I have missed four whole Cup of Coffee days. This is shocking and I have no excuse for you. I’m always talking about showing up, and yet there was no showing up. And now, to make up for it, I should have an epic for you, something rich with jewels of wisdom and perfect pearls of universal truths, but I don’t.
There have been floods here and the mares had to be moved up to the hill and the temperature has plummeted and it’s suddenly feeling very weathery. I spend a huge amount of my time feeling grateful because we don’t really have big weather in Scotland. It’s not like my friends in Canada, with four months of snow and ice, or my buddies in Australia, who seem to veer between drought and flood, or my clients in Florida, who sometimes can’t make a Zoom call because there is a hurricane blowing in.
Yet, for all that, I am finely tuned to changes in weather. The red mare is too, and sometimes we look at each other and feel each other’s jangles, as if there is some delicate mechanism deep inside which has been sent just a little off-kilter.
I’m often looking for the balance between excuses and reasons. I like to know what is going on. I have to face my limits. (Which are legion.) There is a part of me which wants to be stoic and butch and crack on and not make a fuss. And then there is a part which sometimes feels stretched to the limit, so I need to retreat, in mind and body, and sit very still and let the tank fill up. There is no point lashing oneself if all the systems are blinking red. But at the same time, I don’t like to be self-indulgent, when I could pick myself up and make one last, needed effort.
Perhaps every single thing in life is about balance. I spend half my time trying to work out what life is about. There are days when I think it is love, and days when I think it is kindness and empathy, and days when I think it is connection. (Sometimes, I think life is about horses, but then they embody all those words I have just written. They also teach me about something greater than myself, and about patience and gratitude and opening myself to the universe. Because obviously it’s vitally important to open oneself to the universe at all times.)
It’s dark now, and the fairy lights are twinkling, and I don’t have the cosmic answers. I have not felt precisely like Doris Day today; there were no show tunes and million-watt smile. My body is tired, but I got all my work done and the mares are back in their field and I even sent one of those difficult emails, which I had been putting off.
I saw a thing out of the corner of my eye this morning and I can’t remember it precisely, but it said something like - if you get out of bed in the morning and go to bed at night, that is success. It was a lovely, humane thought, one that struck me as being about not hounding ourselves to be coruscating every single day. Sometimes, it is about getting up, and walking through a day, and doing no harm, and making some small offering, and going to bed at last.
Sometimes it is about accepting what is, and rising to meet another dawn.
Or something like that.