This weekend, I woke to rain. Big, sobbing drops of rain that spilled like lakes on landing. The path up to my office is an uprising of green, leaves licking your cheeks, flowers caressing your hair as you walk up. I arrive as spider web destroyer, the eight limbed developers having just clocked off from night shift, my walking unintentially destroying the foundations.
I remarked to my husband that it’s impossible to walk from house to office and through the native jungle without getting drenched.
‘I remember planting those trees a few years back’, he remarked, ‘hoping they would grow into a tunnel.’
Life prevails, it turns out. There is always a beyond.
These last few mornings when I have sat down to write, I’ve had trouble getting words out. I feel like I should be…. Something different. Something other than I am right now.
Perhaps more upbeat. Perhaps more inspiring. Perhaps more instructional.
Perhaps more, perhaps more, perhaps more.
I don’t have much horsey news of my own to report because my horsey crew have not been getting a lot of airtime. Tis not their fault, nor really is it mine.
They are loved and hugged and hayed, albeit slightly wet and muddy.
I have felt myself gain momentum only to have it lost again.
Life lately has been quite lifey. A run of illnesses. The demands of parenting and caregiving, which I have spoken of before. The reality of business, which like all businesses, have their seasons. Weather scuppering plans. It can be all quite boring to talk about, does not necessarily make for uplifting words or prose, and yet that doesn’t make it less true.
And yet this is what it means to have a life with horses.
Life with means the ups and downs, the periods where things all go to plan, and equally the times when they very much don’t.
It’s a delicate thing to hold a sense of possibility for yourself, hold a sense of the beyond whilst not letting yourself be consumed by ‘over there’. Whilst not letting yourself be consumed by the pressure of the things you aren’t currently and think you should be.
Being consumed by ‘over there’ is when comparison creeps in. Being consumed by ‘over there’ creates the illusion of ‘not enough-ness’ in this moment, right here.
I wonder if we have confused allowing ourselves to be swallowed, enveloped by the now with a darkness we should avoid, a place we fear to go that we never may return from?
Light seeking is necessary but should not rise from a compulsion. We have polarised light and dark into the same narrative the span of the reactive world is falling into. All good, all bad, no room for nuance.
Life, instead, is always a series of in-betweens. There is so much shading all around the edges.
I am noticing, as I adventure through this time, how so many of us are tip-toeing on the cusp. Of different life stages. Of down times and up times. Of world events around us creating an upheaval.
And that perhaps, in addition to reaching for the glimmers, we need spaces for the shadows too. Places of gentle fermentation to notice what needs to be explored, what needs to be allowed, what needs to be shed.
With the remembrance that there is always a beyond.
A contemplation on navigating murky spaces.