Category Archives: improvisation life

island time

This was the view leaving Wood’s Hole for Martha’s Vineyard yesterday around 4 pm.  The sun, sky, clouds and sea were creating an elegant, spare choreography of light.

Island time according to the Urban Dictionary is, “The time vacuum created by the ocean’s presence. Similar to stoner’s time, everything moves nice and slow. This carefree aura even has the ability to travel with islanders and can engulf you in their presence.”  Not this time.  I am here to help with my autistic godson, Jacob.  His time zone is uncharted water.

Last night, he was wild – climbing, banging, shrieking – his lanky prepubescent body a commotion. It is humbling to arrive with a somatic therapist’s bag of skills and perspectives and realize that none of it may apply.  To be with Jacob is both quintessential improvisation and unrelenting repetition.

Jacob’s parents have done, learned, implemented, studied, applied, conjured every possible treatment and approach for their child.  Time is moving inexorably toward the need for bigger answers as Jacob grows bigger, stronger, faster.   Adolescence looms.  Time – both the long stretch of each day in Jacob’s world, and the fast moving need for solutions is here.  And yet, what Jacob teaches is the need for consummate attention to each moment – excruciating and beautiful all at once.

For more ideas about time, check out Brain Picking’s 7 must-read books on time.

 

 

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a new year offering

I am planning a January offering – Natural Horsemanship for You and Your Horse.  This one’s a teleseminar – four weeks of strategies for aligning, attuning and improvising with your horse.  Each week will combine instruction and suggestions with time for questions and answers.

You may be wondering how we can do that via phone or Skype, with no horses in the room.  Sometimes it is a good idea to take the physical horse out of the equation for a bit so that we can focus on out own bodies, our own breathing, our own emotional landscape.  Getting clearer about that through visualization and meditation can help us to be more mindful, more aware, softer when we get to the barn.  Our horses appreciate all of that.

Stay tuned for details.

an animal among animals

This is how I want to feel with my horses, with my dogs and cats and even with my human companions.  Like an animal among animals.  Uncovered, included, revealed, in repose.  This painting by Franz Marc feels luxurious, pensive and intimate.  I love the way she is held in the curves and angles of the landscape and its inhabitants.  When I make my daily pilgrimage to the stable, that is what I am seeking – that quality of settling into presence, being present, sharing the moment.

more wisdom

Photo:  Pam White

My daughter Chandrika has a wild wisdom.  She has always seen things from a perspective that feels karmic, otherworldly, lunar, planetary. Several years ago she gave me a list of quotations “from Chandrika’s heart and soul.”  I have them near my desk.  Here are a few:

“Every few minutes stop what you are doing and take a big breath of life.” 

“If anger controls your life that means you are not trying new things.” 

“Look up at the sky because it will show you how many choices you have in your life.”

“Imagine your life like the wind changing and always unexpected.”