The Press of Time

Things, as in all things and as in time itself,  do seem to be speeding up.  Everyone notices it,  and finds it to be challenging to a greater or lesser extent.  It’s like time is literally flying by us, and it all may look the same in the “real world”, but physical life knows it isn’t and there’s a bit of a push/pull, trying to make sense of things as they go past, of our feelings as they swirl and eddy.  How to make sense of what we’re doing, make plans when everything is in such flux if not outright chaos.  I’m watching people I know working through what needs to be done in their lives, making plans and decisions that change with dizzying and speedy regularity.  Usually, I just listen. My own decisions are marching around on their own, practicing how to get themselves in order, and are thus unreachable for comment.

However, and, but.  There do seem to be complementary tracks, even if we feel at times as though we’re following those tracks like dogs with their noses in the grass pursuing bugs.  On the one hand, there’s a LOT of information floating around everywhere in this technological world.  On the other hand? There seems to be an extraction of content from a fair amount of this information.  Where does this leave you?  In the continuing story of the pondering of business and other directions here in Yurt Central, it still seems to me that the inclusion of content and meaning is crucial.  All the well meaning admonitions one receives about paragraph length in a newsletter (or heck! in a blog), and that those paragraphs should all be short so that people can pay attention…..combined with a conversation where someone was talking about what constitutes organic growing and pretty much misrepresenting the basics in order to make a sale, made me stop and wring my paws.  My bias is toward inclusion.  Obviously.  And if we are to change the way things are, the way the world is, we are not going to accomplish that by becoming more stupid, more unconscious, more oriented to having all direction come from outside in specific patterns and sizes and lengths.    We’re looking for INCLUSION, Gentle Reader, and dare we say it, expansion of awareness.  Not contraction.

Combining all this with the (very) dismaying progress in Syria, as well as of politics here in the States, the deadlocked, diatribe ridden (but SHORT PARAGRAPHED!) and/or just downright limited and backward things happening, I come back to the same thing every time.  You have to think for yourself:  nobody else can do that for you.  Thinking for yourself may be frowned upon in some places but it is still essential. ( Just as freedom is, could we but remember that. ) And after thinking, you can explain what you saw and understood to others.  Then, those others can understand the same things, act on their own behalf (crucial in any sort of healing process), and create some dynamism, movement, and progress for everyone.  So, really.  We need those long paragraphs, Gentle Reader!  We need calm, some room to think and develop.  Some quiet and space.  Knowledge, as opposed to propaganda- which is what, of course, advertising is and quite often even the “news”.  We are not presented with the truth, but with an image of what someone else wants truth to look like.  And what that someone else also wants YOU to accept, buy, do.  This lemming- like hurtle toward what’s hot/what’s not and all the artificial constructs we accept as reality is not, ultimately, going to serve us well.  In fact it is looking more and more like The Great Leap Backward.  Especially for women.  So, that was today’s epic think-through. It’s like those fractal rough spots-  those spots reveal the shapes and beings of everything around them and pretending they don’t exist doesn’t fly.  So, finally, a decision.  We embrace long sentences and long paragraphs here.  Happen what may.  (Ahem.)(Scenes from Toiling In Obscurity?)

Meanwhile, for diversion nothing really surpasses the horses next door.  They’re by themselves most of the time, and thus have whole routines and things they do just in the course of their days, since they think nobody’s watching and we are, at this point, largely part of their herd so they don’t worry about US. ( Except to alert us to their need for carrots.)  For example, they’re in a sloping corral area.  They’ll take turns walking, one of them, up to the top of the corral with the other staying down in the bottom.   Then, they’ll “ignore” each other until one breaks down and begins to amble down to the other.  The ear movement during all this is sensational: up, down, swivel, front, side, wiggle.  Maybe a blow out the nose.  After some short time passes during which length of corral/time/distance are measured in equine terms, inevitably the horse on the lower area of the corral makes a break for the top area, and a fair amount of astonishing head and mane shaking ensues.  Then sometimes they chase each other around, or play tag with things they find on the ground.  Sierra, the white horse, absolutely loves to roll in the mud.  The other day she was doing just that, reveling in abandon, when she noticed The Partner walking past the fence.  She gave him a quick, appraising glance and went right back to the mud.  It’s a different story with the border collie, though.  The dog was out playing the dozens with Copper, The Guy Horse, and the head movements and shakes, the lunges and snaps and hoof gesturing were all clearly saying:

DOG- nyah nyah nyah

HORSE- come over here and say that, right here!

DOG- lunge and miss

HORSE- keep it up.  I can do this all day.  WITH PLEASURE.

But the really great thing is we can always walk over there and get showered with horse kisses now.  Which is the next plan, after, of course, we let the Conure Cabal out for their afternoon fly around.  Continuing reinvention can wait a bit.

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Of Horses and Habaneros

AS it turned out….horses do not throw up unless there is a problem.  It turned out to be a big one, too.  Tuesday when Harley came over and threw up he was, essentially, asking for help.  His human (our landlady) called the veterinarian, who treated him for choke, which is apparently something that happens to horses with some frequency: They get a glob of food stuck in their throat and then the problems start.  So, the vet stuck a tube into Harley’s nose to get the food glob dislodged, saying that it was a common procedure and not to worry.  But, of course, you can imagine that that sort of thing- the not to worry thing?-  happens on some other planet altogether, can’t you?  Not the one WE’RE on.  So poor Harley got tubed five times, also had a bad reaction to the pain medication, additionally got colic because he’d been blocked at, essentially, both ends.  Also, it’s been hotter than the well known spot commonly referenced in such comparisons.  So fast forward to Wednesday night when I got back from town and the landlady zipped up to transact some business.  She’d called earlier while I was gone, telling the Partner to let me know Harley was bleeding from the nose and not to freak out when I walked by.  She dashed off in tears, we were all crying, and things seemed quite grim.  It looked as though he might have to be put down.

So, what to do?  Rumi said to let yourself be drawn by the pull of what you truly love.  I felt I had to do something to help, being a witch doctor in training and all.  So first, I sat and, essentially, prayed.  Prayer is a word I often hesitate to use because it has become so…well, polluted in meaning what with all the politicians and..oh, never mind.  Anyway.  I focussed on Harley.  A little later I knew I had to go over and see him.  The poor baby.  His normally clear brown eyes were purple from distress and I knew he was miserable, panting and bleeding and good lord it was awful.  So I started doing Jin Shin Jyutsu on him, talking and moving my hands.  Our landlady came out, in tears, and we stood with him together, moving our hands over his poor pained body,  for quite some time during which I was almost completely devoured by bugs.  We didn’t know if he’d make it through the night or not.  The next morning he was there, looking better, waiting for me.  I worked on him twice yesterday, and today he looked a whole lot better.  Some issues remaining but no blood.  He was covered in cold towels and his breath was largely normal.  His nose is apparently healing but it clearly itches and he puts it deep down in water to soothe it.  He can’t eat solid things like hay yet because his throat is raw, so he’s getting carrot juice and handfuls of clover.  But the thing of it is this.  Yesterday I was doing a sequence on him for which I had to put my arms around his neck.  He rested his head on my shoulder and kissed it.    Today he again kissed me, and nodded his head a few times in agreement when I said how smart his mommy is to have figured out he didn’t like the pain medication, and that he was going to be all right.  As I walked back to the yurt, the other two horses walked over to me from the top of their pen.  The first day I went over they dashed down, wanting to know what was going on, the worry clear in their eyes.  Once I started working on Harley they both walked away to give us some privacy, then when he took a short walk near them, both reached their necks over the corral and wrapped themselves around him so lovingly, it was breathtaking.  Today when they walked over, they both let me stroke their heads and Copper stood up very straight, raising his head over the top of the fence, leaned over so he was nose to nose with me, and kissed my forehead.   It was the best thank you I’ve gotten for a long time.   And it reminded me, once again since I keep losing the thought like a bar of soap on the shower floor, that love is the motivating power of the universe- or at least one of the big ones.  If we let ourselves be moved by the power that flows through everything, we are bound at least sometimes to do good and be of help.  And that’s really why we’re here.

During all this period, we’ve been eating Jerk- we made chicken, although it’s good on almost anything, even tofu if you can believe it.  We have a habanero crop this year that is simply mind boggling.  So we decided to make Jerk, which we both like, and I can report that Mark Bittman’s recipe for it in THE BEST RECIPES IN THE WORLD, is a keeper.   So it is, indeed, a world of wonders.