Posted by Kimberly at March 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Where does courage come from?

The Andalusian horse in my barn has courage bred right into her. After all, Caprichosa's ancestors are the Horses of Kings. Her folk carried the conquistadors. She has a heart for battle.

We've ridden together in some pretty tight places up in the mountains. Places that left my head swirling from up there on her strong back as I fought the temptation to grab the saddle horn while the mare simply strolled onward with all the nonchalance of a tourist on one of those holiday bus excursions. You know, where they serve box lunches and Coca-Cola.

The narrow, rocky trail to Lake Katherine that Dennis talked me into years ago--

I'm jiggling the reins every now and then just to remind the horse of the sheer drop off to the canyon way down there below, the one that's filled with boulders so astonishingly humungous that giants must have stacked them there. Their footprints are everywhere. I can hear them breathing.

To let her know that that marauding mountain lion could appear on the naked cliffs above us at almost any moment. And as she and I are slightly more plump than Dennis and his mountain goat arabian horse Miss Morningstar on the trail ahead of us, he'd be sure to eat us first.

The Andalusian horse remains nonplussed.

I pale in comparison.

Posted by Kimberly at March 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you want money more than anything,
you'll be bought and sold.

If you have a greed for food,
you'll be a loaf of bread.

This is a subtle truth:
whatever you love, you are.

~ Rumi

Posted by Kimberly at March 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

I can't believe I actually had to say this to my husband last night.

No. Wheelies. On. Odin.

Period.

Men.

Posted by Kimberly at March 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

~ William Shakespeare

Her breathe is ragged as we uncoil from the rocky soil up into the ether.

We unfurl like a white flag into the bruised blue and ocher of the day's end. I know I should rein the horse back to a walk. I know she's on the mend.

But Caprichosa's excitement is contagious, and neither one of us is prone to surrender. It's been a long time since we've ridden like this together. As we fling ourselves skyward from the bottom of the hill, we are remembering. Remembering who we are.

Together.

The mare's hooves cleave the red earth. Split the red rocks. Scramble over rivulets. Chew up the rain-gutted trail in staccato gunshots. The sound of our ascent ricochets off the canyon walls.

I look down at the ground slipping away from us. The spraying rocks. The cattle dogs breathing hot on our heels. Feel no need to grab the mare's mane despite her churning somewhere between this bliss and an abyss so dark I can't imagine.

Posted by Kimberly at March 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's easy in the middle of our comfortable, everyday American lives to forget the price of our freedom.
.
I love this. And I love these courageous men and women.

Posted by Kimberly at March 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Forget every idea of right and wrong
Any classroom ever taught you
Because
An empty heart, a tormented mind,
Unkindness, jealousy and fear
Are always the testimony
You have been completely fooled!

Turn your back on those
Who would imprison your wondrous spirit
With deceit and lies.

Come, join the honest company
Of the King's beggars -
Those gamblers, scoundrels and divine clowns
And those astonishing fair courtesans
Who need Divine Love every night.
Come, join the courageous
Who have no choice
But to bet their entire world
That indeed,
Indeed, God is Real.

I will lead you into the Circle
Of the Beloved's cunning thieves,
Those playful royal rogues -
The ones you can trust for true guidance -
Who can aid you
In this Blessed Calamity of life.

Hafiz,
Look at the Perfect One
At the Circle's Center:
He Spins and Whirls like a Golden Compass,
Beyond all that is Rational,
To show this dear world
That Everything,
Everything in Existence
Does point to God.

~ Hafiz

Posted by Kimberly at March 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

From where I sit on the blue feed bucket, Caprichosa's lips are jumbo marshmallows with spun sugar whiskers.

The mare rests her gooshy confection lips on the top of my head, my hair that's all messed up with the breeze anyway is now really going to get it. She sniffs and sniffs and sniffs and moves her top lip furiously back and forth and then takes a few good licks with her cotton candy pink tongue. I read somewhere that means the horse thinks she's taking care of you. When they lick you, that is. She does it all the time to my kids.

I stare at her knees and wonder what that means about her thinking of who's exactly where in the pecking order?

Toby looms behind me on the other side of the fence. As much of his head as he can squeeze through the rails is squeezed through. Head turned sideways soooooo pitiful. Top lip tucked in, wrinkled like cords of black licorice. He's saying that he's just a little bitty baby after all, big spoiled Boo ... it's killing him to be on the other side of the fence from all the action.

Teyla the appaloosa-horse-of-steel keeps her distance, but watches me like a hawk like she always does when she thinks I'm not looking, her head dropped down to my level now, ears pricked forward. She doesn't know it, but I can see every single polka dots on her caramel and strawberry and mocha lips.

My quarter horse, Pinon, lets her big bottom lip droop like a shovel. Or a scoop. The kind Willy Wonka would use to serve up everlasting gobstoppers or something equally delicious. Her I.Q. drops to nearly zero, on the surface that is. Never underestimate an opinionated horse named after a small brown nut.

The teacup muzzle of our resident royalty, Dennis' Arabian Morningstar, fits perfectly in the palm of my outstretched hand through the fence. Saltwater taffy.

Posted by Kimberly at March 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here he is. Odin. Odey for short. Isn't he a gorgeous beast? He's a custom Yamaha V-Star 1100.

And we thought we were going to do the plain black thing. I kept on telling my husband how I just wanted a Plain Black Motorcycle. Something subdued. Not very decorative. No studs, no skulls, etc. You know, kind of like that little black dress?

Mid-life crisis Part I.

Obviously.

Those are Maltese crosses, by the way. The Maltese cross is identified as the symbol of an order of Christian warriors known as the Knights Hospitaller or Knights of Malta.

So much for the scooter idea. Which is actually where this all started.

I suspect we're going to be fighting over this guy. Let the Wild Hunt begin.

Posted by Kimberly at March 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

We saw the previews for the new Narnia movie yesterday at the theater. I've always loved Aslan. (Heck, I'm beginning to love that old chicken eating bobcat.) But I love more this startling poem by Hafiz. At this point in my life, the Sufi poet's Great Lion, rings so much more true to me than C.S. Lewis' Aslan.

The Barrroom View of Love

I would not want all my words
To parade around this world
In pretty costumes,

So I will tell you something
Of the Barroom view of Love.

Love is grabbing hold of the Great Lion's mane
And wrestling and rolling deep into Existence

While the Beloved gets rough
And begins to maul you alive.

True Love, my dear,
Is putting an ironclad grip upon

The soft, swollen balls
Of a Divine Rogue Elephant

And
Not having the good fortune to Die!

--Hafiz

Posted by Kimberly at March 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Love is grabbing hold of the great lion's mane.
-- Hafiz.

I’ve been on my own for a week. The kids are with their dad. Dennis is in D.C. on business.

It’s me and the tenacious heeler sisters.

Lila Jane and Red Dawg are grinning at me in the driveway, planted square on their freckled legs, bob tails wriggling. It’s hard to understand the ferocity of heeler dog love unless you’ve had one. But right now, with their bright eyes turned in my direction, ears pricked, awaiting whatever I decide we’re doing next, I am the center of their attention.

Possibly of their universe.

Because these two, who hardly ever miss a thing that goes on around here, are completely oblivious to what is skulking around the corner of my eye.

It is the biggest barn cat imaginable.

It’s a giant calico cat.

No, it is a humungous tiger cat.

It’s Catzilla.

Whatever he is, I hope we get some of that gene pool into our frighteningly inbred army of barn cats—each one the identical aloof, shaggy, gray, emerald-eyed.

The shadow is slinking 30 feet behind the clueless heeler dogs, underneath the wheels of my Tahoe, quick out into the open, underneath the wheels of the truck, quick out into the open, and then

Gone.

When Dennis returns from D.C. I tell him about how I’ve just seen the biggest barn cat I’ve ever seen in my life, and I wonder where he came from, because I haven’t seen him around here before, and how I held my breath hoping to get a clear look at him without letting on to you-know-who, although I just never did, not quite, and that I was praying the heelers wouldn’t get the poor thing, and disappointed and heaving a sigh of relief when he just vanished into thin air.

My husband, you know, the one you’d probably want to be hanging out with if the whole world goes to hell in a hand basket because he knows the wilderness like the back of his hand, is shaking his head and chuckling because he tells me what I saw was that old bobcat.

Posted by Kimberly at March 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

A twelfth [spell] I know;
when I see aloft upon a tree
A corpse swinging from a rope,
Then I cut and paint runes
So that the man walks
And speaks with me.

Shhhh… Don’t tell my percheron horse Toby, but I’m getting a motorcycle. A black, sleek, shiny one.

No. It’s not a Harley. OK.? Most likely a Suzuki or a Honda. Smaller. 800ccs. Something I can learn on but still get that wind in my hair thing going on.

After a visit to the Harley Davidson shop in Albuquerque a few weeks ago, I’m convinced that their marketing people lay awake at night trying to figure out what scares each and every one of us the most, and how they can fill the void they're counting on in my soul.

Heck, Saturday over at the Harley shop was an event. There were Harley Davidson folks draped around their Harleys in the parking lot. Posing, I think the British call it. Women in leather and fringe bustiers (and in one case a rather heavy duty boostier that fell within the category of an absolute engineering feat if you ask me, making all that flesh appear … well … positively ... perky). Men and women sitting at special Harley Davidson café tables inside the place, presumably discussing ... well .. their Harleys, and possibly the meaning of life, do ya think?, wearing Harley Davidson jewelery and head scarves, all beginning to look surprisingly the same to me in their Harley Davidson getups.

Now don’t get me wrong, Harleys are beautiful machines, worthy of drooling over. But I don’t need to assume some marketing super genius' persona, not even as I travel further and further beyond 45, to sleep through the night. You know, like, here, spend $2,500 on Harley jeans, jackets, chaps, under panties, etc., and voila! You are now Somebody. Somebody who positively laughs in the face of your own mortality astride one of these babies.

Now here’s a group of folks who know the deepest workings and yearnings of the inner male.

This is a Honda Valkyrie Rune.

My husband has been drooling over these. (He's getting a motorcycle too, you see. We are living out our mid life crises together we have agreed. Gotta love the man.) Rune gazing is happening in a big way at my house on Saturday mornings. Just check out eBay.

In fact, check out Rune. The runes are attributed with the power to bring that which is dead to life.

Whoa. Now whose the marketing super genius, I ask? You Harley people better get on the stick if you want the business of we mythologically inclined.

Then see Valkyrie. In Valhalla the valkyries “serve drink and look after the tableware and drinking vessels”. I suppose if you own a Honda Valkyrie Rune, she might just show up and serve you an ice cold beer after your ride.

Have you ever seen those older couples from places like Texas traveling in their cars on vacation? The men sit in the front seat? Their wives sitting in the back where they can't even see? That always just chaps my ass. No wind going on in that teased up blue hair. Not now. And probably not before either.

That's just sad.

We went on a vacation several years ago, and the couple we were with, people about our own age, actually engaged in this bizarre medeival practice.

Well, OK, they tried.

I pitched a fit, in private, to my poor poor husband, who would never think up such a ridiculous arrangement on his own and made sure it didn't happen again.

Well, I could possibly be talked into sitting on the back of a Honda Valkyrie Rune. (Although I suspect once you climb astride this machine, somehow or other, you wind up being its bitch. I suspect the Rune demands to be polished every day, etc., maybe worshiped.) But I draw the line at bustiers.

Unless maybe I could find a tasteful one to match this sweet little ride I've got my eye on--

I'm naming him Odin. Odey for short.

Posted by Kimberly at March 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5)

The girls who made the team had taken dance lessons from childhood, and had perfected their big vacant smiles and big hairdos. I don't think many of them really had a passion for dance; it was just something they were expected to do, as the white, upper-middle-class popular girls whose parents had dragged them to recitals and classes all their lives. I didn't want to dance to encourage school spirit, or to show off my long legs. I didn't care about competitions. I wanted to dance because, even at fifteen, I knew there was something there. Diane Sylvan, Dancing Down the Moon

It's been over 30 years since I bombed out of high school majorette tryouts, but in my dream the other night, as I lay curled up next to my warm bear of a husband in our sprawling four-poster bed, I had a spectacular plan to shine. And win a place on the team.

Not only would I twirl a baton, but I'd wield that lightning stick while standing on the back of my percheron horse Toby, as he thundered down the football field at a gallop.

Wouldn't the judges be impressed?

Certainly more than they were in my waking life.

For some reason I got this idea into my head in high school. That I, the painfully shy girl near the bottom of the pecking order, the one with the painfully small clothes closet filled with blue jeans and a couple of pairs of Wrangler corduroys, the one with a glaringly painful lack of dates, could be one of those princesses prancing out in front of the marching band like a hackney pony, stepping in time to the music in high white boots, tossing a baton high into the air, so high it would make you hold your breath. And, in my case, hoping like hell I could catch it.

The princess I emulated back then, by the way, was the daughter of the high school band director. The perpetually smug Jean C, with a haircut like a homely boy’s and legs longer than a thoroughbred’s. She was the head majorette the whole time I was in high school and always got the really good parts in the school play.

Go figure.

My dad, who actually had hopes of my being Miss America one day, I kid you not, at least this is what he said on the each and every one night a year the fifty hopefuls got sung to by Bert Parks on TV, tears dripping down their faces, ruining their mascara, and which is of course a rather lofty expectation to lay on a skinny kid in overalls, paid for baton twirling lessons at the dance studio in the local strip mall, where my lack of dazzle and poise exasperated my baton twirling teacher—Jack La Lane in a unitard and perky shoes—to no end.

Jack La La Lane must have thought I couldn't see him rolling his eyeballs nearly out of their sockets at my tortured twirling in the floor to ceiling wall of mirrors before which he demonstrated the finer points of the art, enjoying his own snappy reflection way too much if you ask me.

Although there was one baton twirling thing I excelled at. It was called Around the World.

Around the World was the showpiece of my doomed baton twirling routine back then, and it still is apparently. In equestrian vaulting, I had an opportunity to vault a while ago with a woman who’d actually been a circus performer and was then, as I understood it, studying some kind of fire twirling. Heck, if you gave me a lit-up baton right now at this minute, I bet I could impress you with a global tour of flaming baton magic. Although I might burn my eyebrows off.

I might have kicked the covers off as flames ignited under Toby’s hindquarters like jet plane engines roaring. Or my husband might have turned over on his other side, stealing the covers and snoring.

But anyway, that big percheron horse, my sweet and perpetually darling Big Boo, who shows up slightly larger in my dreams, slightly more dark and sleek and shiny, shot right off the mark to cross the 10, the 20, the 30, and by the time we hit the fifty yard line those folks in the bleachers were on their feet, screaming my name, and I just knew it. I was in. Finally. After all these years. Because I was twirling, twirling with all my heart and soul while standing on the back of this fabulous midnight colored horse. And this time, I told myself, as we dreamers do occasionally, I was going to be accepted.

Maybe as a follow up I could sing a solo.

Or tell you about my plans for world peace.

But instead of stopping at the 50, which was part of the dazzling plan, the percheron horse stretched out his marine-worthy neck, furry black ears flattened against his lovely jar head, one gleaming eye cast back at me, and ran. Like the wind. Like a whole pack of wolves were after us.

Like maybe he could save me from myself. He carried me right past those judges and Jack La Lane and leaped over the fence at the end of the football field.

And kept right on going.

And while I kept on twirling, I honestly don’t know where we wound up after that.

But I do know than when I awoke up in the morning, I could see the mesa burning amber and red from beneath the goose down comforter I’d somehow managed to wrestle back from my still sweetly slumbering, dead-to-the-world husband, who might be galloping through his own dreams somewhere impossibly far away, and I had no doubt Toby was waiting for me at the pasture gate, tail swishing.

Posted by Kimberly at March 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4)

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot

Posted by Kimberly at March 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Despite her fybrotic myopathy, our 16-year-old horse Caprichosa is feeling good. That's what that high-octane senior citizen horse food, some MSM and a little bute (plus all that massaging) will do to you when you're trying to make a comeback.

I rode the flea bitten mare down the railroad road yesterday. I let her pick the pace. Well, for the most part, that is. We were about equal on the walk and trot selections. But the horse was so full of herself that she tried to go a little heavy on the canter, and I had to make her cool her big Andalusian jets.

I'd worked her the previous evening in the round pen. She is usually a malleable sort of creature, especially free longing or on the longe line. I can put Jessie on her with the vaulting surcingle and that eleven-year-old girl can do all kinds of crazy antics on her back, and the horse doesn't bat an eyelid. Well, only to let us know that she thinks it's all quite weird and fascinating and extremely interesting. But occasionally, when it's just me, and no kids are involved, the big mare has moments of ornery stubborness that flare up in a big big way. If she's in a certain mood.

We were free longing.

And Caprichosa was in said certain mood.

I asked her to change from the left to the right rein, and she tossed her head at me then rose up above me in a picture perfect levade, muzzle tucked to her chest.

OK. OK.

I know I shouldn't let her do that, but she's making a comeback from being physically flattened, and if she feels good enough to pull a little good-natured bullshit on me, the woman she's known for over a decade, then that's OK with me. In fact, it's more than OK.

I will revel in it.

I just laughed as the white horse loomed above me, bell shaped hooves neatly tucked into her chest where that big heart beats, eyes sparkling like the stars that were starting to come out on the mesa just above us.

We changed rein again. And I was treated to another levade.

Have you ever tried to make a comeback?

Well, it's hard.

Movie starlets (well, the ones who used to be starlets anyway) know all about that sort of thing. Sometimes they make it. Sometimes they turn into Nora Desmond.

And it can be scary.

I'll never forget being at the physical therapy center something like fifteen years ago, after I'd broken my back in a horseback riding accident, looking at my skinny, frail figure in the mirror in the ladies locker room and nearly bursting into tears. Heck, I was lucky to still be walking the neurologist said.

And you don't know if you'll make it or not.

I'd taken it all for granted, you see.

Maybe adult life is just a series of courageous comebacks. Where we are constantly reinventing ourselves.

Like me and Caprichosa. Healing the everyday wounds.

Posted by Kimberly at March 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5)