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Today I met someone I hope will be a new friend. She reminded me so much of another friend who passed out of our lives a few years ago.
My friend, L______, and I used to ride horses together. Twice a week or so, for a year. I'm not a big horse person, but L______ needed a partner on her rides and, thinking my Montana pedigree implied horse sense, nominated me as the guy to get her horse in order. In truth, when I was living and working in Montana, I was much more a farmer than a rancher (big difference in the circles I traveled in), and whenever a cow or two needed chasing, I did so on a dirt bike, rather than on a horse. In those days, horses were way too much trouble. They required attention, love, affection, humanness--qualities in which I was sorely lacking. But now, cut to twenty-five years and a lifetime or two later, when L______ asked me to ride, I responded like any actor would to any director or producer asking the question: You're a good horseman, right? Oh, absolutely. Where and when? I'm there.
Why? Because I wanted to spend time with L______, and if that required me being a good horseman, then by God, that's what I was going to be.
When we rode together, time didn't matter. Problems didn't exist. She wasn't sick. I wasn't losing a friend. It was always springtime. The horses would stop and eat flowers, we'd let them. The problem horse was not a problem for me. (I had learned a thing or two, mostly from Jack Lilly and his boys who've wrangled a few of the Westerns I've done, and after a few test runs, Cheyenne let me be the boss.) We almost never talked about anything deep or meaningful, but L______ was a meditator, too, and for those few hours a few times a week, it felt like we were sharing a heart.
This is the power of consciousness, of meditation. This is available to all of us all the time. This kind of sharing. This kind of oneness. We don't let ourselves have it because it scares us. It scares us to think of having it. It scares us to let ourselves want it (because what if someone could take it away?). It scares us to think of letting someone else in. Guess what? They're already in. In consciousness, we can stop ignoring this truth, stop pretending we're separate. Start sharing, consciously, at the level we're already alive to each other.
The last time L______ and I went riding together, we did something we'd never done before. She called me, seven in the morning, and said, "I'm just back from the hospital. I haven't slept all night. Haven't had a shower. But they gave me steroids, so I can breathe for the first time in days. Come. Let's go for a ride."
I was there in 15 minutes.
We rode way out into Griffith Park, let the horses drink their fill and graze in the shade, then headed back. At the edge of this ravine, we paused for a moment. There's a path around the side, safe and serene. There's a path, steep, down the side, through the brush at the bottom, and up the other side. L______ looked at me--God, I can see that look now. The beauty of it--and said, "Let's do it," and suddenly we were over the edge and down and riding faster than I'd ever been on a horse. It lasted forever and was over too soon and then we were moseying back across the L.A. River and past the stables and through the neighborhood to her home and the corral there, both of us with the silliest grins pasted to our faces.
Today I will allow myself to know someone as deeply as I would if it were the last time we'd see each other, and I will express my gratitude to the universe for the opportunity.
Mermaid, Tribeca
All material copyright Jeff Kober
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