Responding to a combination of serving clients from around the country as well as responding to Covid restrictions locally, I have recently been doing horse coaching sessions via Zoom.

I bring my phone out to the paddock where Blue Angel, my wise old white mare, Derby the mini donkey with the big personality, and tiny black lead mare Cadence, spend their days. Long horned cattle and sandhill cranes laze in the pasture next door. Sandia Peak looms in the distance under the big New Mexico sky.

I have often said that if I ever give up my sense of wonder and discovery in doing equine guided coaching, I should turn in my card. This was when I was doing boots-on-the ground horse sessions with clients. I could always count on the horses to get ...

Here is an idea for a way to share the gift of story this season. It works well in the cozy circle of family that many of us won’t have in person this year. But it also works beautifully in a Zoom gathering!

“Story Seeds” is a game anyone can play that makes spontaneous storytellers of us all. I often play it in my workshops where there are several people, but you could play it with just two people if you don’t have a whole group nearby.......

The wisdom of the ancients understood the place for both light and darkness. Although we might like to have all light all the time, we live on the physical plane where without one, the other does not exist. Solstice is a celebration of equal measure light and dark. It comes on December 21, around the time when many festivals of light are celebrated around the world such as Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, Yule, and St. Lucia Day.

I’m all for joy and good cheer, the more the better. However, I’ve often struggled with relentless holiday merriment when, as an adult, holidays bear a mixed bag of childhood memories and current reality, some delightful, some difficult.

Several years ago, it occurred to me that during the holiday ......

I was afraid I might not make new friends when I moved to New Mexico a year and a half ago. I was afraid that maybe I would leave everybody and everything behind and wonder, once I got down here, what was I thinking. But I knew I needed to make the move. I needed to leave the big, dark old house on Pillsbury Avenue in Minneapolis behind and find light. Trust became my watchword.

I am grateful for the good New Mexico women who have appeared before me almost by magic. One day while scrolling through one of my horse groups on Facebook, I noticed that Pat, an equine assisted therapist, lived in a stone’s throw away from where I now live. One day I messaged her suggesting we connect in person. We talked a bit on the phone and ......

Patience was never my forte. My fuse shortened even more after I had two daughters who were ten months apart. It seemed that there was never enough time and there was always something spilling, or someone was spitting up, screaming or both were running in different directions. What happened moment to moment was rarely in the schedule I had set up in my head. Stopping to wipe erp off the shoulder of my navy-blue pantsuit before going to work really slowed me down, not to mention made the glam factor impossible.

It’s true, though, that people can change. I had done a seminar that revealed to me in a profound way this fact of life: no matter how I think things should be, whatever is going on is what is going on. Though so ......

There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger.

The true courage is in facing danger when you are afraid.

- L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Traditionally when we think of courage, we think of a warrior’s courage – bold, fearless, and bigger than life. It’s the James Bond kind of courage, the bungee jumper flinging himself off a bridge, or the kind of courage I mustered when I led a horse packing and storytelling trip in the Wyoming Rockies with seasoned guides Val the Singing Cowboy and his wife Cindy. I had gathered ten participants, and with a total of nineteen horses packing over narrow trails with 5,000-foot drops, we were about as far from civilization as you could get.

You need ......

“I’m going to marry a cowboy,” my 5-year-old self vowed. After all, I had come out of the womb loving horses. How else would I, a city kid, be able to transport myself into the world of Horse without the cowboys I saw on TV westerns like the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and even Hopalong Cassidy? Seeing images of fearless men riding magnificent horses with names like Silver, Loco and Topper, my child’s mind also saw cowboys as the gateway to being around horses. Yes, there were a couple of cowgirls on TV, too, but I couldn’t feature riding a horse in a skirt like Dale Evans, the wife of the “real” cowboy, Roy Rogers.

“Those are culottes,” my mom explained. “A divided skirt......

One day back when I was about thirty, I sat on my bed rubbing my eyes after waking from lovely afternoon nap. The sun shone through the east window of my third-floor bedroom onto the knotty pine walls, making them the color of dark honey. Some of the knots looked to me like a woman’s head or a horse’s eye or a flower. It felt like time outside of time. In the midst of my reverie I heard a voice, clear as day, firmly declare, “Love makes the world go round.” I sat up, still looking at the wall, scratching my head, taking this in.

“Wow! Love does make the world go round,” I whispered in awe.  “I thought it was a cliché. But no. Now I see. Everything is fueled by love.” I ......

Bill and I recently took off for a Sunday drive down New Mexico 337 through the Sandia mountains southeast of Albuquerque. Exploring has been our big entertainment during the pandemic. We packed sandwiches, water, chips and chocolate, a couple of lawn chairs and we carried a hope within us that we would find a shady spot in the 98-degree heat to stop and eat lunch.

We set out fresh in the morning, marveling at the breathtaking high country so close to home and all its sights: fir trees, winding gravel roads off the two lane, mountain meadows cradling tiny towns along the way, some with signs at the outskirts saying “Congested Area” that made us laugh as there wasn’t a car, or even a cow, in sight.

The landscape......

My friend Julius “Horse” Coffman, a medicine man who conducts Sacred Listening circles, called me into the circle for a year, during which I became both a participant and one of the elders of his community gatherings. Every Friday night we would gather around a fire on the land in Stacy, Minnesota, a land made sacred by ceremony, prayer, honor and attention.  One weekend a month we would stay for a day and sometimes the whole weekend.

As a teacher and coach myself, I love my work and I love witnessing the magnificence and growth of so many. Every so often, though, I need to fill my own well.  So, I took that year to nourish my soul.

When in ceremony, time slows down. What is ordinary becomes extraordinary. We see ......