Sometimes the imaginal component of my work with horses is more obvious than at other times.

The other night, on the edge of sleep, I was jolted by an image: My big buckskin Galahad was right there in front of me. He seemed huge, and his energy was high, with a distinctly unpleasant edge to it. He barged into me and nearly knocked me over; then, just as suddenly, he was gone. I came to complete consciousness as I tried to catch myself to keep from falling.

It was an extraordinary experience whose “reality” was as intense as if it were actually happening. I sat straight up in bed, heart pounding. The image was not related to anything I had been thinking about—I had been peacefully drifting off to sleep.

Knowing that I had a client coming the next morning to work with Galahad, I made a mental note to be a bit more cautious around him, just in case. Then I went on to sleep.

Next morning, my client and I walked out into the pasture to get the big guy. He saw us immediately and headed our way…and just kept coming. His energy was just as he showed me the night before. The flies were driving him mad, and he was in a terrible, sullen mood—I doubt that he got any sleep at all. Fortunately, I was prepared for this attitude. After I moved him around the pasture pretty strongly for a few minutes, he calmed down. Once he had some fly spray, he was much better.

Pretty amazing.

It’s actually not the first time he’s “spoken” to me like that. A year ago, we had to put Galahad in a stall for a couple of nights because he seemed to have some version of the flu. During that time, I took his temperature several times. Each time, he stood like a statue for me.

It turns out that Galahad HATES the thermometer, and he let me know in the same way: I was nearly asleep the second night when suddenly, in my mind’s eye, Galahad jerked his head angrily toward me as I was inserting the thermometer. I came wide awake with a start—it was so obviously real….

He’s contacted me in a gentler way by sharing a dream (you can read about it here), and I can often sense his energy from home. But these “tantrums” are strange and a bit unsettling! However, I’d rather know about his moods ahead of time than discover them accidentally.

How interesting!

Cross-posted on The Alchemical Horse.

A few weeks ago I had another amazing experience.

I had spent a couple of nights sitting up with my beloved Miss Ellie the Cat, who, at 23 years old, is on borrowed time. She was having one of her bad spells, unable to keep down even water. Her discomfort made me wonder about intervening, about helping her cross that Rainbow Bridge. Surely she was suffering way more than she needed to.

Ellie, though, has let me know in no uncertain terms that she is NOT ready to leave this life. When she’s ready, I’ll help her if she wants help; but not until she tells me so. And so I sat up with her all night, just dozing, because she seemed comforted by my presence.

My choice of reading and late-night television echoed my mood: North of Here, a novel by Laurel Saville. Such troubled people, such damaged people; so much loss. A documentary by Anderson Cooper about his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt. Such troubled and damaged people; so much loss. The news: a building collapse in Kenya, a “mistaken” bombing of a children’s hospital in the Middle East. So much loss.

Life…and death.

The next afternoon I went to the grocery. We were out of cat food, and Ellie by some miracle was up and eating again. That cat has used up about 17 lives so far, I swear.

A big storm was coming in, but Ellie was hungry, so I decided to try to get to the grocery and back before it hit.

The sky was absolutely amazing! I don’t believe I’ve ever seen such sharply defined cloud formations. Despite my worry, I stopped halfway up the hill to look and try to get a couple of photos. But as I started on my way again, I noticed the “Get gas NOW!” light was on. Oh dear. On this particular car, that light comes on at the very last minute before the gas is GONE. Rats. I’d need to stop before heading for the store.

But at the top of the hill, distracted by the beauty around and above me, I turned toward the grocery instead of the gas station. Oh no…. The last thing I wanted was to run out of gas in the pouring rain.

So I “checked in,” to see if my intuition had anything to say. “All’s well,” I heard. So despite some misgivings, I decided to believe what I felt—there was plenty of gas.

As I pulled into the parking lot, the storm was all around. Brilliant lightning, incredible clouds, and clearly lots of rain to the north, but no rain here. So I raced into the store, got the cat food, got back to the car—and a few rays of sun came out under the clouds. So unexpected, and so beautiful.

I knew there would be a rainbow. Sure enough, there it was. I would have missed it altogether if I had gotten gasoline first (the gas station building would have been in the way), and if I hadn’t known to turn and look for it.

Couldn’t help myself: I hollered at a couple of women passing in the parking lot. “Hey! Look at the rainbow!” They both looked and smiled—they would have missed it if I hadn’t called their attention to it. One went on to her car after a brief conversation; the nearer one stood and told me the story of Noah and how he believed what God said and so he and his family were saved while everyone else perished.

So I think the lesson of today is that indeed, as Julian of Norwich wrote almost exactly 600 years ago, “All shall be well; all shall be well. All manner of thing shall be well.” Believe in God’s promise, and always—always!—look for the beauty even in the midst of the storm.

The heavens opened just as I reached my front door….

I thought about titling this post “Be Careful What You Wish For.”

After many years of wanting to bring my work more into the public eye, I was invited last fall to present a program to our local Jung Society. Originally, I was going to talk about my dissertation and how it had opened me up to the imaginal world. In the end, though, I decided to talk about the imaginal world itself, and how it manifests in our lives.

“Encountering the Imaginal,” presented in early April of this year, was a huge success. There were more than 60 people there, and—unusual for our group—nearly half of them were men. They weren’t coming specifically to hear me, since almost no one there had ever heard me speak.

I had a blast, and there were lots of good comments and questions, both during the talk and afterwards. Since then, clients have come looking for me, and both sessions of the study group I’m offering as a follow-up to the talk are nearly full. Wow….

Clearly, this is a topic that many people are interested in. We all want to make sense of our lives, and our culture doesn’t have a framework for understanding non-rational experiences unless they’re of a strictly religious nature—yet we all have them. My work is a step toward developing the kind of framework that will allow us to use these experiences as information, in the same way we use anything else that happens to us.

The success of the talk would would have been terrific all by itself. But even more exciting, my own personal growth has kicked into overdrive, and my imaginal friends are hovering around, anxious to help both me personally and all the people I’m encountering. Again, wow….

So. That’s fine, but what does that yellow-painted thumbnail in the photo have to do with anything?

Well, does anyone remember “Red”? A life-changing exploration of the archetypal power of that color, and of what it meant in my own life, accomplished through focusing on and surrounding myself with the color red in every form I could imagine. A wrenching and transformative experience it was, for sure, but not one that I really want to replicate.

I’m now working on “Yellow,” which has shown up in a big way of late. I’m hoping it’s not quite as exciting an experience as Red was. Yellow, it turns out, is a color I’ve avoided even more than I used to avoid Red. Hmmm….

Yellow: Caution, or warning—road signs, school buses, police tape. Warning—bees and wasps. “Notice me! And stay away, or else!” Consequences. Cowardice.

Yellow: Cheerfulness. Sunny mornings and blowing curtains in my mother’s kitchen. Sunflowers, forsythia, daffodils—Mom’s favorite flowers.

Unlike Red’s sturdy, solid presence, Yellow in its bright phase seems loud, aggressive, and belligerent. “Look at me!” it screams. Softer yellows, like butter or lemon, are gentle…but I still don’t like them.

Isn’t it interesting that Red is RED, and only Red. Versions of red have their own names: rust, pink, rose…. Yellow—in all its forms—is still yellow, modified by a separate word. Except maybe butterscotch, which is yummy.

Well, we shall see. For now, the only things I possess that are yellow are these thumbnails of mine, screaming at me as I type this. I can’t yet bring me to go find any clothing in yellow, not even a scarf. But I’m working up my courage.

To be continued, I have no doubt…..

The topic for discussion at the recent dinner meeting of our Pacifica group was “grace.” What does that mean? How does each of us define it? What have been our experiences of grace in our lifetime?

Thinking about the topic on the way home from the barn that afternoon, in preparation for the meeting, I remembered instances where what I experienced seemed like a state of grace. I have been blessed in this life with so many!

I’ve always felt that what we call “the grace of God” is always available to us, if we can allow ourselves to accept it. We’ve gotten ourselves separated from grace and from our divine nature, but it seems to me that “grace” is always there. It’s our natural state.

A friend once chided me gently when I told her that. No, she insisted, the grace of God is something that’s only available when it’s given, that is, when God decides, in His wisdom, to grant us grace.

But I don’t believe that God—or however one conceptualizes the Divine—is conditional. I think that’s a human thing. I think the grace of God is always there—we just have to somehow be able to relax into it and accept it. It doesn’t always look like we want it to look; it’s not necessarily “happy.” Some of the most profound experiences of grace that I’ve experienced have been deeply painful times, where suddenly in spite of the agony that I’m going through—in my case it’s been not so much physical pain as emotional—all of a sudden something opens up and I’m just so incredibly grateful for the experience and for my life and for the blessing of being alive to it all…. Gratitude has a lot to do with being able to perceive grace.

Horses, and probably all animals, live in a state of grace most or all of the time. They’re not surprised by it when it comes upon them, because it just IS; we humans are surprised by it because we’re so separated from the natural acceptance of what is. We’re so busy trying to do stuff and fix stuff and make stuff. Trying to relax into grace is very hard to do! It’s so foreign to what we spend our lives at.

Grace, in my experience, is a gift, a gift that’s given without strings—and it’s always there.

[Cross-posted on The Alchemical Horse.]

Our local Jung Society was privileged to host Dr. Stephen Aizenstat recently for a two-day event. Dr. Aizenstat is Chancellor and Founding President of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpenteria, California, where I studied and received my PhD. He gave a lecture on Dream Tending, a method he has developed over the past 30 or so years, and a workshop the following day where he explained the technique further and demonstratied how it works. Amazing.

Pacifica Graduate Institute is a wonderful place, and my time there was transformative. The first day of classes, I found myself immersed in a community of people who, by and large, viewed the world in the same “weird” way that I do. Pacifica gave me a framework for understanding my experiences—visions, “knowings,” dreams—that had always felt absolutely real but were unintelligible or even false when viewed through the lens of everyday culture. At Pacifica, I felt quite normal!

This morning I listened to an interview with Steve that the Society did while he was here, and understood, suddenly, a big part of why I’ve been so miserable lately.

Earlier this year, the pain in my tongue and jaw (which had been largely absent during the time that I couldn’t drive before my cataract surgery) returned with a vengeance. It’s never quite clear to me why it happens when it does—but this time, I suspect, it had to do with returning to my “old ways” of feeling responsible for taking care of everything, whether it “belongs” to me or not. I even gave myself hell when I wasn’t feeling positive, cheerful, and upbeat. It seems that I’m able to take the idea that “Life’s purpose is to feel joy!” as a command, with dire consequences if I “fail” to carry it out. Sheesh. Such talent.

Steve’s interview re-inspired me. I remembered the one class—just half a day, the last day of classes at Pacifica—that I had with him, and how clear his demonstration of Dream Tending was. Nearly a decade later, I remember that class vividly.

I suspect that Steve’s worldview and mine are pretty similar, and dreams, for him, are living entities, just as they are for me. Listening to him talk reminded me of how close my conscious relationship to the living world, to the Imaginal, and to dreams has been at times—and how it is NOT close at this moment. During to the 15 or so minutes that I listened to Steve talk, I noticed that I felt no pain—I checked to be sure. No pain at all. Hmmm….

Well then. It seems that part of what pains me is that I’m NOT living my life as I want to. That statement has nothing to do with money, time, aging body, aging pets, or anything else in my physical surroundings and my daily life. It’s about not being in touch with the Imaginal, with the dream world, with my non-physical friends and guides. It’s that aspect that is so limiting.

Steve’s words reminded me of being at Pacifica, in that place where I had a community of like-minded souls. He also reminded me that I actually do have control over how I interact with the world, and which reality I choose to experience. Interesting.

I have control, all right, but it’s not easy. In fact, it’s damn difficult. There’s so little support for living that way in the waking world, in the culture that surrounds me and informs almost everything I do and think. It’s a vicious circle: not being in touch brings about pain, and the pain weakens my resolve to stay in touch, so I get more out of touch…. And around and around we go.

But there are resources and community here in town, and I’m becoming more involved. Together, we can be a support system for each other.

Well, it’s the Full Moon in Libra this morning—time for renewing that close connection with the Imaginal and renewing my commitment to being aware of the Imaginal in each moment. I won’t manage that perfectly, but I commit to coming as close as I can.

Interesting….

This weekend I came across a fun little paper I wrote for one of my depth psychology classes at Pacifica.

It concerned the link in my psyche between grasses, which I’ve loved and studied since childhood, and the weasel who had wandered through my yard one afternoon, pausing just long enough to make eye contact with me before disappearing into the grass at the top of the hill.

In class later that month, our instructor had led us on a guided meditation, and this paper was the result. I edited it down considerably—this is just the “good stuff.”

Enjoy!

Grass

All my life I’ve loved grasses, drawn by their fragrance; their grace and beauty; their nurturing nature that allows them to be harvested and utilized by humankind without being killed. Grasses are an ancient group of flowering plants. Their earliest ancestors were probably small forest-dwellers, but over millions of years, they evolved into sturdy species that make up the bulk of the vast grassland ecosystems that support huge herds of grazing animals.

These prairie grasses, to which I’m strongly drawn, are the ones that form the vast, rolling seas that the prairie schooners sailed across generations ago, carrying my ancestors to their new homes in Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.

Grasses have a quiet, almost secretive aspect to them. We tend to think that they’re all about the leaves—for lawns, for hay. Most people are not aware that grasses, as flowering plants, have flowers just as much as do tulips or roses or lilies—but shy grass flowers are small and unobtrusive. They rely for their pollination not on insects, birds, or animals, but on the wind. As their panicles sway gracefully in the breeze, their pollen wafts along to their neighbors and cousins a block or a mile away.

Weasel: the meditation

In my mind’s eye I am lying in a grassy field near the edge of a wood. The sun is warm; it’s early fall, I think. A light breeze blows the drying grasses and I can hear them rustling. Our instructor, the guide in this meditation, suggests that if I look around I will see an animal approaching; this animal will be one I can converse with.

I hear something, all right—it’s small, quick, purposeful. I can’t see it yet. Aha—there it is: a quick, dark flash through the undergrowth. A weasel!

It’s obvious that in spite of the instructor’s suggestion, this weasel has no interest whatsoever in talking with me. It’s on a mission of some kind. I follow it in my mind, glad that this is a visualization, where I can make myself small.

Weasel and I tear along what appears to be a tunnel in the grass. He’s moving at a clip, intent on whatever it is he’s following. I get closer and closer, and at some point, without realizing it, Weasel and I become one being. My conscious mind is still working, but quietly, in the background. As Weasel, I have no use for higher cognitive functions—my awareness is focused on the moment, on the hunt, and on any sensory information that is important to my survival and my rumbling belly. Nothing else matters; nothing else exists.

The earth is cool and moist under our feet as we move deeper into the wooded area at the edge of the grassy field. Suddenly there’s a hole down into the ground—we follow it, down a tunnel into the dark, following a wonderful warm musky scent. Earth presses around us, but our streamlined body fits without difficulty.

Around a bend we rush, and the tunnel opens up just a bit. There! The source of the wonderful smell—a nest of squeaking baby rats squirming in a ball of shredded dry grass and plant fibers. Their blood is salty-sweet, and their flesh crunchy in our mouth. We eat rapidly, ravenously, our muzzle dripping. Once the last sweet morsel is devoured, we turn in the tight space and retrace our footsteps, sniffing as we go in case the adult rat has come home to check on her brood. Outside the tunnel, we course through the grass again, seeking the next delicious odor. Our belly is never full.

Weasel: Natural History

The Long-tailed Weasel, Mustela frenata, is a small, streamlined creature measuring less than two feet from snout to tail-tip. It inhabits most of North America, from Canada south into Mexico. It evolved four or so million years ago, with a body precisely suited for tracking and following rats and other rodents into their burrows.

Weasel is active mostly at night, though it isn’t uncommon to spot one during the daytime, when the tasty little voles are most active. In the northern parts of its range during the winter, the weasel’s dark brown coat changes to white, except for the black tip on its tail; it is then known as ermine, and hunted for its fur.

Weasels are thought of as sly, scheming, ruthless killers, without morals, killing for the sheer pleasure of killing. Calling someone a weasel is a serious insult. Weasel’s close relatives—Skunk, Ferret, Badger, Wolverine—mostly have similarly bad images. But in fact, rather than being sneaky or disreputable, mustelids are efficient carnivores admirably adapted to their environment. It is only when we put moral judgements on them—or when Weasel’s taste for chicken blood comes into conflict with our economic needs—that “ruthlessness” or trickery becomes an issue.

Weasels are sharp, canny, and extremely focused. Their high metabolic rate—nearly double that of most animals their size—gives them a voracious appetite that never quits. They are tireless in pursuit of a meal.

Another trait for which weasels are known is courage far beyond their small size—they will take on anything that 1) might be edible or 2) threatens them. A story is told of seeing a hawk stoop on a weasel and take off with the small animal in its talons. But a moment later the bird dropped like a stone, dead, with the weasel’s jaws locked in its breast.

Weasel in the Grass: the Message

I think it is significant that it is not the forest grasses or the bamboos that draw me, but rather the grasses of the plains, steppes, and rocky slopes. It’s the nurturing, sustaining, background/landscape quality of them, the subtle and hidden individuality of them, that I think speaks to my nature. For many years I have set aside two days a year for introspection, planning, and goal-setting, and each year the top item in my values list is “loving and encouraging others.” That’s a nurturing, grass-like value indeed! And I can see that in my character: the quiet, background supporting of other people, encouraging them, building them up, sustaining them with gentle energy. It’s a feminine, earth-mother quality, a deep and rhythmic energy that others can sense and that draw them to me for sustenance.

Weasel, on the other hand, is a very masculine force: focused, determined, courageous, outgoing, assertive, totally self-centered. Weasel is the yang to the grass’s yin: the much-needed balance. The prairies all too often are overgrazed, overutilized, used up and burnt out; but they never complain. They just quietly succumb to grazing pressure and the advent of weedy species.

This has happened to me in my life, when I’ve sublimated my own needs and desires to those of the people I love. But now, especially now, as I’m moving forward along the path that leads to my as-yet-unseen goal, I need Weasel’s energy and directedness to counteract my grassy passivity. My own rumbling psychic belly needs feeding, and Weasel has come to show me how to fill it by turning that hunger into a creative and determined intelligence.

And if I put these two—Weasel and Grass—imaginatively together, the message might be something like this: I must pursue my vision relentlessly, tirelessly, and fearlessly. I am part of Nature; I can trust my instinct, my intuition, to guide me on my course as surely as the weasel finds its prey. Courage and trust in myself are all I need, for I will be able to “ferret out” whatever it is that I need to know. And all the while, by my very existence I enrich the land and the life around me. I nurture because it is who I am.

I/Weasel am running again. Suddenly, the psychic connection is broken—I am myself, following Weasel through the grass. As though he feels the change, for one instant he turns to look at me with his bright, beady eyes. We acknowledge our kinship, and then he is off, following a scent to his unseen destiny.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

As a graduation present when I defended my dissertation five years ago, I bought myself a harp. Always wanted a harp (…and a horse…but that’s another story).

Since then, I’ve noodled away at my harp, mostly in the evenings, on rainy days when I was alone in the house, or in the wee, quiet hours when sleep won’t come. No lessons, no sheet music, just me tinkling out a melody and figuring out by ear what other notes go it.

Last week, a harp string broke, and I’ve not taken time to get a new one; so when the mood struck me to play something last night, I had to turn to the piano.

That’s when the weirdness started.

Picking out the melody of one of my favorite tunes with my right hand, I found my left hand finding chords to go along, just like I’d been doing with the harp. Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking any more. No sheet music, no nothing—just me, playing. Playing the piano. Not hesitantly, like “normal,” and not thinking about it. Just playing. Confidently, and rather loudly—gasp! Who is this playing, and what has she done with that timid Miss Kay?

I kept this up for an hour or so, running through my repertoire of favorites. I’m not saying I suddenly can play the piano—it’s still very much playing AT the piano, believe me! But suddenly, something shifted and I “got” the connection between chords and melody in a way that’s never translated to the piano before in my entire life.

Astonishing. My musical friends will all laugh—it’s so obvious, of course, but for me it’s always been intellectual and didn’t translate into a KNOWING that I, kinesthetic as I am, could make sense of. All my life, I’d sit down at the piano and try to read music and play songs “just the way they were supposed to be,” and I could never do it—I could never do it exactly, never memorize it and spit it back. My fingers just wouldn’t cooperate. But suddenly, there it is. Music. Chords.

Now, you all know me, right? It’s not IN me to just say, “Oh, that was fun,” and let it go at that. Nope. Especially not with something so huge (to me, at least).

I feel the ice breaking. It’s not just this particular breakthrough, either.

For months I’ve felt a change coming. Ever since the Mean Little Black Horse Midnight broke his leg just over a year ago, my life has kind of fallen apart. Nursing him back to health over the winter forced me into relative inactivity. Just as he healed, pain in my jaw and an injury to my own knee forestalled my return to “normal life.” Then this fall, cataracts and the upcoming surgery to correct them meant I had to give up driving and a lot of my freedom.

Something, clearly, is incubating. But what?

Dear Reader, I still don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s coming…and soon. And the understanding is dawning.

As you know, I see life in metaphor:

There was a new freedom in my playing last night. I wasn’t in my head, trying to “play the right notes” or “read the music.” Instead, I just opened up to what my fingers actually know. My ego stepped away from center stage.

In the experience and in a metaphorical sense, it was like letting go of the rules that I have tried so hard to live by, in my life and in my playing. It was like opening up to not knowing what it is that I’m “supposed to do while I’m here in this life,” and allowing for the possibility that I am actually doing “what I am supposed to be doing while I’m here,” just by being who I am.

There’s a growing trust in the process of Life—I first remember hearing that phrase more than 20 years ago: “Trust the process.” And I have done that, much more over these last 20 years than I ever did before.

But the idea and the sense of relaxing into trust is new to me. It’s a letting-go—a realization that I never had any control over anything much anyway. There are always choices to be made, and each choice has consequences; but I never have had control in the sense that we like to think of it. And suddenly, I find myself just fine—happy, even—with that fact. I find myself being surprised at what happens each day, and being excited to see what’s coming next—it’s a very different way of looking at the world than I’m used to. I know that’s part of what’s going on.

The best part of all this? I am so full of joy! What the heck is this?! Creativity, love, freedom, all those wonderful things—just welling up inside. Wow….

Thank you, God. Freedom … freedom from fear, mostly, I think. And there’s love. Lots of love. And more to come!

I am so blessed!

[Cross-posted on The Alchemical Horse.]

It’s been nearly four months since I posted on either of my blogs. The reason, it seems, is that Midnight’s injury and long recovery took more out of me than I realized. A cold that started the day after Christmas kept lingering, and a bout with the flu in late January knocked me out for a couple of weeks. The cough lingered for most of February and triggered the pain in my tongue and jaw, which had been manageable up until then…. It got so bad that I went about six weeks in late February and March without a single full night’s sleep. That, friends, was NOT fun.

It felt like I “fell apart” right after Midnight’s condition improved to the point where we were no longer worried about his survival. I guess that at some level my body figured it was safe to let go the terrible focus and tension that had kept me pushing through that bitter winter, tending to him every day, and often twice or more each day. I’m no spring chicken, after all.

Anyway. It’s now nearly June and both I and Midnight are doing pretty darn well. Midders may never be quite as spry as he once was, but he’s loving his life! He’s able to walk, trot, and even canter when he feels like it, and he races the food wagon to his stall most days, twice a day. He’s always eager for a walk or a meal, and has gained weight despite the stress of these last few months.

As for me, I’m back to sleeping at night, worrying a whole lot less, and yes, I’m loving my life, too. I’m finally able to take clients again, and am looking forward to some exciting developments for the Alchemical Horse! Stay tuned!

This entry is just an explanation of this long silence, and a promise of posts to come on a much more regular basis. Thanks, readers, for checking in! I’ll talk with you soon!

(Cross-posted on The Alchemical Horse)