black and bay, sorrel and gray (you have to imagine little Rafer Johnson until January), and one painted little pony...

color

The colors this fall are stunning. My landscape photographer husband says drought makes for gorgeous fall color. Every time I drive the past week and a half, it takes a mammoth effort to keep my eyes on the road. They wander to the trees, like looking at a sweeping canvas, except no painting I've ever seen manages to capture the color of sunlight through autumn leaves.

Nevertheless, those of us who write and paint and photograph seem bent on trying.

This year there are two trees bordering the driveway that have made me happy every single day. My own private gallery showing. I've not managed to bring their vibrancy to this page, but the photo is in honor of all the trees.

***

On other fronts: I am hovering at the 19k mark with my writing project, and hoping to get back to a routine this week.

I spent yesterday at a Pony Club clinic with my daughter and her pony, and Saturday was spent getting ready. Yesterday we were up at 5 a.m. and got home in the dark. After a really long day riding and wrapping pony legs and learning about things like horse deworming strategies, she unloaded her pony and the next thing I knew, she was riding him bareback in the pink haze of our lighted arena.

There isn't enough time in the day for all the horsey things.

Today I have Salina and Keil Bay to ride. Cody has a young woman coming over to ride him (her horse is on stall rest), and my daughter has a lesson on her pony. I'm thinking about taking the laptop out to the barn and writing in between all the riding.

A final note for today: assessing vs obsessing worked. I have a highly-regarded barefoot hoof practitioner coming in two weeks to consult about all the horse feet here. If you're not a horse person, you probably don't know that farriers and trimmers, the good ones, are hard to come by and often not taking new clients. So I'm relieved and thrilled to be on his schedule.

And - it's raining! And the tarp is off the shavings pile, so I have to run.

finding the flow

Monday my daily word count dropped to 800 words, which I was okay with, and yesterday was a total wash. Tuesdays are my busiest days and I got sidetracked after the farrier's visit. Keil Bay has mild thrush in his hind feet and this led to research and more research today. Apparently thrush is most common in horses with contracted heels, which can result from poor trimming or simply be the natural shape of the horse's foot. Either way, I need to assess this. The operative word here, for me, is ASSESS. AS opposed to OBSESS.

Writing-wise my goal for today is to find the flow again and get at least my daily quota. Generally what works is to re-read the entire piece and slide back into the rhythm of the writing.

Fortunately, today is much less structured and I have the time to do that.


UPDATE: I managed to get around 1k written yesterday and another 1k this morning (Thursday) and just topped 18k total - so I feel I'm back in business! I hope to go into the weekend with 20k. We'll see...

woolgathering

Funny - after my last post I woke up this morning to find the "word of the day" in my inbox was ... woolgathering.

Perfect! I'll be imagining myself collecting bits of brightly colored wool all day, and weaving them into something lovely tonight.

Just had to dash out the door to see what Keil Bay was hyena-shrieking about. Alas, he and the pony were having one of their frosty morning play sessions. Keil Bay goes down onto his knees in order to bite the pony's belly. They ended with a flying gallop up the hill and some quite lovely trot circles.

time changing and other things

I'm feeling sad about the time change tonight. It will be dark when I GET to my office some days, and the horses will come in earlier now.

I'll adjust, but I expect to feel perpetually behind for a week or so, and I already feel like that enough of the time.

A good thing for the writing life, though, more hours in the evening, and I came upon this quote just now that seems appropriate:

"Stories are medicine ... they have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything -- we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories."

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.

I have an aspiration to sit by the woodstove on a series of cold winter nights and knit myself a poncho. This is complicated by the fact that I don't know how to knit. I'm not likely to tackle this complication in time for this season, but instead I'm going to think of myself knitting with words. A story that remedies.

Addendum: I was looking through some old writing this a.m., looking for a particular passage that I thought might fit into the work. Didn't find it, but did come upon this dream I had back in 2005:

a huge garden (writing) spider built a gigantic web over my bed - it was thick and wide, the shape of a book when lying open. woven into it was a cross (runic cross??) there was a beautiful hummingbird hovering behind the web, trying to get through, but the web was so thick ... and then it began to glow, gold and green.

My gosh - I have absolutely no memory of that. What a wonderful dream. This is why we should write them down - we forget, even the ones we don't think we will.