GUN METAL GREY, WIND AND LEAPING ... AGAIN

We're in that gun metal grey time of the year. It's cloudy more often than not and the wind blows ala Kansas. If I were a writer of music I could draw a melody from the sound it makes as it goes around the corners of this 'former barn to house' that we live in. Each month it's in a different key and rhythm too. In January it's tone is lower, throaty with a moaning chorus behind it. It's the dead of Winter here and, even on warmish days, it's cold because of the never ending wind.

This year I decided to change it up. I'm going back to being a paying student. I'm always a student. If my life had taken a different route I think I would have been an academic of some kind. I love to learn. This year I'm paying for help which means no bowing out, no finding reasons to procrastinate. I need help over some of the humps in my life. I've allowed myself to fall in to a set of bad habits. As a result I'm wandering around in aimless circles, whistling to myself in the fog. Time to restart my mojo.

I had a friend who, years ago, told me that I exhausted her with all of the changes I put myself through. How could I keep taking new paths when the old ones worked just fine? Wasn't it hard, redefining myself? I was like an out of control caterpillar who, just when it was time to shuck off a cocoon and become a butterfly for a few days and then die in a blaze of glory, I changed my stripes, size and colors and started chewing on something new. 

She was right. It was exhausting, frightening, heart slamming scary. I kept leaping and falling, and ever so often making the next ledge, barely. If there are scars from emotional and mental "burns and injuries", I am pretty dog gone crusty and ugly by now. Hitting walls and bruising myself with my efforts was my modus operandi. And I loved it too. I kept running straight at the cliff and throwing myself, full monty, off the edge with a comanche yell. 

And then friends started to die from age related illnesses and even suicide. And someone else convinced me I was old. I made the mistake of listening. Maybe it was grief. Loosing people you've been friends with, laughed and cried with and complained about the things you can't control with, was sobering. How could I keep running straight at those cliffs and ledges with such abandon and loving it when they were suffering? 

What was I thinking of? I'm a grandmother now. Isn't there some 'Grandma form' I'm supposed to follow? And I did too. For some reason I believed them and then myself because it really is my own voice that slowed me down. I've never let anyone else keep my feet away from those chance taking ledges before. I was the one who stopped trying.

Maybe it was breaking some bones in a preventable accident. I knew exactly what I did wrong after the fact, knew it was me who set it up to happen. But bones heal and, in a weird kind of way, I sort of like my cyborg status. It gave me street cred. I now have little metal plates that helped my bones to heal straight and strong. It was all so sci fi of me. And I did it without drugs too, except for ibuprofen at bed time to allow me to sleep. (There are addictive tendencies in my family. I'm not interested in discovering them in myself.) My doctor was very clear. "Nancy, no horses for at least four weeks." Yeah, right. The day before I was scheduled for surgery I was outside with my rake cleaning and feeding. And two days after I went out and did everything for six weeks with one arm. Actually it was an interesting challenge. And it was fascinating to watch the horses react to my odd posture with an arm stuck in the air. 

But if that was what slowed me down, it was just an excuse. It was my much delayed middle aged crisis (I always was a late bloomer.) at the ripe old age of sixty something mutter, mutter, mutter. That's old, right? It's getting in to the big numbers, the sliding down the hill faster and faster numbers. I'm in the more time behind me than in front of me category. I BETTER BE CAREFUL! So I pretty much came to a snail's crawl. It's not in my nature to stop completely but I wasn't exactly leaping anymore either. Instead I started loosing sleep, stopped exercising with intension, started whining about things I couldn't control and very effectively trapped myself in to a rabbit's warren of tight little paths and several ways out. I got dull. And panicked. And I cried a lot too. 

I wasn't excited about anything. I started little projects and piled stuff up in my studio, putting off the process of making a mess. I began to dwell on politics, the lack of money (because taking enormous chances, for me, means a lack of funds. My choice. I grew up with money and my childhood was miserable. It was not the source of happiness.) and loneliness. I had become what I did not want to be. I was stalled.

Funny how horse related terminology comes back in to play. I was stalled. I was closed up in a too small inner room with very little space to maneuver in. And, like any creature who is meant to be outside, under the sun with space to run in and friends to play and work with, I set myself up to begin to wither. (More horse terminology). I was failing. I was making myself sick and unhappy, moving in to crazy making depression. I was genuinely afraid and it wasn't the exhilarating breath catching leaping kind of fear either. There was nothing positive about it. I was behind self made bars looking at the world from a self imposed dark space in the name of so-called safety. 

I love that image. It's out of focus but there's also a sun glare off the lens that makes me think of cheesy guys with a sparkle in their smile. And my problems seem to be out of focus too so, somehow, it works within the story line. Time to focus, to leap, to fill some of the promises I made to myself and my herd. I'm dull. They're bored and we all need a change, a goal. So I paid for help, rejoined the Parelli organization (I'd left it because I was frustrated with the tech changes. Learning about the internet is not so much fun as necessary if I want to keep up with a lightning fast world.) and here I go.

I don't have permission to use the instructor's name but I did choose someone who lives fairly close in to me, comparatively. And I followed this instructor's free live feed videos to FB too. We're doing a four week course. I'm focused, primarily, on getting my goals set back up with my horses so I can move ahead again. But I'm also hoping it will help me to get myself moving with my ideas to write, paint, illustrate and leap off cliffs. 

Oh boy. Here we go. I'm back in school and ready to sit up front, waving my arm around. " Me! Me, me, me!" And I'll do my best not to be a class cut up either. I promise, no fish swallowing on a dare. (Someday I'll tell you about that story too. I only got away with it because I was an honors student. )

YIKES! Trust, Nancy. Remember? TRUST.

I am, ever yours, Miss Nancy, balanced on the edge and looking in to the hairy, scary space in front of me, gulping and smiling ... sort of. Time to let go of that fog!