Posts Tagged ‘inspiration’
What Led?
The weeks that have followed the unexpected death of Legacy, our Arabian gray who was the herd leader of three chestnuts, have been made even more difficult by some extreme winter weather, the death of a colleague and friend whom Cyndie worked with during her years as Principal of Eden Prairie High School, and now signs of some laminitis lameness in Hunter.
Among the many contributing factors listed for laminitis, we found that hormonal imbalance caused by stress of moving a horse or the loss of a field companion spoke directly to the situation effecting our remaining three. Sadly, this recent heavy snow accumulation, followed by the dramatic thaw, has added another risk by making the uneven frozen footing in the paddocks hazardous for bruising or mechanical damage to the cellular bond between sensitive laminae and the hoof wall.
On top of these issues, this weekend Cyndie and I were smacked with the reality that her car is in need of cost prohibitive repairs. Logic indicates it is time to shop for a different vehicle for her.
Roll all these issues together and our grieving minds both came to a similar thought: has our dream of making Wintervale Ranch into a functioning business met with defeat?
Life was a heck of a lot less complicated for me when I lived in the suburbs and only had to deal with maintaining the house and our tiny lot. I hate to admit there are aspects of that which look desirable in comparison to our current situation.
Our unpredictable and decidedly inadequate combined incomes do not make shopping for a replacement vehicle as simple as it once was for us. Right now, shopping for a different car seems to be a tipping point for our analysis of this whole crazy move to the country to build a self-sustaining retreat and learning center.
What led us here in the first place?
We found ourselves revisiting the series of inspirational events that sequentially fueled our passion and groomed our decisions. From the magical trip to spend two weeks with Ian Rowcliffe in Portugal, to Cyndie’s apprenticeship in Linda Kohanov’s Eponaquest workshops, to our discovery of this gorgeous property and log home in west-central Wisconsin, the mid-life transition we embarked on seemed supernaturally ordained.
Where is that inspiration now?
Instead of the surprisingly achievable answers and solutions that have blessed us in response to all the incredible challenges that arose throughout the early years of this adventure, we are increasingly noticing a lack of income-generating response to our offerings and an increase in stressful difficulties with our animal partners.
Obviously, the most dramatic stressor being Legacy’s sudden death.
Just like all that has come before, we know there is a lesson for us in this. Even though he is gone, Legacy still has something to teach us.
At the center of it all is, love.
We grieve because we love and experienced a loss, but loving is how we got where we are today.
We believe it is possible to rediscover the love and inspiration that guided us here and we are seeking to re-attune ourselves to more of the surprisingly achievable answers and solutions that have graced our journey thus far.
What led us here is exactly the same as what will lead us to what happens next.
Please keep your seat belts fastened and your arms and hands inside at all times for the remainder of this wild ride.
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Saturday Morning
It’s just another Saturday morning. Yesterday is over and tomorrow hasn’t happened yet. I’m tired, like so many millions of mornings before, but more aware of it than usual. Is it a physical tiredness, or mental fatigue? I think the answer to both is, yes.
I’m tired like I must be another day older. I guess I can’t argue with that. Older, I am.
I’ve got Trey Anastasio’s self-titled 2002 album playing straight through, in the order it was presented. It’s become an anomaly for me to let recordings play the way I listened to them when I was a kid, one side of a vinyl LP and then the other.
Now days, for me, it’s almost always a computer-generated “mix-tape” of songs from the complete catalog in my iTunes file. That has its own rewards, but it produces a different result, for sure.
Music is like food for my soul. Sometimes I eat just because there is food in front of me. “See food,” I call it. I listen to a lot of music in the same way, consuming it just because it is there. I like to assume it nourishes me adequately enough, but sometimes my mind must develop a craving for tunes that will give me something particular I need.
I want to hear a song I love, an instrumental performance that thrills me, or a composition played so inspiringly that I get a shiver up my spine.
It is a phenomenon that is difficult to manufacture. There are a lot of intangible aspects fueling the outcome, most of them in my head.
It’s odd that I picked one album this morning because I usually get what I seek by way of spontaneously building a custom mix for the moment and letting one song feed the next in a climb to satisfaction.
I’m thinking I might try that next, but the single album mode served to get my tired old self started this Saturday morning.
As I write that, Trey is singing, “Push on ’til the day, push on ’til the day, push on ’til the day…”
With no firm plan of action for the weekend, I look forward to discovering what unfolds.
Pushing on!
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Sunday Two
Wintervale‘s November version of the Second Sunday event is coming up this weekend. The theme Cyndie has prepared involves “Gratefulness Collages.” In the month of giving thanks for our bounty, I expect the creative arts project will most likely be well augmented with bountiful offerings from her kitchen, too.
Materials are supplied, but if you’ve got any interesting old magazines lying around, feel free to donate them to the cause.
As of last night, the forecast for Sunday looked sunny, which would be nice for an afternoon stroll to see what inspiration the horses might offer. Of course, the chickens will be eager to say hello, too.
They love company as much as we do!
Make sure to let us know if you plan to stop in for a visit between noon and 3:00. Cyndie’s contact information can be found at the link for Second Sundays, above.
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Empowering Love
Editorial cartoon by James T. Pendergrast for Rolling Stone, June 2002
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Imagine replacing the negative with the opposite:
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Let fearlessness enhance enlightenment to fill our crucibles with love!
Let’s carefully teach everyone, before it’s too late, to love all the people, “all our relations” on this planet, fearlessly.
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Paving Paradise
We are experimenting with a new way to improve a particularly wet and muddy portion of one trail through our woods. Originally, I was hoping we could simply cover it with wood chips. It worked for a while, but we haven’t been chipping branches frequently enough to produce the supply needed to cover all of our trails.
The piles of wood blocks that I have been pulling off pallets salvaged from the day-job are suddenly proving valuable. Instantly, we have gone from having too many of these lying around, to not having enough to cover the muddy lengths of trail that need the most help.
It is interesting to consider the path (no pun intended) these pieces of former trees have traveled. Somewhere, trees are cut down and milled into boards. Then the wood gets cut into these shapes and nailed to pallets. The company that manufactures the products we receive at the day-job mount their units onto the pallets for shipment and charge the end customer for the wood.
We have asked if they wanted the pallets returned for reuse, but like so many other things in today’s world, since already paid for, they apparently weren’t worth the trouble. We end up with perfectly good, single-use pallets out of brand-new wood, albeit with four odd blocks nailed to the tops.
I’ve been pulling the nails to remove the blocks and using the pallets as a floor in my wood shed and beneath stored hay in the hay shed. I also claimed boards off some pallets to build hay feeding boxes for the 4 stalls in the barn. All the while, the odd blocks that were removed have been piling up.
When Cyndie started looking into a boardwalk as a way to get up out of the mud on our trails, we landed on the idea of using the blocks. She wanted to add some words of inspiration and enlisted Anneliese to join her in creating the enhancements.
Yesterday we laid down the first test run. So far, so good. Only a couple more miles to go. I hope there will soon be a lot of new orders for that equipment at the day-job.
It is poetic justice that we’ve found a way to ultimately bring this pallet wood full-circle, placing it on a forest floor once again.
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Important
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it glides
like an idea does
flowing through
effortlessly
the good ones do anyway
but you have to be able to hear it
the way dogs do
tilting your head
expectantly
listening
for the nugget
nested amidst the clutter
a dancing derelict downburst
gushing forth wisdom
in rapid staccato bursts
that laugh at the universe
effortlessly and endlessly
but quietly
with a slight hint of hesitation
as if it were important
which it probably is
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Inspiration Fades
It happens. Inspiration will wax and wane. My enthusiasm for this adventure we embarked on at Wintervale is ebbing away.
It has been a tough week for me. Where we once seemed to be enjoying a charmed life here, with progress advancing in surprisingly magical ways and solutions flowing with unexplainable ease, our situation of late has become a lot less mystical.
Have we gone off track somewhere? I don’t know. It’s life. Sometimes there are more problems than solutions for a while.
I’m sure there are a lot of reasons for businesses to fail. Ours is simply failing to get started.
Full disclosure, I am writing from a state of overworked exhaustion. Why? Hay. Again. And the thought of facing today’s task of manure management, again.
I threw 100 bales, 200 times yesterday, loading the borrowed trailer and unloading it. Carrying bales up and up to stack them in our shed. It is an endurance exercise where the climb gets higher as the fatigue grows ever more debilitating. At first, the bales seem light, but at the end, they feel a lot heavier.
Today, I need to move the compost piles to make room for more. Since I returned to the day-job, I haven’t been tending the piles in the daily manner I did when I was home all day. Once, every other weekend, is not cutting it.
It’s a buzz-kill.
Meanwhile, there are dangerous trees that broke off and are hung up in surrounding branches over our trail that I need to get after. And siding that needs to be scraped and stained before winter. On Monday, it will be August. Projects that should happen before winter arrives are beginning to loom large.
And we have yet to get our hay-field cut even one time this summer. It has become a field of weeds that are gleefully sowing their seeds for further domination. That is probably the biggest discouragement. It is why we have needed to trailer in more hay than before and it is the exact opposite direction from growing desirable hay ourselves.
It will go a long way to improving my outlook when that field finally gets cut and the weedy debris removed. We have decided to take a full year from hay production and plan to cut it continuously to stop the cycle of weeds growing to their seeding phase. We may also add some recommended soil enhancers and then plant a custom mix of grass seeds in hopes of achieving our goal of getting good quality hay to grow right at home.
That gives me a year of something to look forward to. More mowing. You know how much I love mowing.
Oh, by the way, our lawn tractor is not holding up to the abuse I put it through. I need to shop for something else. Maybe if I do it right, I’ll end up with a machine that I like so much it will change how I feel about cutting grass.
That’s what it is all about here: grass hay and lawn grass. Who knew I would find myself so fixated on a task to which I held such disdain in my previous years?
No wonder my inspiration has a tendency to fade every so often.
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Relative Something 