Foto van Aline Valster

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Let’s Shine

If you could change your life, what would you want to change?
The numbers on your bank account?
Would you wish to be friendlier, or less angry?
Or maybe change your employer’s attitude or your partner’s or your parents’?

The truth is:
we can change our lives,
we can change our beliefs,
we can change our perspectives
and with changing ourselves,
we change the relationships we are in.
Let’s shine.

When we are ready to make changes in our Life, we attract whatever we need, that is the law of Attraction. This works both ways: if we dwell on what we don’t want, we get more of what we don’t want.
Science has discovered what native Americans, Aboriginals and animals, especially Horses and dolphins, already knew:
We can use our bodies as tuner, receiver and amplifier,
We can learn to trust our body language,
We can learn to recognize our Inner Wisdom.
Let’s shine.
Would you like to listen to your Heart’s desire?
Would you like to be Authentic?
Each of us is like a box filled with precious jewels.
We only have to sweep the dust off and shine.

I have never met greater teachers and healers than Horses.
Let’s give them a dust rag or even a broom and
Let’s SHINE!

Ineke Rietveld

You are me and I am you.
It is obvious that we are inter-are.
You cultivate the flower in yourself so that I will be beautiful.
I transform the garbage in myself so that you do not have to suffer.
I support you, you support me.
I am here to bring you peace
you are here to bring me joy.

– Thich Naht Hanh

Love after Love

The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each of you will smile at the other´s welcome,

And say, sit, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life, whom you have ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

By Derek Walcott

Guest House

Being human is like
A guest house.

Each morning a new arrival.

A joy,
A depression,
A meanness,
Some momentary awareness

Comes as un unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they´re a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweep your house
Empty of its furniture,
Still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out
For some new delight.

The dark thought,
The shame,
The malice,

Meet them at the door
Laughing,

And invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
Because each has been sent
As a guide from beyond.

Poem from Jelal´uddin Rumi, a 13th century Mystic Poet

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
As you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life you could save.

By Mary Oliver
(New and selected poems)

To all my wonderful horse loving friends..

A page from an 87 yr. old horsewoman’s handwritten Journal:

I ride. That seems like such a simple statement. However as many women
who ride know…. it is really a complicated matter. It has to do with power and empowerment; being able to do things you might once have considered out of reach or ability. I have considered this as I shovel manure, fill
water barrels in the cold rain, wait for the vet/farrier/electrician/hay delivery, change a tire on a horse trailer by the side of the freeway, or cool a gelding out before getting down to the business of drinking a cold drink after a long ride. The time, the money, the effort it takes to ride calls for dedication. At least, I call it dedication. Both my ex-husbands call it ‘a sickness.’

It’s a nice sickness I’ve had since I was a small girl bouncing my plastic model horses and dreaming of the day I would ride a real horse. Most of the women I ride with understand that meaning of ’the sickness.’ It’s not a sport. It’s not a hobby. It’s what we do and– in some ways– who we are as women and human beings.

I ride. I hook up my trailer and load my gelding. I haul to some nice trailhead somewhere, unload, saddle up, whistle up my dog and I ride. I breathe in the air, watch the sunlight filter through the trees and savor the movement of my horse. My shoulders relax. A smile spreads across my weathered face. I pull my floppy hat down and let the real world fade into the tracks my horse leaves in the sand. Time slows. Flying insects buzz loudly, looking like fairies. My gelding flicks his ears and moves down the trail. I can smell his sweat and it is perfume to my senses. Time slows. The rhythm of his walk and the movement of the leaves become my focus. My saddle creaks and the leather rein in my hand softens with the warmth.

I consider the simple statement: I ride. I think of all I do because I ride. Climb rocky slopes, wade into a lily-pad lake, race a friend across the hayfield… all the while laughing and feeling my heart in my chest. Other days just the act of mounting and dismounting can be a real accomplishment. Still I ride, no matter how tired or how much my sitter bones or any of my other acquired horse-related injuries hurt. I ride. And I feel a lot better for doing so.

I think of the people, mostly women, that I’ve met. I consider how competent they all are. Not a weenie in the bunch. We haul 40 ft. rigs, we back ‘em up into tight spaces without clipping a tree. We set up camp, tend the horses. We cook and keep our camp neat. We understand and love our companions, our horses. We respect each other and those we encounter on the trail. We know that if you are out there riding, you also shovel, fill, bathe, wait and doctor. Your hands are a little rough and you travel without makeup or hair gel. You do without to afford the ‘sickness’ and probably, when you were a small girl, you bounced a little model horse while you dreamed of riding a real one.

“My treasures do not chink or glitter, they gleam in the sun and neigh in
the night.”