Run the Wild Country (Louise Taylor)

Much as I tend to dislike horses (or maybe it's because I'm afraid of them), I find they are very much in my life - my Chinese zodiac sign is The Horse, my now-defunct booking agency was called Horse of a Different Color Booking and a variety of other examples as well. For whatever reason, we seem to be inextricably linked - I wonder if I have some sort of past life connection with equines.

MH and I started a mutually-supportive self-nurturing program last week, and we've walked 7 days out of the last 10 (as well as begun to eat more healthy and mindfully) - I've said that I look forward to it now, like a thoroughbred out of the starting gate... and this poem and song illustrate my renewed life enjoyment...

SONG: Run the Wild Country by Louise Taylor

BOOK: Riding into Your Mythic Life: Transformational Adventures with the Horse by Patricia Broersma, Jean Houston (Foreword)

POEM: The Great Affair by Diane Ackerman

The great affair, the love affair with life,
is to live as variously as possible,
to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred,
climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day.

Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding,
and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours,
life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,
but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

QUOTE: "A horse is the projection of peoples' dreams about themselves - strong, powerful, beautiful - and it has the capability of giving us escape from our mundane existence." ~ Pam Brown

If I Wrote You (Dar Williams)

I've been pondering the types of friendship lately and, despite (or is it because of?) the fact that intimacy brings intensity, I still willingly continue to run the risk/reward - the last nine years have certainly taught me lowered expectations, patience/tolerance and carpe diem. Whether "for a reason, a season or a lifetime", I can't imagine doing it any other way - that would be wholeheartedly (pun intended... :-)

From Appetites: On the Search for True Nourishment, by Geneen Roth:

"We need to build our friendships on truth and wholeness and expansiveness. We need friends who can be with us in our loneliness, not people who will cheer us up so that we don't feel it. We need friends who get furious with us when we are not being real or true to ourselves, not who get angry when we don't do what they want us to do. We need friends who are not afraid of our pain or our joy. We need friends who are not invested in the way we look, what we do or what we feel, who are willing to see us without reference to themselves. We need friends who are willing to break out of gravity-bound orbits and spin with us into the unknown.

And we need to become those friends ourselves.

The questions are always these: does this friendship lead you toward a fuller life or does it confine you? Does it bring you closer to your heart or take you further away? Does it open you or does it close you? Does it allow you to trust yourself further or does it make you frightened of yourself? Does it enlarge your life or does it make your life smaller?"

SONG: If I Wrote You by Dar Williams

BOOK: The Griffin & Sabine Trilogy Boxed Set: Griffin & Sabine/Sabine's Notebook/The Golden Mean by Nick Bantock

POEM: Postcards by Wendy Cope

At first I sent you a postcard

From every city I went to.

Grüsse aus Bath, aus Birmingham,

Aus Rotterdam, aus Tel Aviv.

Mit Liebe. Cards from you arrived

In English, with many commas.

Hope, you're fine and still alive,

Says one from Hong Kong. By that time

We weren't writing quite as often.

Now we're nearly nine years away

From the lake and the blue mountains,

And the room with the balcony,

But the heat and light of those days

Can reach this far from time to time.

Your latest was from Senegal,

Mine from Helsinki. I don't know

If we'll meet again. Be happy.

If you hear this, send a postcard.

QUOTE: "A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely." ~ Pam Brown