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Write It Forward 2: The Voyage

The Write It Forward Game:
I'll provide the start- you write it forward!
250 words maximum please.
End in the middle of sentence...
You can follow any thread - take the story anywhere you like!
Use your own photos if you are a photographer or painter!
Please provide a link so people can see what you are doing on your own sites and share the game on FB/Twitter/Linkedin etc. The more people we get playing the more likely they will look at your site- let's build a huge playground together!

PLEASE HIT "reply' UNDER THE POST OF THE STORY YOU WISH TO CONTINUE. You can see how I've responded and continued the story below each of the comments below.

***BE SURE TO LET THE PERSON TO WHOM REPLIED KNOW YOU DID SO BY PASTING YOUR LAST LINE AND A LINK TO THIS SITE ON THEIR FB PAGE.***
paste: "Write It Forward @ http://coreeqlifecoach.blogspot.com/

Contact me if you have any feedback or questions.

The Voyage

They say that when you see a horizon on a river you'd better paddle for shore.  But what if there is nothing but sheer granite walls squeezing you into a raging, foaming madness of water like a reluctant bull into a castrating chute?  That's when you paddle.  You paddle and you sing.  The song keeps your strokes strong and steady and reminds you to take a deep breath in and to let it out as the front of the boat drops seven feet down into a whirlpool of white. It's a way of daring God to make you cry.  But God likes a song and more often than not we bounce and flail through- and then it's ten more hours till we sleep like stones under our wet birch bark canoes.

We heard the roar before ever a horizon came into few. The rains had been hard and heavy over the mountains all the week before, speeding us along bearing our three tons of furs and supplies... and one white woman in silk and fancy shoes. Frances, "but call me Frank" had convinced her husband that life in peril with him would satisfy better than life in safety without him and so along she'd come.  With paint box and paper in tow.

Our first portage had been an eye-opener both for her and for us Metis Voyageurs.  She had...

Trusting the Ride

Sometimes you just got to chuck the reins and let the horse take care of you.

Write It Forward- Baba Yaga

The Write It Forward Game:
I'll provide the start- you write it forward!
250 words maximum please.
End in the middle of sentence...
You can follow any thread - take the story anywhere you like!
Use your own photos if you are a photographer or painter!
Please provide a link so people can see what you are doing on your own sites and share the game on FB/Twitter/Linkedin etc. The more people we get playing the more likely they will look at your site- let's build a huge playground together!

PLEASE HIT "reply' UNDER THE POST OF THE STORY YOU WISH TO CONTINUE.  You can see how I've responded and continued the story below each of the comments below.

***BE SURE TO LET THE PERSON TO WHOM REPLIED KNOW YOU DID SO BY PASTING YOUR LAST LINE AND A LINK TO THIS SITE ON THEIR FB PAGE.***
paste: "Write It Forward @ http://coreeqlifecoach.blogspot.com/

Contact me if you have any feedback or questions.

THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME PLAY WITH YOU! :)

BABA YAGA:
Baby Yaga lay in her crib listening to the deep voices of men and the snufflings of dogs on her rooftop.  The one room cottage was dark with only one strong, dust-moted beam of light shining through the arched window in the door.  She was warm enough since her Muma Pădurii had wrapped her tightly in a red, white and yellow wool blanket shortly before she left to go to the market.  It scratched her chin and smelled of creosote and onions but it also smelled of Muma. 

Then again, Baba Yaga lay in her bed, two hundred years after the great snowstorm, wrapped tightly in a wool blanket that smelled of chicken soup and garlic.   Her bones ached and she wondered how it could be that this ancient body could be the same body that she had been born with.  She remembered the looseness of her limbs as they pushed against the swaddling blanket, the fullness of hair and lips, and the delight her eyes took in the shadows that outlined the room.  With a dry crackling sound, she shifted on her cot, scaring the mice that lived in the old bed straw.  One hundred years ago today...

Opinions

The world is full of them.

It makes me tired.

I think I will sit in ignorance for awhile.

Or at least until I get my head out of my opinion.

What beliefs are you willing to be wrong about?

NPR submission: In the Bag

Here's the story I submited to NPR's Three Minute story contest. The prompt was: Write about a character who finds something they have no intention of returning in 600 words or less. It's called IN THE BAG

 

Bonnie found the diaper bag full of silver dollars while kayaking up river from her farm.  She’d just been joking about her ability to find useful things when she most needed them- like the time she found a sled in the woods after she shot a deer.  She’d hurt her ankle and was thinking about ditching the meat and limping home when she saw the bright orange sled stuffed in a laurel bush.  Hunter and prey slid home in style.

“Why can’t I find money?” She’d laughingly told Maria.

Minutes later they saw the mud-covered bag tucked into a downed tree.  It must have washed downstream after the big rains.

“There’s gotta be hundreds of dollars in there- the thing weighs a ton!”

The bag was tossed into the kayak along with the duck decoy they’d found.  They split the findings when they got home and went on with their lives.

A few weeks later, Bonnie was sitting at the local juice joint when she overheard someone at the next table. 

“I still haven’t found that bag!  I can’t believe I lost my grandfather’s silver dollar collection!”

The voice was familiar.  Looking over her shoulder Bonnie saw it was a girl who was in her niece’s Waldorf class.  

“Oh, baby-girl, it’ll be found.  You’ve told everyone in town and I’m sure some good soul will return it.”  The girl’s mother reached across the table to hold her daughter’s hand. “The world is a good place- you’ll see.”

Bonnie sipped her banana smoothie and pretended that it tasted as good as it had before she’d eavesdropped.  She still had her half of the find and last she knew so did Maria; it’d be simple enough- drop by the police station, walk away, and the world would be a good place.   She’d be a “nice person” and presumably sleep well for the rest of her life.  But if it were a silver dollar collection, it might be worth big money and big money would enable her to pay her taxes before the auction next month.

Big money would pay for sleeping pills if it came to that.

But what if she were to see the girl whenever she went to visit her niece?  She knew they were good friends.   And her niece was supposed to spend the summer at the farm while her parents went to Europe.  Not good.

“I could spend it and then say, ‘Hey little girl. I found your bag and I spent it.  Thanks!’

Or, ‘Hey little girl, you know that bag you lost? Well how do you like the farm it paid for?’”

She looked at the little girl again.  The girl didn’t look like that great of a kid.  Nice clothes, picking at a $15 burger- most of which would get tossed after ‘precious’ had her nibble, and besides- Waldorf cost a fortune.   Kids these days get whatever they wanted.  If losing a little bag were going to ruin her life then maybe this experience would teach the girl a little compassion for those less fortunate than her.

And Maria needed money as badly as Bonnie did.  

The more Bonnie thought about it, the clearer it became.  She’d prayed for help when she needed the sled and she got one.  She’d prayed for money, as had Maria, and there was the diaper bag.  It was a no brainer spiritual gift.  Returning it would be like spitting in God’s face. No way was she going to return a bag of manna to a spoiled, little rich brat.

The smoothie started to taste better.

Chicken

While watering the cows today, I noticed one of my black and white pin striped bard rocks peck around the water tanks.  A few seconds later she snatched up a frog and started bashing it about on the ground until it was a bit of a pulp.  She then flipped it around, snatched it up by the leg and swallowed it.

I'm thinking.... I'm really, really glad that I am bigger than a chicken.

Why I'm not on here.

In case you happen to stop by my blog and find I am not at home, it's because I am out living a real life, riding real horses, farming in real dirt, enjoying my real body and loving my real girlfriend.  It's what I do...

If you would like some coaching so you can do what you do too... get in touch with me!

Sunday, Wednesday, Friday

That's what my week is like.

Has anyone seen Monday, Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday? 

Know what I mean?

I'm just giving up on the idea that there ever was a seven day week.

Unfamiliar Ground

Yesterday I tried something new and fell on my face in the mud.

All I did was step off the feed platform from a different area.  It was a simple enough procedure really, but apparently my body wasn't quite ready for such a big change as stepping off of a different step instead of the one I step off from two or three times a day.

So, my feet felt that surely my mind must be wrong about leaving my foot were it was.  Nope, when the knee is bent like this, in this place, then the foot needs to turn and come off the wood block.  So, my foot got stuck and I fell in the mud.

The moral... never cover new ground as if it were familiar territory.

What if you could grow-down instead of growing up?

In Norton Juster's Phantom Tollbooth there are a race of people who start life floating in the air because they spend their lives growing to the ground instead of up to their final height.  This way their perspectives never have to change as they grow taller.

I used to think this was an amazingly clever idea, until I noticed that most people's perspectives don't change as much as one would think. 

I'm thinking of the less literal usage of the phrase.  As in the "what do you want to be when you are a grown-up?"

I'm sick of growing up.  It is too much work, it is hard and there is no final destination.  There are some great rewards, the best being the fact that when you go to a candy store you can buy all you want, you don't have to ask for permission AND you can eat it all before dinner. 

I've decided I am going to grow-down from now on.  Enough of this uphill battle against gravity, time, myself and everything else.  My butt is sagging, my skin is sagging, everything is trying to give me the message:

GROW-DOWN ALL READY!  jeesh...

Overwhelm

Does overwhelm bring out the control freak in you? 

Lord, does it bring out the control BITCH in me!  I could write pages and pages about why it does it, what I do to deal with it and most of all I can make lists and schedules.  But, I suspect that my writing pages and pages is in fact a sign of overwhelm.  It is as if all those words will lead me out of the town called Overwhelm and into the State of Bliss.

Language has such clear structure and orderliness to it. Writing gives me such great sense of power over my mind and better yet, it means that I can lay on the couch, feeling important, while nothing else gets done. 

Action can help overwhelm but mostly it just leads to more confusion and indecision. Which do I do first? Gosh, maybe I'd better sit down and write a list to sort out my priorities.  Pick one?  Okay, but what about those twenty other balls I've got tossed into the air?

The trick is to think of overwhelm as distraction from the thread I mentioned a few posts back.  But for those of you who are too overwhelmed to add looking for that post to their list, here's my idea once again.

Your heart has been whispering to you since you were a baby.  Basically, our heart's desire is a really crappy communicator.  Most of the time it is too quiet to hear, other times it is screaming at you so loudly that all you can do is shut it out.  The rest of the time it just sits there resisting all your attempts to do anything other than obey it's indistinct, difficult to achieve and seemingly illogical demands.  Still, our hearts beat for one thing only and that one thing is to achieve your heart's desire. 

I think of my heart's desire as a thread and the actuality of it as the eye of a needle.  If I can get that thread through the needle, I will be living my heart's desire and it will be very fine indeed. 

The problem is that I am trying to thread this needle in the dark, with a lot of noisy, bumping, irritating things that keep getting in the way (my bad habits).  Not only that, but my hands are shaky, the thread keeps sticking to my callouses and worst of all my body is cramping up from the effort.  

Now add people, animals, bills, dishes, etc. to the mix and you have what I call a challenging situation in which to thread a needle.  A.K.A. Overwhelm.

The only way to thread a needle under these conditions is to keep your focus on the thread, your hand and the eye of the needle- not the other side of it, the front of it.  It requires a combination of soft and hard focus.  Sticking out your tongue and shutting one eye also helps.  Breathe, believe, and most of all go slow- especially when that tiny end sticks out on the other side for you to grab.

In short, when overwhelmed you must concentrate on the really, really important thing in your life: your heart's desire.

If it's hard to hear try just sitting still and listen to its beating.  Then do exactly what it tells you.  You'll know it's the real thing because it will almost always start with the phrase, "trust me".

Good luck!

Courage

What is courage?

Tonight I read some of my fiction in front of an audience at an open mike.  It went well but to be honest, I don't really like doing it.  It makes me nervous and frustrated by my lack of natural talent in the area of "acting".  It started out being a really great thing and now it has become.... well, work.

When people talk about living their dreams, they don't talk about the part of the journey where it rains or they have blisters.  They give the highlights bathed in the glory of completion.  It sounds romantic to have wet feet and dirty hair for weeks on end.  But in reality, it's work and pretty awful work at that.

Making dreams come true sucks.  It is hard, nerve-wracking, exhausting, bank account emptying and tough on relationships.

It seems so much more exciting to slay a dragon and ride off into the sunset with the pretty girl.  But guess what?  Once the adrenaline rush is over, there's this chick that talks and talks and needs special food.  She rides your horse while you walk and then expects you to marry her. Yep, it's work.

What is courage?

Personally I'd have to say it was stubbornness bordering on idiocy.   I mean really, the only difference between an idiot and a success is the fact that one's persistence paid off while the other's didn't.
I'm thinking that people who persist in making their dreams come true, fully expecting the wet socks and dirty hair, are the courageous ones.  They are the workers.

I think courage is an act of faith in the value of work.

Here's a thought:

What if you were to think of all that hard work you have to do as acts of courage instead of tasks to accomplish on the way to slaying the dragon and rescuing the pretty lass (or lad)?

New Forever

I've decided to assume the following:

1.  My girlfriend is passionately in love with me.  She loves sharing my life with me, likes it when I share hers and together we have a lot of really fun and exciting projects.  She is not shy about telling me all the good stuff and she is sweet and understanding when she lets me know I've messed up.

2.  I make more than enough money doing all of the things I love to do. 

3.  I can fully relax and receive all the wealth, health, friends, fun and good food I want whenever I choose.

4.  Everything really is good (as compared to good in the "but, oh look how much it made me grow" kind of way) and so let's start from there.

5.  I am a luscious, yummy, inspiring, touchable, warm, joy to be around.

As far as I am concerned, my whole life experience feels as yummy as it feels when I am with my horses.

So says I!

Unknowns

If dreams are a thread that lead us through the crap, what if there is crap on the other side of the needle as well?

Which is worse? The unknown or the known bad from the past?

Whenever I decided to move forward, I invariably manifest some "old crap", largely in the arena of relationship. After all, it is much easier to lay the blame on "her" (or "him) than to admit to doing something so obviously stupid as messing up my own life.

I have asked my manifesting self to do me a big favor.  The next time I start worrying about the unknown future... please make me recreate some past WONDERFUL moment rather than having to go through the same old crap one more time!

Now I just have to try to remember as vividly all the great things in my past as I do the horrible moments. 

Why is happiness so much less memorable than the yucky bits?  I understand the physiology of survival, but really- can't we be pulled forward by the surety of good times just as easily as we are pushed forward by the avoidance of the miserable times?

Faith in the Space

I recently had some weird heart issues- of the physiological kind. I have a right bundle blockage which means that the left and right ventricles are not in sync.  Combine it with a wicked chest cold and you get heart palpitations and shortness of breath of a scary sort.


My relationship, my writing career, my income, my farm, my exercise program, my horses' training- nothing's lining up with where I think I ought to be.

It makes me wonder which came first. My life being out of alignment or my heart beating whacky?

When I had my first heart palpitation this last week, it made me so weak I couldn't stand for long and it caused me to be out of breath for fifteen minutes. All I could do was think "oh please beat, don't stop, just keep beating."   It didn't hurt, but it was very, very real.

In that fifteen minutes I realized all I ever needed to know about faith. Faith is the space between heartbeats. We all assume the next beat will come and so we run through life chasing our beliefs with confidence in the eternal nature of our heart. It rarely lets us down!

When we get afraid, our hearts beat hard, almost as if it were cheering us on from the sidelines. "I'm still here!!" The beating of our hearts lets us know when we are in love and comforts us when we are sad. It is something you feel in the night when you hold your lover tight. It's all about the beat, man!

But when my heart seemed to stop, I realized that the beat is merely the reward for surviving the dark before the dawn. It's the prize for not quitting before the miracle. The real moment of truth, the absolute test of faith, lies in the space between beats. Take some time and feel when you heart isn't beating.

Quiet in there isn't it?

It's when there is no hope that faith carries us to the glory.

Times are tough. It looks bad, really bad. But here's my challenge:

What if this is just the space between heartbeats?

Focus on your faith, whatever form that takes. See your dreams like a thread that you are trying to poke through the eye of a tiny needle, in the dark, on a bumpy road, with screaming kids. Ignore it, focus on the thread and the eye of the needle.


Have faith, the miracle is waiting on the other side.

Finding Love Quietly

Most of us are really good at giving.  Some of us are really good at receiving.   We all secretly think we are really pretty simple to be with and that everyone else is a lot of work.   We’ve all heard the “you have to love yourself first” and the “give up and it will come” crap of the self-help gurus.  And even though we know better, I can guarantee that there isn’t a soul on the face of this Earth who doesn’t believe that the romance played out on the big screen is impossible.   We all want it.  We all want in on that mysterious thing called love.

Here’s the secret- no it isn’t out there in the Universe waiting for you to learn how to ask for the cookie correctly (see my Barnyard Philosophy page for more on that):

If you really want to be loved, all you have to do is shut up about it. 

Seriously… stop yapping.  Quit the agonistic poetry.  Turn off the TV.  Put down the book.  Leave your poor lover alone.  Stop reciting affirmations.  No crying allowed.

Just SHUT UP!

 
Do this for a few days.

We'll talk about it then.

Passion

What is passion?

Bag that, what does passion feel like to you?

Most of my life, passion felt like yearning, desire, want, need, must have.  It was a craving in need of satisfaction, recognition, action, reception.  HUNGER.

This morning as I was happily working on one of the five novels I am writing, I realized that I've really got it all wrong.  Passion isn't about pursuing some holy grail (girl).  It has nothing to do with the feelings of falling in love.  Passion is about having what you really, really want RIGHT NOW so that you can roll in it at will.  To be passionate means that you come from a place of completeness not of emptiness. It is enough in search of more. 

Passion isn't about lack fulfilled.  Passion is only available in abundance.

Love what you have.  And then love it some more.

Doubting Tics

Doubt has a tendency to surprise us. 

You could have had a great weekend with your partner and by Monday morning you think, "has he always taken up this much space in the bed?"  or "why does she have to talk so damn much!"  By the end of the day you wonder what the hell you are doing with them.

Perhaps you have just spent a great half hour snuggling and grooming your horse only to discover in your lesson that no matter what you do, the bugger just won't pick up the left lead.  What was once a match made in heaven has become one of the most irritating aspects of your day.  What happened?

Not a single thing.

In fact. there were little signals along the way letting you know that perfection was on its way out the door.  It was there in the little niggling voice in the back of your mind or the slight irritation that made you clench your jaw.  Maybe something they did that made you tuck your chin or furrow your eyebrows.  Generally there is a feeling of hurt or anger followed by a tendency to think the other is being insensitive to you.  

Before you know it, you are in a fight, depressed or feeling like nothing is ever going to go right again.  . And without a doubt in your mind, you know that the jerk is a real asshole.  Things feel out of control and you are going to do whatever it takes to get it back under YOUR control.

What would happen if you took notice of all those little physical clues that pull you out of your fantasies? 

I find that I become more present when I pay attention to the clues that let me know I am in doubt.  I find that I am in a position to choose or self-direct rather than react. And more importantly, I am more willing to reach an understanding with my partner because I see an "error" in the moment instead of a "fault" in the other.  

It's like catching a dropped stitch.  You can deal with it as you go along or end up with a crappy sweater.

The best way I can describe it is that something inside me is saying "Um. Wait a minute, that was funky. We had better stop and check it out."

Usually there is a boundary issue being crossed or an assumption has been made.  Once I am clear on what is bothering me about the situation, I can immediately clear up the misunderstanding and ask for what I need in a non-emotional way.  If I wait until I am pissed or hurt, I am sure to cause a ruckus and destroy trust.


How does your body let you know when something is "funky"?

What can you do differently in that moment to keep things great for both you and your partner/horse?

I am hoping you will find that you fight a lot less and that it is easier to get what you want out of life. 

And as an added bonus you will suddenly be LISTENING with your whole being instead of just with your mind. 

Stay tuned for more on "listening"...