It had snowed the night before. It was a light fluffy snow that had had gently settled onto the earth. It filled the crevices and depressions in the forest floor. It left a thick insulating blanket over the landscape.
The grouse had taken refuge in the lee of a familiar poplar and except for the occasional fluffing of her feathers she did not stir all night. She knew that somehow she was not in danger of being trapped by a heavy wet snow. This light airy blanket could completely cover her and she would be fine.
It had been an easy fall with mild temperatures and plenty of food. Her clutch of chicks were grown and gone. She would spend a solitary winter. She would forage and rest until spring. The drumming of the cocks would signal the change and the time for mating.
For now her life was simple. There were no young to protect and feed. There were no males vying for her favor. The absence of these complicating factors added to her already quiet rest.
The snow stopped sometime during the night. The morning dawned bright and clear. With a sudden rush of energy she burst from her bed. The wind picked up crystalline snow scattered by her exit and swirled it into the air. The sun caught the airborne prisms. It was as if there were thousands of diamonds caught in flight.
She flew to an oft-used perch in the same poplar that had sheltered her during the night. With typical animal patience she sat and surveyed her world before hunger motivated her to move.
It mattered not to her that today was Christmas. She knew a less specific calendar. In her own way she was thankful for her good fortune but no more this day than any other. She had three seasons of successful chick rearing behind her. There was plenty of forage. The owls and hawks had let her be. She was fulfilling her purpose in life. She was content.
I am sixty-six years old. I have had many jobs in my working life. For all of those jobs there was a commute. On a few occasions I have lived close enough to my job to walk to work. Those were times I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and my walks to work were city walks full of the sights sounds and smells associated with city life.
I once lived in Brookline also in Massachusetts and had a job as a landscaper in Newton. I rode my bike to work to that job. For this commute I had to stay very focused on my surroundings as I shared the road with many cars. That wasn’t as pleasant as my walking commute but it was still outside and I still was a part of the world around me. As such I could still see, hear and smell what the world had to offer.
For a time here in Maine where I now live, I commuted to work on my motorcycle. This still allowed me to be a part of the world I was passing through even though I was now traveling at the same speed as the cars around me. On a motorcycle the rider can still smell and hear things that would not be possible to experience while traveling in a car.
Then of course for years I also commuted in a car. In a car the driver is passing through the world and is not as much as a part of that world as one would be on foot, bike or on a motorcycle. Now at the end of my working life, I have a job that involves horses. My mare is an active participant in the work that I do. I now commute to work by horse.
I live in rural Maine in a town of under five thousand people. The town is New Gloucester. All of the roads around our three hundred acres are dirt. I have seven miles of trails on my own land. I work at an equine assisted psychotherapy practice at a farm approximately one mile from where I live. If I am short on time, I can ride on the road and be at work in about twenty minutes, fifteen if I ask my mare, Cyra, to trot and canter part of the way.
When I am efficient in doing my morning chores, I leave between forty-five minutes and an hour for my commute. This allows me to thread my way through the woods and fields between where I live and where I work. This alternate route puts me on a road for only about fifty feet. My favorite back-co
untry commute takes me deep into our woods. I cross a stream, several stone walls, slog through muddy stretches of trail, over a wooden bridge I built with my son and then pick up an old abandoned county road that gives us multiple opportunities to canter if we so choose. The forest looms over us forming a green tunnel through which we pass.
We occasionally see deer on these rides as well as wild turkeys, ruffed grouse and many squirrels and sometimes woodchucks. We have heard coyotes talking to each other off in the distance. We are always serenaded by numerous birds whose homes we are passing through. At the end of our ride, we come out of the woods and pick up a trail that takes us along the edge of a fifty acre hay field that is now lush with soon to be harvested grass and clover. Here we exchange a green canopy of leaves for a blue often cloud studded dome of sky. These rides are rich in sights, smells, sounds and tactile stimulation as we frequently brush by and under branches of trees. I ride Cyra bareback and so am in intimate contact with her body as it moves under me. She has a very full mane and I frequently grab two handfuls of her hair for stability if we are cantering or going over rough terrain or up a hill.
For a lifelong horseman, these rides are a dream come to life. It never gets old being on Cyra deep in the quite peace of the forest. In winter, our work keeps us at the farm after dark. On moonless nights we make our way home either under a dome of stars or on cloudy nights in darkness so black that the road is a barely discernible gray line stretching out in front of us. On nights with a moon we slide into the woods in the gray moonlight. In the woods, the ethereal light is just enough to find our way. In the fields I feel like We are bathing in light so different than that of day that magic always seems close at hand.
I have to close this reflection with praise for my equine partner. We have been a team for over ten years. She trusts me. I trust her. She knows the way to work and often I will drop the reins of the rope riding halter I made for her (no bit in her mouth) and let her take me where she knows we need to go. I sometimes ride with my Native American flute, playing tunes from my heart to the world we are passing through. I know that I can do this and trust that we are OK with her on auto-pilot (who needs a self driving car when one has a self driving horse?).With Cyra I have come to a place in my life that fits me so well that I have to pinch myself at times to know that this is real. I am a very lucky man.
I have been a horseman since I was a teenager. I began my riding at a resort in Virginia called The Greenbriar. I had gone there with my family. I don’t remember much about that first ride other than my horse sneezed when I was in the saddle. It scared me to the point of never wanting to get back on a horse again. Fortunately, that did not happen. I went onto ride in many places during my youth and later as a young man in my twenties. When we were first married and living in Boston I would travel out to Concord to ride out of a barn there. I gained the trust of the barn’s owner and was given permission to fetch an horse and go on my own on the trails in the adjacent countryside. I rode a Belgian mare whose name escapes me now but the memory of our rambles lives on.
We did a spell in Ann Arbor when I went back to college at the University of Michigan. There I leased a horse at a barn in Hell (small town near Ann Arbor, not the legendary Hades). Again my mount’s name escapes me but I do recall that he was prone to spooking at anything white that we came across on our rides. It could be a discarded fridge or even a scrap of paper by the trail but he never failed to think he was about to be eaten by a monster and would launch himself sideways with no warning. I learned to be ever vigilant for all things white.
Fast forward to the present day. I now am the owner of two horses. Cyra, my mare, is a cross between a Clydesdale and a Newfoundland pony. She looks like a miniature Clydesdale but in fact is small enough to be still technically a pony. I also own a gelding by the name of PJ who is 16 hand Tennessee Walker. It is an interesting pairing, the pony and the big rangy gelding but I love them both very much for the very reason that they are so different and provide me with very different riding experiences. Cyra is very steady and slow. PJ is spooky and fast. It is Cyra I am going to write about today.
I work at a barn about a mile from my farm. Both of my horses are involved in the work that I do. I am the co-founder of an equine assisted psychotherapy practice called Healing Through Horses. I ride PJ to work on Tuesdays and Cyra to work on Thursdays. With Cyra’s broad back, short stature and even temperament, I choose to ride her bareback. Sitting on her is like sitting in a warm overstuffed easy chair. PJ is too tall, too bony and too hot for a bareback ride. I ride him in a western roper’s saddle. On Thursdays our sessions go till after dark so our ride home is in the dark. I have equipped myself with the same lights a bike rider would wear, white in front, red in the back. The rides home after dark are always different. There are some nights when there are no stars or moon and perhaps even some fog. Those nights are very interesting as I have to trust Cyra to not be bothered by the sudden appearance of the headlights of oncoming cars and trucks.
Several weeks ago we made our way home not on a dark cloudy night but a night filled with stars and a nearly full moon in a cloudless sky. It was so bright, I turned our lights off. I normally ride home on the roads at night but this night was so bright that I decided to thread my way through the woods and fields to get back to my home barn. Coming out of the driveway at work, feeling the warmth of her body under me, I turned her toward home for a short stretch before disappearing into the moonlit woods. Riding by moonlight is a wonderful experience. The light is so ethereal that it feels as though you have entered into another world, similar to the day world but strangely different as well. Everything is softer with muted shapes and light that tricks the eyes into seeing things that are not there.
We crossed an open field at one point and the snow glowed softly in the moonlight. The apple trees that dotted the field seemed eager to transform themselves into other forms. I half expected to come across sleeping deer under those trees but did not. I grabbed a handful of Cyra’s thick black mane and picked up a trot and then a canter. Cyra’s hooves threw snow into the air in swirls at her feet. She was wearing a string of sleigh bells and the tinkling sound of the bells added additional magic to the already mystical ride. We reentered the woods at a walk, making our way though the dusky pines. We were soon back at the barn, welcomed by the whinny of PJ. I slid off her bare back, gave her thick neck a hug, fed her a treat and led her into the barn. It was a ride I will not soon forget. Michael Fralich michael.fralich@gmail.com
Fifteen years ago I came home one afternoon from my teaching job at the Gray New Gloucester Middle School to find a flock of four geese sitting in my barn driveway. I had kept chickens for years but I had never had geese. I had no idea where they came from or what to do about them. Chickens I knew. They lived in a coop in the barnyard. I raised them for eggs. They went into their coop at night and I closed the door. Being an animal lover and knowing that I would learn as I went along with these new additions to the farm, I began to offer them food and water.
They seemed to settle in quite nicely. They didn’t mind the horses and the horses, although curious, didn’t seem to mind them. They were all white and after some research I determined that they were a breed called Pilgrim. While you cannot tell the sex of a goose by external characteristics, behavior is a guide. All of my new geese seemed to be getting along just fine with no one goose standing out as dominant. This led me to believe they were all females with no male or gander.
Word in the neighborhood got out that I now had geese and I was approached by a local family who had a gander that was looking for a home. This gander was a Toulouse which has dark varied plumage. I agreed to take him on knowing that this would likely result in my having more geese at some point down the road. I had a goose house built for them which they studiously ignored, preferring to claim the barnyard as theirs. When winter rolled around, they still ignored their house and would camp in the barnyard in the foulest weather, heads tucked under wings riding out even the worst of storms.
When spring came, they began to lay eggs and it became a tradition for the kids to take an egg to their teacher as a gift. They ultimately hatched out multiple clutches of goslings. Our children were in grade school at the time and were fascinated by the babies and were afraid that if I left them to fend for themselves, even with their parent’s protection, they would be taken by predators. We decided to take them from their parents and keep them protected. The babies then imprinted on our kids and would follow them around the farm like feathered puppies. They would take them for walks down to the brook to give them a chance to swim and then back to the farm and their house. They were a cross between their white moms and dark dad and were a lovely mottled color.
As the years rolled by more geese raised made it to maturity and the flock increased in size to at one point just shy of twenty individuals. When our kids were no longer kids, we let nature manage the flock and there were some years when no babies made it to adults. In the spring when the geese were laying but not sitting yet, I would collect the eggs to have for breakfast. One goose egg made a dandy meal. Our daughter once collected enough eggs to make a platter of hard boiled eggs from them. It was quite impressive as goose eggs are easily four times the size of a chicken egg.
The geese that did survive to adulthood were of course not all females. Ganders were added to the flock which made the flock dynamics interesting to say they least. In the spring the barnyard was a raucous place as ganders fought with other ganders for the right to breed with the females. A dozen geese all honking at each other is a sound not to be forgotten. We had a gander one year who decided that it was his job to either bite me in the butt when I wasn’t looking or to bite the tires of the school bus as it stopped to pick up kids. He met his end under the tire of a truck one sad day.
One of our geese once developed an infected foot, Bumble Foot we discovered was the name of her condition. I made the perhaps foolish decision to treat her and took her to the vet. He gave her a shot of antibiotics and sent us home with ten preloaded syringes to continue her treatment. My sainted wife opted to be the holder of the goose while I was the shooter ( I had to inject her breast with the medicine). She recovered nicely but I don’t think my wife ever did. It was at that point that we learned that geese can live to be thirty years old.
Our present flock numbers twelve. All of the original flock is gone. They roam the property at will adding their voices to the symphony of sounds at the farm. Some have died of old age, some have been taken by predators (fishers will kill a goose, take its head and leave the body untouched). Our current challenge with the geese centers around our two dogs, Mocha and Sadie. They are English Shepherds and are hard wired to herd animals. They have taken to herding the geese off the farm. The geese were taking up residence in the middle of the road much to the sometimes amusement and sometimes chagrin of our neighbors. I built them a pen, moved them back onto the farm and into their pen but the dogs have continued to drive them out (the geese are capable fliers when pushed). As of last week, the geese have taken up residence in the marsh opposite the farm. There is open water there. They are out of the road. The dogs will not go there as it is outside of their Invisible Fence. I am walking to the marsh and throwing them cracked corn each morning. Everyone seems quite happy.
Life at the farm is never boring.
Postscript to my geese journal…..
February 3, 2016
Since I completed my entry concerning my geese there have been some new developments that I would like to touch on. When I went down to the marsh last week to scatter some cracked corn for my errant geese I was shocked to discover that six out of the twelve were missing. It seemed unlikely to me that a predator or predators would have taken six adult geese in twenty-four hours. There was no sign of struggle, no blood or scattered feathers that would have indicated an attack had taken place in the marsh. I heaved a sigh, fed the remaining six geese and went on with my day.
The next day when I went down to scatter cracked corn I was dismayed to discover that all of the geese were now gone. Again, no sign of struggle, no blood, no feathers. I could not hear any sounds that would indicate that they had just gone further into the marsh. They were just gone. Twelve healthy, adult geese each weighing approximately fifteen pounds, had simply vanished. I was left to ponder their fate for several days before I saw three of my flock on the road near the barn.
I the intervening days, I have been on the lookout for the remainder of the flock to no avail. I have not heard any sounds that would indicate that the other nine gees were anywhere in the marsh. I have been leaving food in my enclosure with the gate open and have had luck walking them into their new space several times but when I go to the barn to do the morning chores, they are always gone.
I am perplexed about the fate of most of my flock and it is entirely possible that I will never know what happened to them. Stay tuned for updates. I will share any new news as I have it.
Last week I laid out the journey that brought me to found Healing Through Horses with my friend and business partner, Sandy Fletcher. This week I would like to continue that narrative. I will attempt to capture what this new phase of my life has meant to me and the people that we serve.
Years ago I realized that I wanted to dedicate my life to serving the needs of others. I did this first through my volunteer work at Maine Audubon, leading nature walks for them. This led me to become certified to be a public school teacher. This morphed into my becoming certified as a therapeutic riding instructor at Riding To The Top in Windham. After eleven years there, Sandy and I founded Healing Through Horses here in New Gloucester.
Healing Through Horses (HTH) differs from Riding To The Top (RTT) in one key way. HTH partners with mental health professionals to offer counseling to people seeking help with their challenges in life. RTT teaches riding to disabled children and adults but offers no mental health services. At HTH I sometimes teach riding to clients if that fits with their treatment goals but not always. Some clients prefer to just learn how to take care of horses. The work at HTH is always done with two providers and the client My therapist partner, Susannah Harnden, works with the client to address their mental health needs. My job is to keep everyone safe as we partner with thousand pound animals that are hard wired to always be on alert as prey animals for danger.
I will begin to reflect on what this works has meant to me with the fact that I love to relate to those I talk to about HTH. I live a mile from where we do our work. My two horses, Cyra and PJ have their own clients in the practice who look forward to seeing them every week. On Tuesdays I ride PJ to work. On Thursdays I ride Cyra to work. Being a life long horse person to be able to not only do this work in partnership with my horses but also to ride them every week, all year round in the day and at night (our Thursday sessions in the winter end at 6:00 when it is fully dark) is a dream come true for me.
At this time of year when the weather is cool and the bugs are gone, I leave my house with plenty of time to be able to wander through my seven miles of trails on our land to make my way to HTH. This never gets old for me. Every time I throw my legs over a horse, it is magic for me. It is such an privilege to be on the back of these magnificent animals. I never take that for granted. That they allow me to be on them and that they are willing to thread their way through Norumbega’s woods through mud, over stone walls and across streams never ceases to amaze me.
When we arrive at HTH, a different kind of magic begins to happen. In the three years we have been in operation, we have gone from Sandy and me partnering with three horses in service to three clients to the present where we have four mental health professionals working with ten equine partners and eighty clients. Not only to we offer mental health counseling we also have a partnership with Avita of Stroudwater, a facility for elders with dementia. Twice a month Avita brings residents to HTH for interaction with Sammy, one of our Quarter-horses, and Cookie, our miniature horse mare. With the addition of the elders we have clients who range in age from six to ninety-six. We also have a small but growing program for veterans struggling with adjustment back to civilian life.
Before I began this work at HTH I had a deep respect for my horses. I knew how they enriched my life. I knew what joy they brought me in all aspects of my journey with them. To be able to fly across an open field on the back of a galloping horse is an experience that I hope I am able to have in my life for years to come. At age sixty-four, it seems nothing short of astounding that I am still able to do that (bareback on my mare Cyra!). Now that I share my equines with others and am witness to what they are able to do in other people’s lives it has deepened my love and respect for them beyond measure.
I will close with a story about just how profound this work can be. We had a client who I will call Mark (not his real name). A vet who suffered from PTSD, depression and anxiety, he came to us heavily medicated, suicidal, house bound and estranged from his two sons. In six weeks with my mare Cyra under Sandy’s and my guidance, he completely turned his life around. He got off his meds, reconnected with his sons, moved to a better place and enrolled in school. When asked how he was able to make such a miraculous transformation in his life, he replied, “It was all because Cyra accepted me as I was and helped me see who I could become.” I feel so blessed to be able to do work that flows from my heart in service to others and in partnership with my equine companions.
Since I graduated from college I have worked at a variety of jobs. I actually went to college twice. I graduated in 1974 from Goddard College with a BA in photography. I tried my hand at being a freelance photographer and managed to get a few jobs before taking a job at a camera store as I needed a steady income. I went back to college and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1981 with a BS in Natural Resources. Once again I was unable to find a position in my field and ended up doing many things for a number of years before I realized that what I really wanted to be was a teacher. I had done volunteer work for Maine Audubon for years and really loved being with children, sharing my time, knowledge and energy with these wonderful young beings. This led me to go to school once again to get my teaching credentials. Thus at age forty, I began a career that finally fit and paid me to do what I loved.
I worked in public education for fifteen years until I decided that while I loved teaching, it did not allow me to call upon my other passion in life, horses. I quit my job at the Gray New Gloucester Middle School and got certified as a therapeutic riding instructor and worked for eleven years for a non-profit located in Windham called Riding To The Top (RTT). At last I was able to blend teaching with horses. For eleven years I worked with a broad range of very special people ranging in age from five to sixty-five.. Our clients were all special needs riders with a variety of physical and emotional challenges. I learned a lot about horses, about myself and about the incredible resilience of my riders.
Four years ago we at RTT were approached by an organization called Crossroads for Women that provides services for adult women recovering form addiction. They came to RTT with their own mental health therapist as RTT had no therapists on staff. Six women came for six weeks for this pilot program. When they arrived for the first time, they were quite intimidated by our equine partners. None of these women had experience with horses. I started out by giving my safety talk and teaching the ladies how to interact with the horses in ways that minimized the chances of feet being stepped on a fingers ending up in horse mouths.
In the six weeks we were together I watched in awe as their new equine friends acted as catalysts for emotional growth and healthy introspection for the women. By the end of their time with us, the women had bonded with their equine partners to such an extent that many tears were shed as they bid farewell to the horses. The journey had been transformative not only for the women but also for me. I realized that this work, equine assisted psychotherapy (EAP), was what I wanted to do with the rest of my working life. It brought together not only my passion for teaching and my passion for horses but also my desire to partner with horses in ways that I never knew existed in service to others as they struggled with their challenges in life. It was at this point in my life that I called my long time friend, fellow horse person and therapist Sandy Fletcher to suggest forming our own non-profit to do EAP. Next time I will continue with how this all unfolded for me with the founding of Healing Through Horses.
We all do chores. It is part of keeping our lives and personal spaces organized and not overwhelmed by the detritus that results from living, eating and maintaining a healthy life. For me, chores are a way of keeping me grounded on a journey that can be at times very chaotic. Chores require a routine. If that routine is adhered to and adapted as conditions change, my life can achieve a fragile state of balance. When a chore cycle is done, I always feel better about myself. I feel as though I have made some sense of my life and the spaces I inhabit. I can stand back and see the results of my labors and know that I am a good person for having disciplined myself to address the clutter that inevitably comes from being alive. My chores are divided into two realms, the house and the barn. It is the barn chores that are the subject of this blog post.
I am a keeper of animals. Some live in the house but most live outside, either in the barn and its environs or in one of the several pastures and orchards that are part of our farm. My outdoor chore cycle begins with a trip to fetch Mocha and Sadie who sleep in a kennel overlooking the orchard. Mocha and Sadie are English Shepherds. Their job is to keep deer out of our orchard. They spend 90% of their time outside in a twenty acre area defined by an invisible fence. They are both trained to the fence and know the boundaries of their domain very well.
With the girls in tow, I head to the barn. At the barn I have two horses, a flock of sixteen geese, a rooster and six laying hens. My two horses are Cyra, a mare that is a cross between a Clydesdale and a Newfoundland Pony. My gelding is a Tennessee Walker named PJ. I begin my care of them with their grain. I then begin cleaning their stalls. When that is done, I give them their hay, refresh their water and feed the geese, hens and rooster. The sweeping of the aisle completes the barn chores. I take pride in my barn. I always feel good when it is clean and my animals are well fed and watered.
I next turn my attention to preparing to do the chores of the animals who do not live in the barn, the pigs, cows, turkeys, ducks and meat birds. I fill five 5-gallon buckets with water as well as two buckets with pig grain and cracked corn for he birds. That done, I load these buckets into my pick-up truck, call Mocha and Sadie, get them into the cab and drive up top to the orchards and pig pasture and cow pasture.
I have a breeding sow and a boar named Shuhka and Shorty. Shuhka recently gave birth to piglets. They live in a pasture adjacent to our orchard. Their piglets are eight weeks old and are quite independent. They are still nursing but are also fond of the grain that I feed Shuhka and Shorty. Mocha, the older of our two English Shepherds, is very fond of the piglets and will mingle with them and even lie down amongst them if they are settled. Sadie keeps her distance. Mocha tries at times to herd the piglets but getting a pig of any age to go in any one direction is virtually impossible if the direction is not of their choosing. I now have Shuhka and Shorty separated to give her some space from him and to manage the breeding of the next litter. The piglets move freely between Mom and Dad, depending on who has the best food and wallow. Shuhka and Shorty split twenty-five pounds of grain a day with the larger portion going to Shuhka who needs the extra protein for her milk production. At over four hundred pounds, she requires a lot of feed.
Watering the pigs comes next. My pig pasture has no water source so I transport water up to them in five gallon buckets with lids. They go through about ten gallons of water a day each. Shorty is fond of nearly immediately dumping his water to create a wallow to relax in. Shuhka’s water becomes a wading pool for her offspring as well as a source of drinking water. Depending on how rushed I am with my chores, I often pause to give Shorty a good back scratch which he enjoys immensely. I also enjoy watching the antics of the piglets and their canine buddy, Mocha.
The fowl are next. The ducks are water intensive birds and I have to give them ten gallons a day to drink and splash around in. They live in a portable coop in the orchard. The coop can be moved so that with its wire floor, new grass comes up for them to eat every time we move it. Their waste goes into the ground to enrich it. The ducks are quite shy so I have no problems working with them as they retreat to the far end of the coop when I am feeding and watering them. The turkeys and meat birds are another matter. They are very curious and friendly and frankly a pain because they always attempt to get out when I have their door open. They are not as intensive in their demands for water. They get by with five gallons a day. Mocha and Sadie are fascinated by the birds and will dance around the outside of their coop when I am doing my chores. This is not appreciated by the birds.
Last on my list for chores are the cows. We have a Red Angus bull named Wild Bill, three Black Angus heifers and a steer calf. We have nicknamed Wild Bill, Chill Bill as he is a very laid back bull. He definitely is deserving of respect as he weights over a ton but I have never felt threatened by him. I don’t ever turn my back on him or the heifers but we all seem to get along just fine. I fill their one hundred gallon water trough from a hose that originates at the Cider House. The Cider House is off the grid so delivering water to the cows requires that I turn on the generator to have access to the well. Mocha and Sadie have gone into the five acre cow pasture from time to time but recently, they have chosen to hang back. Mocha has also tried to herd the cows with slightly better results than with the piglets. The cows browse on grass and saplings in their pasture, supplemented with a round bale of hay. I do feed them grain upon occasion but they really don’t need it and it cause for great excitement for them which sets them in motion and propels me outside of the fence for my own safety.
With the cows fed and watered, I am done for the morning and can then go to work! In recounting all that I do for my animals, it seems like a lot but I would have it no other way. They keep me grounded and entertained. When they are all well cared for, I feel better about myself. Though these tasks are called “chores” it is not a chore to do them. Caring for other living beings forms the center of my life. I would have it no other way.
Too slow for those who wait Too swift for those who fear Too long for those who grieve Too short for those who rejoice But for those who love Time is Eternity
Yaddo 1901
I came across this quote on a sundial when strolling in the garden at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. Yaddo is a retreat center for artists. It was founded in 1900 by financier Spencer Trask and his wife Kartrina. Its mission is to, “…nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.”
I have often pondered time and its passage. I know I am not alone in this. From the time humans were evolved enough, safe enough and well fed enough to have the luxury of time to contemplate their existence, I am sure they also reflected on time’s passage. These thoughts are thoughts of an older man.
When I was young my thoughts about time were focused on how much time I had until the final bell rang at school and then how much time I had until the next school vacation. When out of school, thoughts of time centered around how long I could stretch my woods wandering and still be home on time for dinner.
Now my musings about time are centered around not how much time I have before school is over but how much time I have before my life is over. I did not think about my own mortality when I was ten. Even going to the funerals of my grandparents did not rewire my thoughts about time. They died. I was alive. It was that simple.
At age sixty-three (nearly sixty-four which puts my thoughts solidly in the classic Beetles tune about the ancient age I have nearly achieved), I am very well aware of my own mortality. While I don’t compulsively think about death, I do contemplate it and find myself reading about this miraculous transition we will all face someday. I am currently reading “The Grace in Dying” by Kathleen Dowling Singh.
Kathleen Singh works with dying patients in hospice care. She has attended the deaths of hundreds of people. She describes what she calls the “nearing death experience” as a process of miraculous transformation as we mentally surrender into letting go of this physical realm to transition to the Great Mystery of what lies beyond life. She has witnessed an acceptance of what is coming by most, but by no means all, of those whose deaths she has attended. I find her observations to be very comforting as I let my own mind wander down this path. I was holding onto my mother’s hand when she died and I found that moment to be as miraculous as when I attended the births of both of my children.
As I write this post, I find myself to be the recipient of a gift of time. Last week on a cold but sunny morning I impatiently went for a bike ride at my farm. As I was making my way up our Orchard Road I caught my front wheel in a frozen rut. As I went down, the hard saddle on my bike dug into my knee and tore my ACL.
For the first few days after this unfortunate accident, I struggled with what this would mean for my immediate coming days and weeks. I live a very active life that involves riding not only bicycles but also horses twice a week as I commute to work on horseback. I have two horses in residence at my barn as well as pigs, geese and chickens. All of these animals require daily care. My mobility is of paramount importance as I attend to my barn chores. I found myself wallowing in self pity. I felt cursed.
I awoke this morning after a restless night brought on by my inability to get comfortable with my compromised knee to find that my attitude had shifted from feeling cursed to feeling blessed. Normally my day would have been a long one involving riding to work for our first session of the day at 9:00 (I co-founded and help run an Equine Assisted Psychotherapy practice at my partner’s barn about a mile away from my farm) and then returning home at around 7:00 after our last session of the day.
Prudence dictated that I take the day off and the coming days off until I get my knee attended to. This morning I found myself surrendering into this forced “vacation” and embracing the gift of time I had been given by this turn of events. Yesterday, there was no surrender. There was instead, depression and anxiety. I cannot say why this shift in my thinking has taken place. Perhaps I have gained some wisdom in my sixty-three years. I would hope so. In any case, this gift of time has allowed me to begin my healing process with a positive attitude and the time to contemplate time. I do not expect any great epiphany. What I do look forward to is taking this moment in time to quietly reflect on my journey as my knee begins to heal. This is a gift that I will savor.