Position, No Action

We do without doing and everything gets done

Our bodies are full of thoughts, muscles carry memories and charges of electricity run through cells firing off commands much faster than one can comprehend. The first step is getting to place of intellectual knowing; the next letting go of knowledge so that the body can take over. My brain longs to control, my body responds with tension, the horse is uncertain of my request. My brain shuts down and is still for a moment, my body relaxes, energy flows, the horse moves in harmony. Simple.

Bent to Breaking

This week I am taking that which I hold precious and close to my heart, and redefining my perception of it in one week. It is pushing me to the edge, the breaking point looms, to be in a position where the less I know the easier and better off I will be, this is a time for unlearning, unwinding the ego, yet this is a process that must be handled delicately as if it is crushed all that will be left is a quivering pile of unfocused goo. I cannot describe fully how to unlearn years of learning, but it happens and I am grateful.

Serious Lounge

It is Sunday the eleventh of September: my first day off in a month. I woke at my normal time, quarter passed six, since then I have been lounging in bed drinking coffee in a clicker trance (I learned fancy diy nail-polish tricks that I will put to use in all of my spare time.). It takes 21 days to form or break a habit. I am not concerned that listlessly shuffling through websites will become a habit. Yet, progress calls! Rumors of an heirloom tomato festival and the fog of Bodega Bay lure me from my sheets.

Long-Term Agreements,

The natural state of entropy and disregard have their own gravity. I was three, possibly four, when the nightmares began. Giants would swoop in from the sky and hunt me through the forests and skies of my dreamworld. They would come alone or in groups, cannibals hungry to eat my nose. I lived in terror of sleep. One morning I was sitting outside of the cabin and using my thumb I was squishing black ants. I had no conception of life until this moment, when I realized how unjust it was for me to squish an animal simply because it was small relative my the largess of my three years. I stopped killing bugs and made an agreement to not take the lives of other beings. This week I cleaned the small barn so that the horse of my heart could move into safe, clean, welcoming environment. This consisted of removing years worth of cobwebs from the walls, ceiling, corners. If I were a witch who needed spider silk for potions, I would have had gallons of tensile thread at my disposal. I uncovered a spider larger than a silver dollar, her round black body shone in the unexpected light of day, her eight legs, talons, the telltale hourglass mark on her back. She was guarding the nest I had just swept away, "Please get on my broom so I can take you outside." She didn't listen and pulled her legs close into her body to appear less dangerous or even dead. I looked for a jar to transport her out of the area, no dice. I tried again to encourage her to come with me on the broom, she would not leave the destruction of her former nest. My heart sank as I realized that this was the worst moment I had faced in years, I had a real and absolute choice to make. Afterwards, I wept, moved her body outside, left an offering for the life taken. I said a prayer and thanked her for her ferocity, the care that she put into her home, and the power of her life to help me remember the promise I had made long ago to honor all life.

Shuffle the Deck, Take One, Pass the Rest

There are blogs about a lot of things: how to eat and dress, do a fancy side-twist braid; the importance of awareness; loads of blogs about babies and the people they boss around; sand-crabs of santa cruz; however there are not a lot of blogs about learning how to live with roommates at the ripe age of 31. I have no solutions to this, I am not about to start, but I can say that it is a new challenge for me to learn how to define what matters to me in a shared living environment and what is not worth bothering about (why do people not always think of things in same way that I do at all times in all cases and about all things? what a bore. It is a treat to live with new people, the challenge is real, present, and an honest delight. ... Things I love: ... bananas, hard-boiled eggs (foods that come in portion appropriate portable packages) ... and... half-cartons of eggs and six-packs of beer ... 137... Love, chaya ;:

The Road to Hell is a Bowl of Cherries

I had a friend, once, who arranged my refrigerator magnets to say "the road to hell is a bowl of cherries." I saved those nine magnets for years before the tide of progress caused me to through them in the goodwill bin.

Half-way there. Things are falling apart--my car is having electrical problems owing to the fact that the muffler needs new rubber bands so it is hanging on by a thread; the mechanics who last replaced my air-filter used the wrong size, so I have been cruising for the last 13,000 miles with basically no filtration; the #12 fuse keeps blowing up; the battery fell out of my computer this morning.

Mercury retrograde always hits me a few days late and all at once.

Yet all of this is simple and relatively easy to fix and I am here in Ashland, the town of $2.50 cup of coffee (they try to serve me single origin Ethiopian as if I will be please to drink the cardboard dust) and it is beautiful, amazing, and I am happy to be stranded here, if only for hours rather than days.

And, it's September, the air at five this morning was so chill that I had gooseflesh running up and down my arms. I slept with the doors open, under three woolen blankets, listening to the crickets, the creek, the stars moving across the dome of the sky.

Juxtaposed between departure and arrival I dance in this limbo to get comfortable with these feelings of frustration, addiction, emotion. I move into the day fresh as sleep falls from my eyes.

manifestation

Pulled from my notebook:

24 June 2011, I make my living riding, training, working with horses. This work is deeply meaningful to me and I am consistently amazed at the possibilities that continue to offer themselves to me. I work with a trainer who challenges, motivates (and may I add, respects) me. They are kind and generous with the animals in their care. The relationship is mutually beneficial.

At times I make a practice of writing out exactly what I want so that my subconscious brain and the universal id that makes shit happen line up.

Pulled from life:
12 August 2011, Offered the chance of a lifetime to work in a classical dressage barn in Healdsburg, CA.

Now, I am overwhelmed with all of this manifestation. On my list of physical things that I needed were living off the I-5 corridor, a better climate, living near a small town; my mental and emotional list be a horse monk; be able to bring my horse; be able to live on the farm; respect, value, love the people I work with and for; have a living stipend; have enough time to take it all in.

Every item on that list is covered, every damn one. When does that happen? overwhelming gratitude

Ticking Clocks, Off Time

In a previous life as a sensitive ticking clock phobe, this house would have driven me mad. There are no less than two ticks in the room where I sleep, three in the living room, one in the kitchen, and others scattered aesthetically through out the rest of the home.

This cacophonous din became white noise as I slept: through people arriving late in the night, through dreams disjointed dreams, through the anonymity of waking without a name to attach to myself the clocks remained vigilant. Waking as the sun cracked the eastern rim of the sky lighting the dew, the horse's backs, the spark behind my eyes.

I wake and feed the animals, make coffee, the air is damp and clear as I pick the manure from their paddocks. Tomorrow, I will ride before dawn.

Poison Rattles

I was three when I dreamed of compassion; I was four when I learned the cold hard truth of life; I was five when I knew that compassion and humanity are not happy bedfellows; I was five when I was kicked out of kindergarten for fighting.

The Rogue River was close to the place we were living in late spring of 1985. I saw dead salmon in that river. Huge teeth and a long tapered jaw, its teeth were black and yellow with age and rot. The salmon must have been spawning; it was bigger than me.

There was a mama duck. I found her nest in the cattails; I didn’t touch the eggs, she was my friend. I was fascinated with her concentration as she sat on the next but after all of the eggs but one hatched, I was so sad that I didn’t like watching her living ducklings because the one egg in the nest just sat there lonely abandoned dead.

I saw a lot of death that year. The worst was when the creepy Jesus Lovers killed the rattlesnake in the drive way. I was four, almost five, and we lived a studio above a garage in Grants Pass, OR. It was the first time we lived on a street, had a sidewalk, or neighbors. Our neighbors were also our landlords; they hosted revival style meetings in the garage on Sunday mornings. They would bang-bang on drums and sing to heaven about sin and salvation. I was pretty sure that everyone was their neighbor's landlord, right on down the block to the very end to the last house next to the park and those people were in charge of the park, that way everyone had someone to watch over them and keep them safe. Some boys lived next door, they had a grape arbor and taught me to swear with the biggest four letter word. I learned that if you say fuck your mother will swoop in with a bar of soap and teach you that words are so powerful that you have to eat lye to absolve their hold over you.

One day the landlords drove up with some of their friends. I stood up in the window watching them as they pulled a styrofoam cooler out of the back of their Lincoln. Tipping the cooler gently onto the baking driveway, the all stood in a circle as a snake twisted hissed coilded in the sudden light. In a flash, one of them had a jack knife. Running for the stairs, wailing nooooooo I burst through the door and into the daylight. The majestic snake in its final death twitch blood pooling. I ran at them and tears and mad and fists and why why why did you kill it? They told me, so that it wouldn’t get me first. But, they had trapped it and brought it home and slaughtered it right there for an eight ring rattle. That was their prize, and I’ll bet that they shook that rattle early sunday mornings as they worshiped Jesus and all his creation.

a fruit once plucked will never ripen

The tub was small, deep
and round, rather than
long and coffin like.
The water, pulled from
a cistern then sun
warmed, hid our legs below
the murky surface.

Upstairs, our parents smoked
joints
on the futon listening to
records. A narrow
window stretched from the
roof to the basement,
connecting
us. We shared a view
of an old gnarled

apricot tree. In
the green tiled tub our
toes turned from raisins
to prunes as scarlet
and fucia flamed,
a fire of sunset.
The fruit, still hard, green,
sour, hung silhouetted
in twilight ripening—
waiting to be eaten.