This is from Keri Smith’s book,How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum.  I have this page posted on my desktop, and every couple days, I open it to remind myself to wake up to seeing things anew.  I particularly like the suggestions that are not so familiar to me, like tracing things back to their origins or noticing the stories that are going on around me.

Right at this time, I have a swirl of stories about my off-the-rails youngest daughter.  Raging stories, regretful stories, mean stories, sad stories, frustrated stories, despairing stories.  I also have stories with various endings, including death, dismemberment, embraces and joy.  Sometimes I can’t choose the story I might prefer because it is crowded out by an obsessive story.  Sometimes I see my story as I would like to tell it in a movie or a book.  For example, I went to see Red 2 with Helen Mirren et. al., and got very excited during the scene when she was driving with an Asian hit man in a blue sports car.  She said, “Show me something,” and he put the car into a slo-mo spin as Helen aimed and fired guns out both windows with that deadly, steely gaze.  That is a story I could love. And for those of you who may not see the movie, that moment is minute 2:10 on the trailer.

But back to being an explorer.  To help with my stories, I am choosing #4:  alter your course often.  When I do that, I can dislodge from the stuckness of a bad story and access what is actually happening now, this moment, this breath.

Staying in the saddle means that regardless of how rough the ride, we try to maintain balance.  I am not talking just about riding here.  When our youngest daughter ran away and cut off all communication, dropping out of the college and basically shattering her family and mucking up her life, we all came unseated.  It took me about two months to even find my horse and try to get back on. I am back in the saddle, but there are days when my balance is poor, when I do not want to ride or even get up.

Those days a fewer and farther between.  The universe, curiously, has delivered me two great gifts:  An artist’s fellowship from the state of Connecticut and a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy.  I take those gifts to mean that not only must I ride forward, but I have to be firmly seated in my own life, my own work, moving into the days with a courageous heart.  When Mark Rashid told us to ride with “feel, timing, blending, balance and breath,” I took that as an instruction for living.  His idea is that those elements result in softness – the kind of irresistible Aikido softness that can move mountains.  My horses already feel the difference.  So do I.  My daughter may be lost, but it is that softness, if anything, that will open a way for her to return.