I feel exhilarated and expanded. I feel ten feet tall, like when I sit on Flamin', my favorite horse. My sit bones are mobile and ready to follow the movement of a horse and to guide a horse, and since I don't have a horse right here, I'm talkin' to my chair.
Kim was my mentor yesterday and she is quite a character. She is a dancer, and so presented some different moves in working with the horses. I also saw the immediate effects of how I hold my hands yesterday. When I first got on top the horse, I was holding the horn of the saddle and had my left hand clenched. When I held the little rope that is there, not a rein, but a little rope, and unclenched my hand, my whole upper body relaxed, and I am carrying that feeling now. I am mobile in my chair, and swaying softly back and forth. It is my own personal massage. I am going to pay more attention to my hands today, and how that affects the rest of me.
The day is filled with bird song, and I am filled with an increasing wonder at the movement and vibration in, and of life.
I saw a man who caught two trout yesterday in Lake Lagunitas.
I came home and read the magazine Orion, and there was a poem on trout by Brian Swann
TROUT STREAM
Flash by flash as if an exorcist
had just freed them from their skins
to shoot through a flexible world where
everything happens at once, freed to
swim in and out of selves new at each gleam
so where they end is where they begin and
flashes pricking the body make
everywhere the same and nowhere so
they are their own reflections moving
as music among bolts of a current quick
as a thought of something else,
so you have to take hold of yourself and
step back before you lose your balance
and fall in.
- Brian Swann
I read this and feel like a trout, for a moment, and realize yesterday I did almost fall into the lake. I didn't step back soon enough, and slid right down the hill to the lip of the lake. I rode a horse and a hill yesterday. It was quite fun.