The Teapot thrives, while we get sick

One thing about being self employed, you don't get sick days. Martyn came down with a bad sinus cold last week and yesterday I got it. Chills, slight fever, blah, blah, blah. So what do we do? Go outside and work it off. Now I will say it was a beautiful 40+ degree day with sun, no wind, and the task at hand was not that difficult. We needed to put up pressure treated boards on a fence that divides where I feed The Teapot and the other equines. Boone was pushing over the fence to try to get one blade of hay. I'm hoping I can wait until spring to get the No Chew on it, so I was quite pleased that it was still standing this morning [tongue-in-cheek].

Lydia Rose, aka The Teapot has already shed some pounds. We have her on a good diet of hay and trace minerals and tish of senior feed just so she doesn't lose too fast or lose good resources of minerals and vitamins. Her Cushings test was fine and in spring we will do an insulin test, as per the requirement of the rescue we got her from.

I have been working on her ground manners, she has them lurking in her, taught long ago, she just got away with a lot in the last years, and not because she wasn't loved. She is also settling more when i put her with the donkeys, and less 'ears back' to move them around is happening.

To be honest, she reminds me of a combination of Paco when he first arrived, and Rosie the grumpy pig who nobody wanted as their friend. I do not feel any sadness in Teapot, she just needs a clearer job. So I am going to start walking her on a lead into the woods, and I am planning on having "Wood Walks with Teapot" or something like that.

I had planned to make Paco her buddy, and maybe teach them to pull a cart together. But Teapot is not herd bound, and I'm thinking now since she clearly had some driving training years ago, she might be a good candidate to work with on an individual basis. I also of course hope to have her be one of our therapy healers...but we will proceed one step at a time.

I looked at the photo of her taken right before we picked her up, and compared it with the photo taken yesterday. Her coat is looking shinier and she has lost a little bit of weight.

Making the fence Boone proof

Left, The Teapot after some time on her diet

Red on red

As summer fades...we smile

It has been a humid August this year, and humidity is not my friend, or too many other's either. Since we never had humid summers in Oregon, I've never had to deal with certain things rotting in the garden. On the other hand certain things seemed to thrive this summer-the Queen Anne's Lace for example. But the rains we had, with humid days after, did seem to do some things to certain roots.

I could have an entire yard of The Queens, perhaps with sunflowers too, and pumpkins. Martyn has been patient with my Queen love, letting me keep large plantings of it in both the front garden and back private garden. We kind of have this unspoken rule that the front garden is more his, except for my hollyhock patch-step away from my hollyhock patch-and the back garden is more my garden. It's one of those couple speak things. We obviously are very united on how we take care of Earth.

And the cone flowers this year are phenomenal too.

I talk to all my flowers, how can I not? They are so full of personality.

But, as you can tell by this lackluster post, it is still August, and I am really no different than the plants, or leaves that are crumbling. I really feel this is what happens to me in August, I am no different than every other piece of Earth, I am ready to shed parts of myself, decaying skin and bits of dirt and hair, and start afresh in September. Fall for me is a revitalization, even though it is a time when Nature is prepping for winter. Winter for me is a long, caccoon of creativity and silence.

Fall always has a melancholy too. I think for me it is because it reminds me of days gone by-memories of being a kid and sitting in my leaf huts back in Minnesota, my mom in the house making a good dinner, my dog at my side. Back to school has that same revitalization for me-new pencils, the smell of the new books, who was my homeroom teacher going to be.

But for now, I do try to look at each flower head, marvel, and revel in it all-this setting, how we got here, and what will happen next. If I think of people now gone, or animals, it is not really in a depressed way, it is an acknowledgement that without them I would not be here in this exact spot and time...and that they live in my head.

What do you say when a friend's mate dies...with open ears and heart, I say, "It will be okay" {somewhere in time}

I went for a ride this week, placing dandelions in Boone's halter after the ride. It was a beautiful, perfect day. I had no complaints, really. And my husband, my best friend, was alive. Every thought came back to that.

A day earlier I had heard the shocking news that a friend of mine lost her husband, who was only in his mid fifties. He had lived with the consequences of seizures his entire life, and knew the ramifications but always had a wonderful attitude about it. He had a seizure, fell on the open stairway and suffered a brain injury that he could not recover from.

My friend tells of how she awoke that morning and was a bit sore from her long walk the day before, and her time in the garden. Her husband said he'd give her a mother day massage. They had no children, but loved their dogs and they were family. I imagined all the people who have woken up to normalcy, and hours later, they are living in between two realms.

It is normal and human to think of our own worlds when we hear of a sudden death. We are not only shocked and sad for the survivors, but it knocks you between the eyes that life is life, death is death and the two are intertwined every minute–you don't get to choose which one you want, it's not an a la carte menu once you are born. One false step, one fall off a horse, or stairway, and it could be gone, poof. All day after I heard, literally everything I did from making a piece of toast to working in the garden, I thought of my friend. I thought of her lying in bed the first morning after he'd died...the shock must have come back in starkness that first morning. Sleep might have given her a reprieve, but upon waking...

Oh yea, he's gone. What? No!. Yes, he's gone.

Later that day or the next day I forget, I was planting my sunflower seeds. I always plant sunflowers, such joyous, magnificent creatures, I call them Goddesses. My friend's husband loved to garden and be in Nature, and he had a garden he considered his sanctuary. He had been working on it for 14 years or more. It is where the family and friends will gather to celebrate his life, honor his next journey, and sit amongst his energy enmeshed in every living thing he nurtured there. I was on my hands and knees, using my bare hands to till the already prepared bed of dirt. It was quiet, even on the front road. I could smell the salt air of the cove. An occasion animal sound wafted from the barnyard.

My husband is alive...

I thought. And then I saw my friend's husband's face, smiling. He had what I would call a gentle smile, like Martyn's, a smile that had no ego, no slyness to it. His face stayed in my mind like that for some time.

I wrote to my friend later, by email, wondering all day-what words would be best for her right now? I knew she had many details to deal with, I knew her family was with her. I only wanted to tell her her when she was ready if she needed, I was there with open ears and heart, to listen. I told her about her husband appearing to me as I gardened. They were very connected to the Earth and Nature, and were spiritual too, as I am. I knew it would have meaning to her. We are both of the frame of mind that energy does not disappear. His energy is just not in his body anymore, so magnificent is it now that it can zap around all over the place. She wrote back, and liked the story.

It will be okay, is the prayer I send her. It will be okay. He is okay.

It might not be okay as she has known, but it will be okay in a different, at-the-moment-unimaginable-way. For me, this is what I can tell people in grief. I was told this by a friend when I lost my mother, the day or the day after when I was still hardly breathing, when I was not of this realm, I was so ungrounded from her death that first few days. And my friend who had lost her parents called me and immediately said,

"Your mother is okay."

It was simple, and direct. I believed it. And I needed to hear it, and wanted to hear it. It was not a lie, it was not sugarcoating the truth. You can either walk into grief thinking it is not okay, or having a compassionate source that tells you it is going to be okay. I prefer to be that source for someone. It might not be okay today, but it will be, in a different way.

My mother would say, "It will be okay," when I was in dire straights. It was always okay, she was right, but I always needed to hear it. Perhaps I am one of the lucky ones who had that grounding of a mother that instilled that in me, perhaps there are people out there that truly do not believe in bad times, challenging times, that saying "it will be okay" is realistic, or fair.

I disagree.

It will be okay. I will share that again with my friend, after I listen to her, in time, when she is ready.

Poem for Boone

Boone and I had a great workout this week. We rode over to a nearby corral and worked out together. It felt so good. And he was really in sync with me, which made me feel like we are getting back to each other. I wrote this poem some time ago and came upon it today.

Wind blowing through his mane

up onto my hands which hold two reins loosely.

We ride, or I ride and he carries, down a gravel road

chunks of itself missing

after log trucks rush by with their fallen victims.

All around us, before us and in front of us,

lay fallen leaves, dead on arrival.

He stops to ask me with his ears and a twinge of his neck,

"May I have one?"

"No," I say with tight leg, "we still have a ways to go."

And we move on,

the flies sitting in the corners of his eyes

which he blinks away, only to have them return seconds later.

With each gust of wind I watch his mane's journey,

left, then right, left, right again.

I lose my sense of place as I watch,

waiting for the course strands to settle again.

We near our destination,

a small valley with abandoned house,

nothing left but an old satellite dish,

and a gate falling down, bent in age.

The hay has been cut, bundled and hauled off to old barns

leaving us this empire of grass, and a backdrop of ancient trees.

We hear the true collaboration of trees and wind

with branches and space humming, hissing, and groaning .

It's not a greeting, or a playful song -

It's a resonance.

Ignoring skin, it sinks down into the flesh and then the bone,

while the heart skips beats trying to keep up.

Haunting, it reminds of a past time

that we can not get to.

Facing fear again and practicing conversations with periods and commas-don't flatten me out

Boone and I went for our first ride this season. It was a short mile ride but I wanted to test him, and me, out. I can't say I was scared [if you are new here, Boone and I had a bad accident last June landing me in the hospital a couple days with a concussion], but I wasn't necessarily in the zone either. I wasn't rigid, but we were rusty.

I focused on one thing, my hands, aiming to keep my cues as soft as possible. Boone is a desensitized horse from all his early cow pony days, which has its benefits. I'd rather have that than a high flight risk or spooker. It felt good to be on him and I think he enjoyed getting out too after being cooped up in a paddock all winter.

But what I noticed is...I felt sad afterwards, not because of the ride, or even the past accident. I pondered it all day and decided that I really miss my friend Joanne who died last year. I met her about six years ago, when I started riding at her barn and property of 300 acres back in Oregon. It was one of the saddest goodbyes for me, when we left. When I met her, I had had Boone for a couple years and we were working through some issues-i.e. he was playing with me and was winning. I was not a good leader and lacked confidence. Someone suggested I go ride at Jo's and it was a life changer for me and Boone. We'd ride all winter out in Oregon, and Jo even encouraged me to take dressage lessons with her, which I did, amazingly. That was very worthwhile. Boone and I went on to ride in a parade, get some blue ribbons at school shows, go to the ocean, and do some tough rides in the woods too. We overcame his fear of 'squishy' ground [he's sunk in quicksand once as a cow pony and was freaked out by the sound of squishy ground below his feet] and I overcame my reaction to his fear. I became a good leader. I was really proud of him, and me, and I have Jo to thank for a lot of that.

I realized too that not only did I miss Jo and our rides, I missed our conversations, and I missed the type of conversations we had. We had an easy flow conversation. There was no interrupting, we could engage in all sorts of issues and I never felt judged, or belittled, I never felt I wasn't being heard. When she talked I listened, and vice versa. I felt she respected my experiences in life, and I respected hers.

I never felt like she was talking at me, or over me. I never left the conversation feeling like I'd been run over. Do you know people like that-when you get done with a conversation no matter what the topic, you tend to feel 'flattened out?" Kind of like your big bossy sister came in and basically told you what do, or told you what you might consider doing even though you had not asked her opinion.

I took a business seminar once on communication. One thing that came up was when we listen to someone else talk, and then we answer with, "But don't you think blah blah blah," what we are really saying is, "Yea, you just spent time telling me your thoughts and even though it looked like I was listening I really have to tell you a better way to think about this." I was quilty of this, it was a good lesson. I don't think we are perfect at communicating, it is a life long pursuit, to become a better communicator and listener.

I guess there are people in life that just do not mesh with our personal conversational styles either. But I don't like to be 'talked at', or patronized. We have an ongoing lesson in our house, we try to remember to use 'periods and commas' when we speak [we often fail]. Anytime Martyn and I are going to be at a gathering, when we get out of the car, we remind ourselves to use periods and commas. We had a house guest some time ago that had an answer for everything, even things they had far less skill in than we did. At one point after a couple days of exhaustion trying to listen all the time, I leaned over and said something to Martyn, and the guest said, "Okay, don't listen, go ahead and interrupt me." I pointed out that it wasn't that we weren't listening, but he never stopped talking so there was no chance to interrupt.

I guess I realized after my ride that I'd been having some 'conversations' like that with people. No periods or commas, no acknowledgment of my past experience that might bring some clarity or interest to the topic at hand. I was consistently leaving those conversations with he same people feeling...slapped.

And it made me miss Jo.

But it's okay. Boone and I will ride on. I have a person I'm going to call to see if he and his wife might ride with me sometime, just to get me and my head back in confidence mode with Boone. He lives a ride away, and he said he'd ride the same trail Boone and i had our accident on. I want to do that.