You do one little thing and that is the beginning of your beginning. I guess I am thinking.
My friend Chris said
You are a seed
You start here and then in a little bit of time, magic. Like spring, I said.
I have started before. I've submitted stuff before. Like years before like prison sentence time lengths before. Like 30 years with the possibility of parole.
It is nice to do something and feel accomplished. Like maybe I will have more than 3 readers. More than 3 people to love me and hear me. It's nice to have those 3, or those 13 or whatever my core group are. Maybe it's nice just to be inside ME, and to have me listening and rooting for me.
I feel like alot of what my mom is going through, is not just dementia but life grabs you by the balls, man. It tells you you can't do this, or you don't understand this, and then you get depression because you really think you see a glimmer, you know you are more than this drudge, this person just going through the motions. You can do more. The motions are hard work. Though.
My mom has a brain eating disease. This has been also eating my brain. It's what someone said the difference between a problem and an inconvenience. Having kids while being a writer is an inconvenience. Having a brain eating disease is a problem.
Today I feel like I actually did something. The things I do on the trail feel like real things while everything else feels like faking it. At times although I fake everything at times like everyone does or maybe no one does. Everyone else is really real and I'm the only one left standing at musical chairs. The worst game ever, where you don't belong.
I took the baby horse to water for the first time and nothing went as I expected. He was pretty much fine with water, crossing the creek. Standing in the creek. He didn't leap it like I expected. He didn't get worked up or freak my other horse out. He just investigated the water like he does with everything else. He was so happy to see a new thing. Like when he first ate a pear. Like an apple, but not. He walked through the creek so we tried the deeper water. He sloshed in with his nose like a submarine and was fine walking all through it and then he rolled in it. That was the surprise. Then I was worried he can't roll, when he has a rider in two and a half years when he's not a baby, that would be a bad habit. Then we're leaving down a skinny trail and it's very sandy and I'm suddenly seeing legs flying all around by the bottom of my horse's legs and he's rolling in the sand. It's like the skinniest area ever, like a dragstrip between the pch and the ocean and I don't want him to roll under my horse while I'm on him I just see death advertised everywhere so I get off my horse and then the baby is standing up and for two almost whole minutes he is a 400 pound toddler, he is so happy he wants to run or leap or crash into the bushes and there is nowhere for this mini explosion of happiness in this tiny path with the other giant horse and me so I am angling him and shoving him and walking him and aiming him and manhandling him and he slowly starts to relax from water bathing and sand bathing and new trail longest trail of his life happiness, he's only been here on earth for 5 months. The earth has so much sand to roll in.
I just rode home feeling like I did something hard and first time, and the sun is setting that golden light on everything and my riding partner is having his own bad mood and I am miraculous that the things I thought would be hard weren't, and I was surprised by the rolling and the joy. It's so weird how you just never know what you're going to get, or how or why. The trail always unfolds in this unpredictable way.
I was worried though beacuse I never had a baby and what if rolling is bad, what if I screwed up, he might always roll with a rider on him, and then passing in a car I see the one person I saw on the trail the other day, who told me take him out. Take the baby out. Take him to the water, she said. She did it with all her baby horses. So the only reason I had the guts to take him out was because she said do it and there she was in a car on this street at this exact time, the exact time I needed to see her and she said hey I'm so glad you're out with him and I said like a new mother He rolled is that bad he rolled in the water and she said he's a baby. Let him roll. My babies all rolled. He'll be fine once he has a saddle. He'll learn not to roll. Mine never rolled with me once we were riding. He's a baby. Let him feel everything.
She was there and then gone, she was there the minute I needed reassuring and then she was gone, like a mystic river I was floating down on my way home, I was getting the guidance I needed from someone named Chainsaw Jan, I barely knew her but she knew horses, and she steered me back gently to peace. and then kept driving away.
This saves me.
I did something hard and it's all okay. Says chainsaw jan. I was okay before I saw her, but reassurance calms the beginner mind.
I was only out to get my mind away from my mom's hard battle, which worked, and then cleaning up the kitchen where my littler daughter made cookies for the first time with her friend, and then cleaning up a little more in the barn, and then talking to my other daughter at college on the facetime phone and writing, and I was thinking it isn't impossible to do a little of everything right. It's so much easier to try and do everything a little, and feel accomplishment right in your bones for the hard stuff.
I am living through my mom's worst part, and only I am getting to see it. My kids are living through it with me. Our whole family is changed from the hardness of it. I'm handling it, and she is still here, 16 months later. It is slow and infuriating, and sad but I have ER and swimming and I have myself and horses, and dogs and kids and family. I have everything I need to get where I need to get. A seed has the whole map of the tree in it.
I don't think I have to worry about where we're all headed or if we're gonna get there or if it'll be in a timely manner that we all get what we want. I think we are all there, on the platform together, and these are the people I have assembled, and if we keep talking to each other we might get through it because talking is comfort. And what else do we have but human company, we're a on a rock floating through space.
A person can figure out anything if you wait and listen and decide to take it on, and then listen some more and tea helps and laughing, and different foods at different times of day. And sunlight going across the sky, I feel the path of life in a day. The more I stop trying to be the best, and just do the little things I can do, in all the areas I've made myself, then when I get a big thing like surviving the rolling in the creek and the skinny path with the creature, that feels like winning.
Talking to my daughter when I am slowly remembering myself through writing, that is also me. I am lucky to have this me, the me of all things. Specific things to me. My daughter said she said to her friend up there, who is the best person in your whole life. He said my parents. She said me too. It is so funny how can we ever live up to what our kids think of us.
I am a seed.
