New Year / New World
Incubating New Times

Greetings!

  

Bitter cold with little sunshine recently has kept us all bundled and indoors, horses and people alike. We are cocooned on the brink of this new world, having emerged happily from the Mayan "end of the world" which we anticipated with curiosity and inquiring minds. For my part, rich gatherings with family and friends counterpointed the long dark nights. There seemed a burgeoning of something new in the darkness of the "passing-awayness" in 2012. Something seems different now, subtle and powerful, quiet and slowly emerging.

It's a rather delicious sense of liminality, an in-betweeness that seems to ask mostly for patience as something new is being seeded and taking root. For me,  expression in art seems the only way to any understanding of it. Making art in a friend's studio. Taking photographs from new angles. Thinking about writing a new book. Creating from my own muse's inspiration, alongside giving artful form to clients' websites.

My daughter asked me to create something about the meaning of the winter solstice to share at a family gathering. I calligraphed these words by Antonio Machado onto paste paper I had created in the studio:

"I thought my fire was out, and stirred the ashes . . . . I burned my fingers."

Yesterday the intense cold was accompanied by bright sun, and I gratefully headed for the horses to give them some time on fresh grass. Mystic greeted me with long sighs, velvet muzzle resting for long moments on my face, my chest, my shoulder. Her neck wrapped around me and her chin rested on my hip. Eyes closed, no hurry to do anything, sweetness flowing between us. Yes, I thought, this is what we are all doing these days.

The poet Hafiz says it this way:

When the sun within speaks, when love reaches out its hand and places it upon another,

any power the stars and planets might have upon us,

any fears you can muster can become so rightfully insignificant.

What one heart can do for another heart, is there any beauty in the world that can match this?

Brotherhood, sisterhood, humanity becomes the joy and the emancipation.

So, the calendar for this year's events will emerge soon, I trust. Here is a beginning:

May 13 - 16, 2013
10th Gathering on Equine-assisted Learning and Mental Health Best Practices, Prescott College, Prescott AZ

My presentation: "The Power of Story for Holistic Approaches to Equine Assistance Learning and Psychotherapy"

I trust the New Year is opening for you with goodness, beauty and promise. I look forward to seeing you somewhere on the trail in these coming days.


Trish Signature

  

Yii Haa