Reconnecting and SuperBetter

Health. In February I met up with N and M at Lionsdale Winter Tourney. It had been seven years since I had spent any time with either of them. Just the warmth and hope with which these women surrounded me was amazing, and made me feel as though no time had passed and that I was loved and cared about in ways I so rarely consider. We met again with a day long visit to the stable where M keeps her two horses, where N tried them out and after an almost abortive fall, I slung a leg over the big Percheron mare and rode, for the first time in six years. There are no words for how wonderful it felt. Then I taught a brief riding lesson for my youngest son, who fell off twice but got back on both times, making me very proud of him. Over dinner, M wrangled us both into agreeing to help with an effort to get Equestrian started in Lionsdale again. Fast forward a month, and my little sister brings me out to her friend's farm, where she had had one unsuccessful ride (meaning she fell and didn't care to get back on again soon). They tack up their horses and I watched her work the big mare on the ground then under saddle. Her friend L was noticeably distracted and inattentive, and J did most of the work with her horse. A brief lesson, and I found the old eyes and rhythm of instructing coming right back. I even threw a leg over and got some semblance of collection from the big mare, and that was exhilarating. I started coming out every two weeks with Songbird to teach and sometimes ride. I get to know the owner and the horses and realise how little correct guidance has occurred to this point, so the next chance I get, I introduce N to D, the owner of the farm. They hit it off better than anyone could have hoped, and N moved her big mare up to the farm, so she could get started teaching again. Plans move ahead for the events upcoming, starting with teaching Basic Horsemanship at EMP events on the farm, and then branching out to teaching lessons during SeaLion War, and then the big success of Lionsdale Champions which had about 20 people take lessons or watch the equestrian activities, out of the 70 who attended. By this time I am going out at the farm at least twice a week, sometimes three times, I am teaching and riding and reconnecting with all the things I love about the sport and finding it is coming so much easier. I am finding I can walk for longer distances with less worry and pain, I am trusting my body more, and after a few lessons on Bella, N's Shire, I am remembering I am only 42, and I don't have to let go of all my dreams. In fact, I don't have to let go of *any* of them. Horses always were therapy for me, and I had somehow let go of that. Never again. I am now looking forward to learning from other coaches, developing my own skills and maybe even attaining some of those pie-in-the-sky dreams. I just spent a week at M's, my first real vacation since I worked with C at Griffonwood, back in 04 and 05. Activity on FB led to a friend posting a link to Jane McGonigal's TED talk on how to turn the healing process into a game, which she called SuperBetter, and established a site to facilitate other people learning the techniques and playing along, finding their own paths to happier, healthier lives. The logic of her ideas, and the very real benefits I had found from my own pursuits of happiness and beauty rang so true to me, so I am doing my best to use her site and her ideas in my daily life. Here's to getting SuperBetter. One of the tasks I have to work on is reconnecting with old friends. L, Z, and newer friends are seeing more of me and hearing more from me, and I am rediscovering how enjoyable it is to just get out of the house and hang out with friends. It is a long road back to health, but I am not dying tomorrow. Knock wood.

Something Beautiful

Okay, this one is going to be very stream of conscience because it is late and I am barely.

Just had a lovely visit with an old friend over tea and chatter, catching up, and swept away by how lovely a woman she is, and in a quick browse over the web once she had left, a faint feeling that something was awaiting, a sense of immanence. Brush over etsy and there in the recent listings I find... this card. A digital overlay imagery of butterfly and tiger eyes, subtle and haunting... such exquisite beauty.

Actually while that piece alone was nice, not really riveting, it sent me on a trip down the weblines to a site of two brilliant artists. I'm wandering around it, seeing so many things of invention and alchemy and sheer aesthetic glory... it was one of those satori moments as I looked over every piece of art and jewelly - a virtual window shop into a fantastic Oriental little market stall of wonders. I see pieces that JB would love, or Arkay, or Kimiko... even my kids, my mother. And yet... not quite anything that is just for me.

I am awed by the creativity and intuitiveness that artists like these can pull up out of dormant materials, out of inorganics such vibrant living colour and form. Awed, and I admit it, deeply envious.

The thing is, after a browse over literally every piece they had to offer I am both frustrated and inspired. Inspired by the creativity, the purity and the invention of the images and jewelry, and always frustrated by my own fragmented talents and means to make the things I see in their work, and the awareness that no matter how good I could become as an artist of any media, my work will always leave me cold while that of these artists sings to me. Frustrated also knowing I would love to own a piece made by such hands, but I'd wish for something custom to me, that didn't just resonate vaguely but rang me like a bell, strummed me like a harp string. They are already so close... if they could just see into me, they could play an entire orchestral etude in beaded, silver, copper, glass and paint... I would never look away from that piece. It would make of me Narcissus.

And yet... stung by images as beautiful as my dreams, I *want* so badly. I am sore with the writhing bittersweetness of it.

So synchronous that I feel I had been primed for the moment, like a canvas, a pump or a gun. A surface prepared, and the finding of those artists can't be the whole of it. Immanence remains, a dull throb behind the ache of desire to build, make, paint, create.

And I am left holding thread and hook and a limited craft and even more limited talent. It is the ambition that is limitless.

I wonder if the ostrich ever dreams in memory of flight.

And in Dreams

I am haunted by exes and their smiles; their kisses that felt wrong even then. Having never known love, I am through wanting to find it, and yet every predatory and passive hunter I know sees a signal I'm not sending. I am adrift in complacence and wish more to be left alone than to be bothered pleasing others. If I am pleased in and of myself, that is enough. How to get that through to the rest of the world seems to be an issue.

It is a few days before another New Year, and there is nothing new to celebrate. the western world remains swathed in gluttony and the artificial demand for more useless things, and in order to even hang on, by the thin slivers of my nails, I am forced to feed that, to push for more hunger for *my* useless things... buy me, buy ME! As if I can do anything better than anyone else, or there weren't already a glut on the market of what little I have to offer.

Only in dreams, only in the manic state just before sleep rings, only there do I have something unique and weighty, some dramatic truth veiled in stories, and the stories are only whispered to me, through me. I have yet to put them down, offer them up some meager sacrifice of mind and eye to whatever reader might see them. I hesitate, here. I always pull back from that brink, and hold my stories inside, safe, but also trapped.