Waking up on the day after the recent election was hard. Frankly, I felt that I had been punched in the stomach and hit over the head with a two by four. All day this darkness followed me around and all efforts to self soothe were non productive; as a last ditch effort I headed to the barn where I ride to visit the horses which always makes me feel more peaceful and more in tune with my inner emotions.

Unlike election day, which was mild and pleasant, this day dawned cold, windy, and gray as if winter had suddenly announced itself as a harbinger of what is to come. When I got to the barn it was all closed up and dark, no horses quietly grazing in the fields, no equine heads jauntily poking out of the dutch doors. Inside it was eerily still as I went around to each stall and found one horse after another standing quietly, head bowed, as if grieving a troublesome loss. When I got to the stall of the small Arabian that I ride the most, I stopped, slid open the stall latch and stepped inside. Cosmos seemed preoccupied and after quickly acknowledging my presence with a half hearted head butt he resumed his head hanging with what I detected as a strange mixture of sadness and anxiety. Gently rubbing his withers, I felt a tear slide down my cheek and a great surge of complex emotions rise up from my gut and into my heart. As an artist I tend to be a reflective person, maybe a bit too contemplative for my own good, but I have spent many years earnestly trying to iron out the flaws in my own character, sometimes successfully and often times not so much. But here I was, a twisted ball of emotions with no where else to go and an urgent need to ground myself; for this I had come to the horse.

Yes, I wanted things to be different, but mostly I wanted to understand why and what had upset me so much and how I could move through these feelings and present my best self to the world despite them. Like I have been taught by some wise spiritual leaders, I place my right hand on my gut and my left hand on Cosmos’ belly and try to discern the rumblings within. Maybe because I am a woman, maybe because I am a recent widow, maybe because I have experienced intimidation and bullying from men that I have loved in my past, I now feel that I am vulnerable and exposed, like being out in the elements without food or shelter. For some of you who lived through and remember the sixties, there may be an element of understanding of this predicament; for many of you who are newly outliers or innocents or outside of the mainstream in any way this is a familiar place, a very scary place to be without some kind of support or protection from predators, very much like being an equine who as a prey animal has no defense but to run like hell.

After identifying fear as part of my turmoil, I turn to the sadness. In yoga we use the salutation Namaste which represents the belief that there is a Divine spark within each of us that is located in the heart chakra. This gesture is an acknowledgment of the soul in one by the soul in another. Nama means bow, as means I, and te means you. Therefore, namaste literally means “bow me you” or “I bow to you.” I feel the tears and the sadness rising up again into my throat as I place my right hand on my heart and my left on Cosmos’ heart and listen. Today we have a new leader, a new person stepping into the parental role of guidance and care for all of us and not once has he acknowledged my soul or the light that all of our souls can emanate into the world. Not once. For this I grieve, not only for myself, but for the innocents, nature, animals, and the earth itself.

I need some time with this darkness. I need to feel the sadness. Eventually, at some point, I will fall in line and do what I have to do to help this new leader succeed because it is in the best interest of myself, my country, and all those who I have mentioned above to do so. But that does not mean that I do not mourn. That does not mean that I will not remember the things he said about women, minorities, the disabled, and the planet itself.

I throw my arms around Cosmos and bury my head in his mane; I shed my tears in that dark barn on a grey bitter day. I promise him that I will protect him from all predators because that is what a leader promises to ALL his followers. I just wish he had not said those things. It would be a lot easier if he had just not said them.

The tree frog is tiny but has superior grasping ability; it can oppose two of its fingers to the other two, resulting in a vise-like grip. -Wikipedia

I am in my studio sitting in front of my computer cursing; there is a particularly virulent form of Adware parked somewhere that is popping up maddeningly everytime I try to use Safari. Expletives spew from my sailor mouth as I had planned on a quiet contemplative writing session backed with a little Googling research. Now I am on hold as I have dialed Apple Support and am waiting on my new BFF to help me out.

It is dusk, nightfall is descending, and that’s when it always starts—the incessant loud chirping that has been disturbing my sleep for the last few weeks. I’ve tried shutting the windows in the house but the calls are so loud that I can hear them through the walls. First I had asked my tree-hugging, neighborhood sleuth what kind of bird she thinks it might be but she has no clue. In frustration one day I drive directly to the birdseed store and an astute clerk immediately plays me a recording of the offending sound which turns out not to be a bird at all but a tree frog!  But I digress.

My art studio sits in the middle of my backyard garden, the windows and doors opening out into the yard so that it feels as if one were actually outside. I am sitting here listening to my newly identified tree frog call to his mate as if his life depended upon it when the Apple lady finally comes on the phone. As she asks permission and then magically takes over my computer, I strain to hear what she is saying above the din of this tiny tiny creature sitting on a leaf, a twig, or a blade of grass somewhere in my garden. Finally she asks in exasperation what the infernal racket is in the background. ‘It’s a tree frog’ is my original reply and she is  appropriately dumbfounded.

When my yellow lab was alive she was always with me in the studio at night. She’d alternate napping on the couch with stalking the perimeter of the unlit yard for possible critter intruders. As she grew older and lost her hearing she became anxious about me not being in the house with her and my husband after nightfall. Her solution was to sit on the deck of the house and wait, staring at the studio as if she could will me inside with her incredible concentration. Of course her theory panned out everytime as eventually I would turn out the studio lights and walk toward the house and as I approached I could hear her let out a big sigh as she stiffly pulled up her body and turned toward the door, toenails clicking softly on the wooden deck floor.

Now I have a cat— the lab is gone, the husband is gone. The rescue organization where I got this feline made me promise not to let her outside but she does go out onto the screened in porch which looks out directly to my studio; she sits on the wicker chaise and she waits. Just like the dog she worries when I am not safely inside. When I finally make my way toward the house I can hear the thud of her little paws hit the porch floor running as she gets ready for me to open the door and go inside.

Soft, sacred sounds these are and I bow my head to them.  The old dog sighing, the toenails clicking, the tiny little feline paws hitting the ground with a thud, sounds that have been and are so much a part of my everyday living that they do (and still) echo in my brain many years later.

Which brings me back to the chirping tree frog clutching his branch with all his might, calling out to his mate night after night, wondering why she is not with him, why she is not safely inside.

Don’t make any big decisions for at least a year.  That’s what I kept hearing from friends and family in the months following the loss of both my beloved lab and the husband I adored.  And, to be truthful, I agreed with them, that is until Emma came along.  While my husband was sick I began taking riding lessons at a local stable, revisiting a passion I once had as a young girl, and losing myself in a totally different world from the sad, sweet one I now inhabited at home.   Once a week I drove east, over the reservoir, and saddled up one of the saintly school horses for an hour of dust, sweat, and manure piles that transported me from caretaker to little person atop a huge bundle of powerful muscle.  Each week before my lesson I would feel the familiar anxiety and reluctance of leaving my comfort zone but as soon as I was up on that horse I was a different person.  In a few months, thanks to my young maniacal riding instructor, I was doing the two-point and breathlessly jumping over obstacles in the dusty arena.  And each week, after cooling down the horse and settling it back in its stall I would drive home through the open fields and cry my heart out, sobbing and beating my fists against the steering wheel, for all the beauty that had been in my life and was now exiting.  Once home my now very thin husband would ask about all the horses, calling them by name, and after I told him excitedly about my day at the barn he would remark on how happy I seemed on those afternoons, how much younger and relaxed I looked.

I was drawn to Emma the first time I saw her.  A big, dark, bay mare with a social, loving personality and a huge rear, she belonged and was loved by one of the boarders at the barn. Every week I would bring her offerings of organic mini carrots from Whole Foods and scratch her ears while her hot breath blow dried my hand.  Don’t get me wrong, I adored all of the horses, but Emma was different; I felt like she knew something that I needed to know.

My dog died about a year into the riding lessons and in several more months my husband was also gone; I continued to go to the barn and being with the horses continued to lighten my heavy heart.  After my lesson one week I heard the girls in the barn talking about Emma being for sale, that her owner was graduating from college and was moving to Houston and could not take Emma with her.  My heart jumped as I heard myself exclaim loudly, “Emma is for sale?”  and in an instant all eyes turned toward me and the connection was made, what a great pair we would make!  I had no intention of buying a horse but as the days wore on and the wrong people came to size up Emma, the thought of her being taken away from this barn and all that she knows began weighing on my heart.  I remembered the pain I felt when I had to sell my own horse after graduating from high school and I could see that same angst on the face of Emma’s young owner who on her Facebook page is posing lovingly with Emma by her side.  So I caved.  I went to see a man about a horse as they say and now that horse is mine.

I had to pinch myself on a regular basis the first few days after taking Emma into my care.  It was the first big lifestyle change I had made since losing my partner and it felt like I had stepped off a familiar shore, away from the family I had once known, and into the unknown on my own.  Was I moving too fast?  Would I find myself stranded in a new world before I was ready to leave the old?  These are the questions I brought to one of my first lessons on Emma.

The first time I rode her, Sam, her owner told me as i was mounting that Emma would take care of me, just to relax and enjoy her huge rhythmic stride.  And huge it was, as I quickly learned what having a XL rear can actually do for a horse.  By the third session with her I realized that Emma has places to go and people to see; as she trots she continually picks up the pace until I feel a bit like I did after losing my loved ones…sailing into the unknown, a bit out of control, leaving behind all that I had known before.  And this is when I learned about the half halt, which is both a driving and restraining aid, sometimes thought of as an “almost halt”, asking the horse to prepare to halt in balance before pushing it onward to continue at the same speed, essentially to rebalance the horse.  Whoa! (no pun intended)

And so as I am learning to ride Emma I am also learning to use the half-halt in my own life’s journey.  Whenever I feel like I am moving too fast, leaving too much of my old life behind too soon, I call my attention back to my center, sit up straight and down in my seat, take a deep breath, and rebalance.  It’s a simple rhythm of restrain and yield, restrain and  yield, as all the wise horse people have taught me.

Today I googled the name Emma;  it means complete or whole.

I’m sitting here waiting on a local volunteer agency to pick up a chair, you know the drill with the three hour window.  Two weeks ago I was doing the same thing but it was a sofa, an oversized chair, and a coffee table.  The queen’s chair is what we used to call the oversized one, as it had once belonged to me before the dog and later the husband took it over.  I decided to get rid of all of them (the funiture that is) one fateful night in early spring while streaming some HGTV program on Netflix.  That night, lying on the sofa, I began to notice these wiry, curly, yellow dog hairs that only labs can grow sticking straight up out of the cushions like darts.  Moving my eyes over to the oversized chair was no better; it was noticeably sagging in the middle in the exact shape of my husband’s ass.  It all seemed particularly drab and depressing and I guess I had just had enough.  So I called.

Within a few days my living room was practically empty.  The cat and I laid on the floor with a pillow for the first few nights of Masters of Sex but that had to end when my back seized up in rebellion.  (That thing about lying on a hard surface being good for your back is BS.)   And I could tell that the cat missed her cozy perch on the faux fur throw that used to adorn the back cushions of the couch.  But I liked the room better; it seemed more spatial and open, as if something new could happen, as if the past were over and the future could begin, this time without the dog, without the husband, who both passed away last year.

This morning, when I returned from my daily hike, I was taking  my usual walk around my garden  when I noticed unruly piles of dead foilage mixed with shreds of plastic trash lying on the ground around the martin house.  My husband and I had bought this ultimate, luxury hotel for birds on one of our many trips to wine country in California.  It was an anniversary present to oursevles one year and we had it shipped to Ohio, had it first mounted on top of a dead tree and later purchased a designated pole with decorative brackets on which it now rests.  Martins, however, were never attracted to it, perhaps because there are so many tall trees nearby. Instead, the delightful gold finches have made it their home for several years which means the martins will probably never come.  In either case, it is evident to me that this morning, or last night, perhaps while watching Netflix,  these feathered creatures living in my backyard in the big bird hotel had finally had enough.  They cleaned house.  They cleared house.  They took everything inside that structure and threw it spiritedly on the ground in disgust.  They will begin again.

There’s been a foot of snow on the ground for the last few days which makes my morning walk on the cross country course seem more like trudging.  It’s hard to get a meditative rhythm going when every few steps my weight breaks through the snow and I lurch forward like a bad tennis player—my Leki walking stick helps.  It’s easier to find a trail of footsteps that have already been made and then carefully place each of my feet one after another into those prints; sometimes they are my own from the previous day, and sometimes they belong to the guy whose boots make tracks like bare feet who I’ve never actually met.

Now I know we’ve been told by spiritual leaders and self help gurus that we should always make our own paths, always take the roads less traveled (to borrow from Scott Peck), and to never follow another’s road just because it is easier and well known.  I feel really bad about this as I am picking my way each morning through the snow, but after much inner wrestling and visual investigation, I discover that the wildlife, for whom I have the utmost respect, are doing the same damn thing!  Hell, I love animals so altruistically and believe so enthusiastically in the goodness of their instincts that I’d probably eat the bark off a tree if I actually saw them doing it, so why should I feel guilty?

So here is what I witness—deer prints placed very carefully inside each heel print of the human track as if they have been stamped there with a stencil and rendered identical every time!  At first I am a bit disappointed by the sheepishness of the deer and their shortcuts but now I have learned to cut them some slack.  Everything is awfully hard in winter and there is absolutely nowhere to hide; the branches are bare, there is no foliage, and one’s tracks can lead the big bad wolf directly to one’s door.  So why not take a shortcut when it presents itself, just for now, just until it gets a little easier to find food, shelter, and a fire in the heart?