Lila and I were riding the quad through the country road on our way to the beach. I love these dusty roads. They give little indication that we are no longer in 1974 and this, from the first day, has hooked my heart. As we were getting closer to the village, we saw one of the vaqueros (cowboys) a few meters in front of us. This man, one of my neighbors, often leads a herd of a couple dozen cows and bulls from atop his horse, seven or eight dogs closing the parade. He too is one of the reasons I chose to build my home here. Like I say, 1974. Well, except for the times when he is on his cell phone. But yesterday, it was just him on his horse with, next to him trotting along … a tiny horse. A really small and almost heartachingly beautiful tiny horse. Perfect, really. Perfect and … something else. He was walking free, with no lead, next to the man and the grown-up horse. I slowed down wanting to be sure not to scare him with my engine and asked my neighbor how old the baby horse was. As I got even closer to the horse I could feel my heart start to fill up in an odd way. The cowboy held up three fingers. I, having grown up right outside of Paris and knowing very little about horses, nodded and repeated to him that the horse was three months old. Not even three weeks old, mind you. No, no. I offered three months. The vaquero without even blinking corrected me: Three days old. The baby horse was three DAYS old. I knew I had sounded ignorant and instead of saying nothing, I thought it would be good to comment about how amazing it was that he was already walking. Then ask if the other horse was his mama. Babbling, you know? She was. I couldn’t take my eyes off the animal. My chest was doing funny things, and I just wanted to ride alongside them, wherever they were going, until the end of the day or until I ran out of gas. Eventually, I tore myself away by pressing gently on the accelerator and that’s when I realized what had affected me so much. Three Days Old. I remember Three Days Old. I remember holding my baby granddaughter when she was three days old just a few weeks ago. I remember how simultaneously strong and fragile she was. I remember too how it had felt as though part of her was there with us and part of her was still in the other world, the one she had just arrived from. This baby horse felt the same way. Precious, sacred, so pure and new. Now riding through the village I was full of the Gifts of Life, the miracle of our baby’s oxygen mask having come off around day three, and the miracle of this perfect baby animal trotting along his mama in the dusty sunlight at the same age. I was so darn happy that my eyes started crying a little, releasing some of that fullness into warm tears of gratitude for all of it. For all the little lungs working on their own and for all the skinny little horse legs trotting healthily. And then, because I am human and sometimes humans can’t leave stuff alone, my brain started to ask some questions. “How many babies did she have?” I wondered. and then: ”How did she get pregnant?” I wondered some more. And just like that, before I could even begin to formulate an answer to either of my own questions, BAM. A memory. A terrible, awful, very bad memory. One I had been trying to forget for the last week. Riding home on the same road, I had passed a small farm on my left, as I do just about every day. In that farm, there are roosters in cages - most likely fighting roosters - and a horse. A big horse who lives under a tree, tied from his head to a branch up above. Every day as I pass by I invent in my mind ways to cut him loose. Every day I force myself to keep driving and step into neutrality, and humility. Possibly into chickenshitness. I tell myself, as I do very, very often here, that I don’t know. Which is correct. I tell myself that I have chosen to live in a culture that is different than mine, whatever mine is. Which is true. I tell myself that I am a guest here. I keep driving home over the river beds and into the open field where at least three animals are going to be very happy to see me, running around freely and making it easy for me to forget a little. Last week was harder. As I passed by the farm, instead of one horse there were two. There were also two men. And the two men, holding ropes and using loud voices were directing one of the horses to mount the other one. For a brief instant, I thought I didn’t understand what was happening. But I did. I think it’s called breeding and me seeing it as assisted rape wasn’t going to change anything. One of the horses was the one that was usually tied by its face to the tree. I kept driving and I cried. For so many reasons. And then I put it away. Until the baby horse. Once Lila and I made it to the beach, my mind was swirling around with words, each one crashing to the beat of the pristine foamy waves. Contrasts. Not knowing. Choosing what to celebrate. Humility, again. Living here. Being human. Complicated. The juxtaposition of this perfect baby animal and the way maybe he too had come to be in the world. My readiness to melt into gratitude for one end of the story and to be outraged by the other. How little I know. How little I often know. I tossed the word hypocrisy around and auditioned it for a few minutes. I let it go, it didn’t feel quite right. It’s something else. I think that living here makes all of this complexity, these contrasts much more “in your face.” In the States, there are layers in the way that soften a lot of the raw stuff. Interestingly enough, for me, these layers also soften the glory. I find myself gasping a whole lot more over here. Living a lot brighter. Crying more, too. And so, here I am, aware that while I am delighted by the new art stencils that arrived yesterday, I know that they happened to come from a company in China whose practices I have not researched. Here I am enjoying writing this story to you from the jungle using the super reliable internet service for which I send money to Elon Musk’s company each month (which is not very 1974 of me) Here I am celebrating a baby horse while rejecting breeding practices. Today, I invite us to be gentle with ourselves for the babbling and the bumbling we might do when realizing how complicated our integrity map is. I invite us to be aware that it’s often not all that simple and to decide how far in the complexity we dare to tiptoe or trot in. This life… First Make a Plan, She Said First of all, please meet Marley. Because until 7:00 this morning, she was all I was going to write about today. Marley, Marley, Marley. How we met, how she has become part of our family (she is Lila’s 5th birthday present), and the total awesomeness of her beautiful little self. But at 7:00 this morning, while Lila, Chiquita, Marley and I were walking through the dusty road by the house, something happened which is what I want to write about now. Still, take a look at this FB post and it will tell you how we met Marley. You’ll understand. Now, about this morning.
Walking through the still-dry riverbeds, passing many dogs - three of them Chiquita’s puppies, who have become big and loud - it is a lovely morning in the countryside. The air is still cool, everyone is having a good time and I love, love, love seeing Lila so playful with her new sister. She is even jumping around Chiquita who is wondering what the heck has happened to her usually very calm neighbor. A few minutes after the second river bed, I see a woman walking towards us. I have never seen her before. She is dressed in semi-fancy colorful layers, beaded earrings matching her beaded necklace, pretty much exactly not the way people dress to walk around this neighborhood. Also, her hair is covered with a headdress of some sort. Me, I am wearing my friend’s grandma’s nightgown, which I wore to the Women’s Circle in the jungle last night and in which I fell asleep. I threw a small jacket on top of it, put on some rubber boots, brushed neither my hair nor my teeth, and stepped out, twelve paws in tow. Oh well. It’s not as though I am going to run into anyone, and the dogs sure don’t care. We pass each other, say good morning, and the pups and I keep walking. I notice she is carrying a stick and I can’t tell whether it is a walking cane or some sort of special staff. On our way back to the house, I see her again. She is now propped on one of the big stones in the middle of the riverbed, her stick by her side, sitting straight up with a book on her lap. I recognize the book: You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, in Spanish. It is possible that this book saved my life 33 years ago. So I tell her. From the dusty road all the way to her throne/stone, I tell her. She seems surprised that I would even know the book and well, of course, it’s a matter of seconds before I am sitting in the sand in front of her, the pups playing by my side and she and I talking. Well, really she is talking. She is telling me about how low she had been feeling, how she couldn’t seem to get herself out of bed, nor remember what the point of her life was. The whole time she is holding the book. Then she tells me how she had had the book at home for a while but how this time, it sort of threw itself at her. Same with a small Al-Anon book she had. I know what she is talking about. This Louise Hay book tends to do that. Throw itself off the shelf into someone’s path. She is animated, excited to be sitting here on this rock. I notice that she is actually sitting on a small yellow piece of cloth, her white pants out of dust’s way. She is prepared. “I do this every day now,” she says. “You see this plant by my feet? It used to be tiny when I started, but now it is a full-grown plant.” This is her spot. She walks from her house to our neighborhood and sits on the rock. Well, on the towel on the rock. Then she says something that sparks brightly for me. She tells me that a few weeks ago when she was feeling so low, a good friend had told her to “make a plan.” Make a plan. I raise an eyebrow, signaling that I would like to know more about the plan part. “A plan,” she said. “Any plan. Read a book, take a daily walk, go to a class. Just make a plan.” I ask her if dressing as though she was going to a party was part of the plan. “It is”! She says. “I get up, I put on my prettiest clothes and jewelry, I do my hair, I take my book and I come sit on the rock. And now, I can feel the gratitude, I can feel… me.” Well. That’s pretty good stuff for not yet 7:30 in the morning, in a dry riverbed by a dusty road. Then she says that soon she will walk home, put on different clothes, take off her shoes, and go walk barefoot in her garden. This too is part of the plan. So there you go. A plan. Make a Plan. Today, I invite you to be open to connections in unlikely places, I invite you to notice synchronicities. I invite you to notice … invitations. And then maybe to Make a Plan. This life… He was almost sitting on top of me. I had the flu or some kind of something that wouldn’t let me get off the couch and my partner was almost sitting on top of me. So sweet, really. Rubbing my shoulders, his fingers through my curls, looking into my eyes for signs of what I may need next. Very … present. Me, I badly wanted him to do the dishes, which I could see piling up out of the corner of my eye. Throw away my Kleenex and old tea bags, straighten out the pile of books on the coffee table. Create what I needed: an orderly environment where I could heal. Then sit next to me. No talking, maybe one hand on my arm. Stay with me as I dozed in and out of sleep. Very… present. It was the early months of our relationship and eventually, over the years, we synched and he would know just what to do if I got sick. I too would know just what to do if he felt bad: sit almost on top of him, run my fingers through his hair, bore my eyes into him. Definitely not do the dishes. It took time. It took asking, and it took speaking up. It took being ok with giving something we didn’t want nor understood. It took generosity and it took vulnerability, and it took humility. Also, it took love. You see, none of us come with an owner’s manual and without one, the best heart-guided thing we often do is: to treat others as one would want to be treated by them. Ugh. As time passes, I have tried over and over to remember this. To pay attention to what someone might want or need, independently of what I would want or need. Then to give them that. Even - or especially - when it seems to make no sense to me. Writing this article, and because words are fun, I tried to think up for a name for this, for this adjusted Golden Rule. for “my” rule. “What could be better than gold?”, I asked myself. Well… platinum! Platinum is worth more than gold. I will call it The Platinum Rule! Then for good measure, I did a quick Google search and read: “As opposed to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," as the golden rule states, the platinum rule asks you to "do unto others, wherever possible, as they would want to be done to them." Ha! And there I thought I was so innovative. Platinum Rule indeed. Yesterday came with a great opportunity for me to practice this. I had committed to taking my neighbor’s pup to the vet to get her spayed. I fell in love with this girl in the fall of 2022 when she was just a few weeks old, living in the same barrio as we do along with her baby sister. They played and played as puppies do, she was the shiest one of the two, the lighter colored one, the smaller one too, and seemed to follow her sister wherever she went, happy to be in the background, her white coat often covered in red dirt. Chiquita and her sweet sister, in the fall of 2022 They were both getting bigger and when I came back from a short trip to the city last summer, as I was walking up the dusty road toward my home, a neighbor asked me to follow her to the back of her house where the bigger sister was laying under a tree, sleeping peacefully. Except she wasn’t sleeping. She had died. Just like that, under a tree. I still don’t know what happened. A scorpion? A snake? Poison? I don’t know but it shook me up and my heart hurt to see the little sister day after day sitting on the edge of the road, without her playmate. As I walked by, I would stop and pet her and she would roll onto her back so I could rub her belly. Before I knew that her family had named her Güera (White Girl) I started calling her Chiquita. Chiquita grew and settled into her own sweet personality. She goes on daily walks with Lila and me and most days, and whether I am coming home by quad or by car, she races me to my house and meets me there as I arrive. Some belly rubs, a little food (in this exact order of importance for her) and she goes back home, across the field. A good life. Last October, as I was coming back from another trip to the city, Lila and I took a walk, and whereas Chiquita always bounces to join us as we pass her house, this time she showed up with two male dogs, one on each side of her. She seemed bothered by them and they wouldn’t let me get close enough to pet her. They walked with us across the rivers, down the muddy roads, one always flanking her whether she stopped to pee or sniff something. I did not like it one bit. I recognized this energy, this possessiveness, this invasion. I knew I was taking it more personally than was necessary, these are dogs after all. Still. I did not like it. And I was pretty sure she was about to get pregnant if she wasn’t already. Sure enough, sixty-three days later six puppies arrived, and as much as I love puppies, I resented these guys. She seemed overwhelmed by them and quickly started to get really skinny, feeding all of them on an already thin frame. I vowed to keep her stocked in calories and I vowed to do whatever I could so this would be her last litter. I told her so. Now, the pups are almost four months old, they are beautiful, three have new homes and I am hoping the other three will get to the free spay/neuter clinic this weekend. Then find forever homes. A couple of weeks ago I mustered the courage to talk with Chiquita’s mom and ask her if it would be okay for me to take her to the local vet and get her spayed (there is a wonderful organization in the village that makes sure that all the sterilizations are free). I don’t know why I was so nervous about it, but I was. Would she be offended? Would she send me away and if so, what would I do? I had promised. But no, just as my friends had told me she would, the lady was fine with it. Which made me wish I had asked six months ago. So yesterday, off we went, into my car at 6:45 am and over the bumpy roads towards Dr Julio’s office. Chiquita had never been on a leash before and her first car ride had her shaking. I kept one hand on her, sang to her, and asked her to please trust me, that we were going to have a couple of “adventure days,” and then all would be back to normal. I stayed with her until she got drowsy from the calming, pre-operation shot and then went home to prepare her a soft nest of blankets to come back to. She had never spent a night at my house - or any indoor house - always preferring to go back to her place to sleep and I was really hoping she would hang out long enough to heal a bit and get her first day of meds. Thus the soft blankets. At noon I picked her up and my ego got a blow. I thought for sure she would be so happy to see me, ready to leave the clinic. But no, she took one look at me and turned her head the other way, wouldn’t even look at me. “She hates me,” I thought. “I betrayed her and she will never come to visit us again.” Then I remembered that even if that was the case, it didn’t matter. No new puppies roaming around mattered. No “accidental litters” mattered. Arriving at home, I carried her into the living room where a friend was waiting and I plopped her onto the couch. There she stayed between us for a few hours. All three of us napped, petting her, talking to her, and telling her that it was going to be ok. I started to think the night would be easy after all, she would either be on the couch or on the fluffy blanket nest I had prepared for her. Just the way I would want it for myself. Except, not. As soon as she felt strong enough to get up, Chiquita got off the couch and made her way into the bushes outside of my studio. Under the palms. On the dirt. Where I certainly could not pet her or keep an eye on her. Where SHE was comfortable. Because you see, The Platinum Rule. Whew. At dusk I managed to crawl back there and give her her two nighttime pills and then as night fell I had to remind myself that she was doing just what she needed to do, just what worked for her. The blankets remained untouched and we all went to sleep the way we wanted to: Lila, Tiji, and I under the mosquito net, and Chiquita a few feet away, in the dirt. I prayed that the antibiotics would take care of any potential dirt coodies. It took some mental gymnastics for me to stay aligned with what SHE wanted, what was comfortable and familiar to her. To stay away from what I thought would be best because this was what I would want, or what my girls would want. To not insist that she slept in the soft crate I had borrowed for her. To stay away from The Golden Rule and instead slip into The Platinum Rule. This takes work. In human relationships, it takes curiosity, which can often be the opposite of judgment. It takes work too, to stick by someone who is choosing a different road than the one we would take. To stand by even when that path makes no sense to us. To not say: “Well, I made you a bed and blankets and you are choosing to sleep in the dirt, so if your stitches get infected, I don’t want to hear about it.” It takes work to get up and do the dishes when if it were us, we would want to be held. By morning, she had made her way into the kitchen where she ate a whole bowl of food as soon as I got up. I knew it wouldn’t be long before she would want to walk across the field to her home and her three pups. When she did, I sent her a bunch of love and told her I would be bothering her twice a day to give her pills for a short while. She was slow moving but her tail was wagging. We had done it. Today, I invite us to choose the harder work of connecting authentically with the beings in our lives to discover how they would want to be treated. And then with love, away from fear, to do just that. We can do this. This life…. |
SCARED OF THE SACRED
HAPPINESS SCHOOL:
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