Update on Honor

In 2011, I began this blog partially to chronicle my journey with Honor, our Quarab gelding.
(Here's a link to read about that:)

It has definitely been a ride! Indeed, sometimes I've contemplated passing him on to someone more experienced than I. He is a beautiful boy, but I am not as unbreakable as I was at 19, and the more I endeavored to teach him, the more I realized that while I knew how to ride (or more accurately, how not to fall off), I did not really know how to advance him beyond the basics (and even some of those were missing).

Enter an amazing trainer in the Redding area. She has transformed this equine equivalent of a slightly snarky teenage boy into an attentive, collected, respectful mount. She has also transformed yours truly from a self-taught bareback rider into one who can give proper leg and rein cues, and command respect in the saddle and on the ground. Yes. And now I'm taking Honor out on the trails and we are having an idyllic time.

I know there are deeper meanings to this chain of events, which I could and probably will delve into at some point, but honestly, my brain hasn't had enough coffee for that yet, and really, I just wanted to give an update on Honor because I'm so thrilled with who he has become and the fact that I am able to go out riding under the endless October sky.

Morning Meditations

The early morning breeze washes over me like a river, tossing the trees under a sky not yet light.

Coffee, warm and fragrantly brown, doctored up with cream and sweetness, lends its magic to my quiet spot, the mantle clock which ticks too loudly has mercifully stopped sometime in the wee hours of the night, and Toots snoozes on the back of the couch.

Toots

It's a typical morning in so many ways--the same room, the same coffee cup, the same planet--yet different, because this morning I am taking a moment to breathe in: to hear, to feel, to smell these elements of my life. This is not because I am a great philosopher or incredibly poetic. Rather, it is a result of a recent conversation with my travel writer daughter who is training herself to pause. Pause to live, to experience, to capture the moment.

Even as I write this, I realize I've posted similar blog entries, and I wonder at my recurring theme. Does this "capturing-moments-living-dreams-making-memories" continually surface because

A: I hunger to fully experience, yet so often see only afterwards what riches went unnoticed even while I held them in my hands.

B: I sense a greater something, an unseen realm, that gives depth to the world through which I walk.

C: I am hoping that somehow the act of chronicling moments will enable me to fully experience them. 

D: God has put "eternity in my heart", as Job said, and I feel it in every breeze, every smile, every sky.

All of these, and more. I want to gaze with fresh eyes on familiar scenes. The weathered green of an
old cabinet sheltering special coffee cups from precious people and remembered places. The painted duck that belonged to my Granny. A trip to Samoa Beach near Arcata, CA--life is all around me, a familiar space and a frontier to be explored all at the same time. And so I savor the coffee, study the breeze, gaze on the sky, and am at the same time both content and longing.

Perhaps in its own way, this diving deep into the precious everyday-ness of life is like hunger. We eat our fill, but then we turn around and yet another scene spreads out before us, only to leave us yearning once again...

Youngest son braving cold water in quest of a perfect wave