Tuesday, July 1, 2014

How's the ranch life?

This is the question I’ve been getting a lot lately. I’m not totally sure how to answer that question because I haven’t solidly wrapped my head around the fact that I’M WORKING AT A RANCH (and this has been a dream of mine since the urge to be with horses took hold in January). This is mostly my fault because I think my little stressed self had a hard time believing that someone would actually hire me. My life has not been the easiest for a lot of years so I just didn’t spend much time thinking about what life would be like after I started this job, just in case something happened to curtail it.

When I'm in a stall or paddock, I think about how much I’ve fought the waves of change. How I haven’t been as authentic as a could have been, and how I’ve been so timid with expressing who I am. I’m not very proud of this last year of my life, I feel like in many ways I’ve failed. There have been a few bright and shining moments where my head finally surfaced above the clouds and I actually got to SEE what I have and what I’m living, but many, many of them have been marked by fear.

So here’s what I’m learning now: the lesson that I have to learn over and over and over again. Surrender. I will never be able to control every aspect of my life. I may never know what the next six steps are. I may never know what’s next. But I am choosing to believe that whatever’s next, it will be OK. I have 50 years to tell me that whatever comes, I will BE OK. In the next month I will likely be sleeping out in the wildness with a herd of beloved horses or traveling to another country. I don’t know which pasture and if I for sure will be moving the herd, but I’m choosing to believe that whatever it is, that’s the place I'm suppose to be in. I’m choosing to remember that my life has always been orchestrated in ways more beautiful than I could ever have planned myself. I’m choosing to stop fighting the waves.

So anyway, how’s the ranch life? Right now I’m ENVELOPED IN THIS AWESOME ATMOSPHERE. I think it’s good. I keep looking at each horse I feed or water, across the stall, or across the paddock and I feel so incredibly thankful. I get to spend the rest of my life doing something like this. Most horses are incredibly patient with me and I think back to what I wished for, 4 years ago, when I was taking all of those blind steps forward, not knowing where I was going. I think back to those times when the hope of what could be in the future was all that got me through. And I realize that those things I hoped for, those things that I wanted deep in my bones, THOSE are the things I got. It’s like someone knew me and made it all happen. Love, Sharon

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