among the wisps of dried brush, but she wasn’t around.
“So have you named her yet?”
“Well, according to Elise, (his five year old sister), it’s Lucky.”
“My first dog’s name was Lucky.” I said. I’m sure I smiled.
“I got two bags of carrots at the store today for the horse,” I said. “They were only 37¢ each. So if you get permission, I’d love to have you join me in a carrot feeding.”
Ethan’s mom has taught them not to feed other people’s animals, unless you have permission because you never know if there are special circumstances.
And besides, there was a sign.
“So, here’s a question…” I pointed to the worn wooden sign with faded white letters that said Please Don’t Feed The Horse. The top right corner of the wood, including the E in please, was gone.
“So, do we respect the sign? Or, did it apply to the OTHER horse? Can we feed THIS horse? Because this is a different horse?”
Ethan tilted his head toward his left ear and shrugged. “I don’t know.” And I didn’t know either. But I knew that I wanted to.
Later in the afternoon, I was sitting at my picnic table writing and scanning the hill to see if the horse was grazing nearby. Julie, another neighbor, walked by and she knows Marvin, the horse’s owner. She said the reason he doesn’t want people feeding the horse, is so that she doesn’t lean over the fence.
“But she leans over even if I just go up to her,” I said. “And I’m not going to stop doing THAT.”
Julie smiled and said, “Oh, just do it. I won’t tell.”
“Well, still, maybe you can ask him for permission to feed her carrots?” I said. “And can you find out what her name is, too?”
That evening, as the sun disappeared behind Horse Hill, I watched and waited. I had cleaned the RV windshield so I’d have a clear wide view. I felt like a kid, waiting for my new friend to come over and play.
The red-tail was back on the post. And the horse was grazing in a flat patch across from me, about twenty feet away. I ran out with my carrots and called to her from the fence. But her head was down, facing away from me, and she didn’t even notice I was there. I waved my hands. I whistled. I took a bite of the carrot. It was crunchy and sweet.
[ssba]A Simple Game of Questions
There was a fun game going around on Facebook a while back. A friend chose the age for you and you had to reflect back and answer the questions as they related to you at that age, and then also at your current age.
Like most quizzes, the important thing was not to spend too much time thinking of perfect or clever answers, but to simply respond with whatever came up in the moment.
A friend gave me the age of 26:
I was: 26
I lived in: a semi-furnished one bedroom apartment over a garage in Tempe, AZ
I was married to: being single, independent, the best
I drove: a Plymouth Horizon
I feared: nothing
I worked at: Computer Pro, preferring to demo the Apple IIGS and Macs than IBMs and Compaqs
I wanted to be: top salesperson every month and I was
Then, when it came to my current age, I wrote:
I am: 54
I live in: my RV across the street from the ocean in Cayucos, CA
I am married to: my technology
I drive: a blue RAV4 with white flower stickers (it makes people smile and it helped my mom see my car)
I work at: staying present, enjoying what is, keeping my heart open to love, light and compassion
I want to be: in a wonderfully exciting, loving, intimate, heart-sparking relationship
After I hit the POST button, I reread my responses and noticed that my answer about being in a relationship didn’t say if this relationship is with a person, my work, my art, my writing…or what. And that I had somehow omitted what I am afraid of now.
I found both of these things very curious and revealing. And it’s had me thinking about it ever since.
So I invite you to answer these same questions for yourself. Don’t work too hard at the answers. Go with whatever comes up first. See if anything surprises you, reveals something in a new way, gets you thinking about who you are and how you show up in the world.
I was: 26
I lived in:
I was married to:
I drove:
I feared:
I worked at:
I wanted to be:
Then, answer them again, using your current age:
I am:
I live in:
I am married to:
I drive:
I fear:
I work at:
I want to be:
If you’d like, I’d love for you to share your answers by clicking on the Comments below.
[ssba]
