new horizons

After nearly a year of mulling this over, I finally made the leap and bought beet pulp, alfalfa pellets, and along with the rest of my supplements, will be making the horses' feed from "scratch."

As usual, the impetus for this is Salina. After reading that the soy in horse feeds is causing some mares to develop swollen udders and metabolic horses (or those on the border) to have laminitic episodes, I decided it was time to make the changeover.

This is not the first time Salina has led me into new territory, nor will it be the last, I'm sure. One of her missions seems to be to teach me all the things I need to know about horses.

So, as I type, there is beet pulp soaking in the laundry room, and tomorrow I'll begin the gradual shift from processed feed to something different. I have to admit, I'm excited, now that I've set forth.

On other fronts, I got the pony's kinesiology test results this morning. He has:

low digestive enzymes

low insulin

high blood sugar

a blocked meridian that needs acupuncture

low seratonins

Patsy had nearly NO information about the pony, and when she described the blocked meridian and where it is in the body, I nearly fell over. I was not writing fast enough to get the exact name of this meridian, but it begins behind the eye, goes down each side of the neck, behind the scapula, and into his left leg - and that's where the block is.

I immediately realized that this must be why he has always had issues with taking the left canter lead, and why he counter-bends traveling left. She said it is likely he has had soreness in the shoulder - guess what part of his body the massage therapist always finds tight and tender?

His 4-week herbal regimen will arrive in two days, and I have a call into an equine acupuncturist/vet who came highly recommended. Now it's the pony leading me into new territory.

It's also fascinating to me that he has the blood sugar/insulin issue - this time of year has always been a difficult time for him, and I have suspected the grass of late summer/early fall is just too high in sugars for his system. Hopefully (and Patsy thinks we'll really see a change) this course of treatment will give my daughter a great year of riding before she has another growth spurt and we have to look at training him to drive. (and won't THAT be an exciting new horizon to explore!)

cloudy with a little flurry (of activity)

We're getting some welcome rain this week, and a nice break from the summer sun with these gray, rain cloud days. This morning I went out dressed to ride, but by the time I got the feeding done and some basic barn chores out of the way, it had started raining. I settled into a chair in the barn aisle with the white board, which was woefully out of date with reference to who is getting what feed-wise right now. I tend to carry all that info in my head, and I like to have it written down in a pretty obvious place so that everyone knows who's eating what in the barn.

Everyone in the barn is doing well. The biggest drama this week is the gigantic horse flies, but running into the barn seems to deter them. Cody seems to be their favorite target, and the pony not at all. I haven't seen any going after Rafer Johnson either.

Otherwise, after a weekend that really did get me rolling again, I've been working on adding somewhere in the vicinity of 20k words to the novel, with plans to exchange mss with my writing partner in a week and a half. She has buoyed me to think querying thoughts for September.

Funny how one thing moving tends to set other things in motion. I've had two magazine article queries answered positively this week, and some other things are rolling in that area.

The fall flurry of activity is beginning - and I've got two big crows right outside marching toward the window even as I type. Things always flow when the crows are near.

noveling

(dream castles, courtesy of Matthew Cromer)

Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

-Jorge Luis Borges

a little salina update

The swelling has reduced by one-third as of this morning - and when I attempted to get an even closer look, she walked away. As in, "that no longer requires your attention, please give me more hay."

If I ever go back to school to study anything formally, it will be homeopathy. Powerful and effective.

tune of the cosmic dust

(title from an entry in Caitlin Matthews' The Celtic Spirit)


Human beings, vegetables, cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.

-Albert Einstein

(image courtesy of my husband)


This week the tune of the cosmic dust seems more apparent, as one thing happens and seems almost magically to link up to a next thing, in a sequence that fits perfectly but was not planned, nor could have been, by me.

Sunday I woke up to Salina's enlarged udder, and rolled through the day with that on my mind. Her quick response to the homeopathic remedy carried through to Monday, when talking with the vet, I was able to get validation and also offer some needed information to his office staff about bringing a horse down to the area to board.

Monday afternoon we arrived at my daughter's dressage lesson to find the trainer in the midst of many emergencies: the barn loft was literally falling, and being supported by steel support beams carried in by a construction team. A load of footing was being delivered into the arena, not at all on the schedule she had arranged. It was dumped in the wrong part of the arena and was the wrong kind of sand.

The Grand Prix schoolmistress horse my daughter rides was a pillar of grace. She stood quietly while being tacked up in a paddock, the sound of hay bales being dropped from the temporarily secured loft and landing on a metal trailer didn't bother her. The dump truck maneuvering didn't alarm her.

And when we walked out to the arena for the lesson, the trainer put on her ribboned hat and proceeded to teach, marking off a section of the arena where there were no mountains of orange sand blocking the way, so my daughter could ride.

I learned that there was more still going on: a family member diagnosed with a scary disease, three horses lame, a family pet in surgery.

Needless to say, I received a lesson on Monday, and it was seeing grace under pressure.

My husband announced the beach plans that evening, and wonderfully, a good friend and former writing partner was free on such short notice to come for an impromptu writing retreat this weekend. She told me when I emailed that she had been working on her book all day, and had been feeling the need to give it special time this week. And now we will pool our creative energies and move forward.

Tuesday we began preparing for the pizza/movie night tomorrow, when 11 pre/early teens will gather and plan some activities for their fall. They're all excited about meeting, and there was a last-minute rush of RSVPs that added to the excite.

I got in bed last night tired and realized my left breast was having an unusual sensation. (it's Salina's left udder that is swollen) It felt like something clearing. A pressure releasing. I breathed a sigh of relief. She is in no pain, nor would I let her be, and has no symptoms beyond the swelling. But of course I have been aware continuously that the swelling needs to reduce for things to be completely normal. I suspect I'll find today that that symptom too is resolving.

It's being one of those spans of time when I can almost see the bigger machination turning and spinning - where things fall into place and one thing sets up another.

It reminds me of my most favored Mark Helprin passage, from his novel The Winter's Tale:

Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of the electron, or the occurrence of one astonishingly frigid winter after another. Even electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability, are tame and obsequious little creatures that rush around at the speed of light, going precisely where they are supposed to go. They make faint whistling sounds that when apprehended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying through a forest, and they do exactly as they are told. Of this, one can be certain.

And yet, there is a wonderful anarchy, in that the milkman chooses when to arise, the rat picks the tunnel into which he will dive when the subway comes rushing down the track from Borough Hall, and the snowflake will fall as it will. How can this be? If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given -- so we track it, in linear fashion, piece by piece. Time, however, can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is -- and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others.


I propose that today we all stand back and breathe, take it all in, and celebrate the vista. That's my plan for the day.