Butterscotch Ponies and The Stories We Tell...

Do you know that it’s easier to get someone to change their church or even religion, than it is to get them to leave relationship that causes them pain or unhappiness…Even if they are not married, and have no children together..

This is astounding don’t you think?

At first, when I began to see the pattern in this, I thought it was just about not wanting to be wrong. I don’t love being wrong… especially when I thought I was SO right about a guy…

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I seldom hear anyone else saying “Wheeeee! I was WRONG! Yee Haw!”…. But still, do we really stay in a miserable marriage, pine over someone who didn’t treat us well, then left us.. or try and revive a relationship that is for all intents and purposes, dead….just to avoid being wrong about them?

One school of thought, Abraham-Hicks, and the law of attraction says that when this happens it means that that person is just no longer a match for who we are, and what we NOW want… That we’ve grown and changed from the person we were when we started the relationship…and the other person didn’t make the jump to the follow-up class with us…

Okay, I like that idea….Relationships as classes… I can see it…But that doesn’t explain why it hurts so stinking bad when one ends. Why your guts feel like they are being ripped out…and it seems to go on and on hurting.. And you catch yourself saying “but I LOVE him” as an excuse to keep in touch, and not cut it off once and for all.

That would be like choosing a college class because you want to learn the material (or you HAVE to for your degree requirements)..

So you sign up for the class, you're excited (if it was an elective one) you get the text books, if you're like me you caress the text books and love them and love the info you believe they are going to impart to you....

Then let's say you get to class and your professor starts out a HOOT, so much fun and charming and so on, but before long you realize that he's not teaching you what you WANTED to learn but goes off on other tangents, or never shows up to class and expects you to get it all out of the book on your own, or grades in a way that is confusing, and you’re frustrated and feeling like you are NOT learning what you're supposed to be learning..

Next thing you know, the class is over and you weren't pleased with it but no one ever finds you sitting on the steps of the college lamenting "what did I do wrong? How could I have chosen SO wrong?????"... Ya know?

We just automatically say, "that professor sucked, and NOT in a good way"... and if we liked the subject matter we might even take the class again w/a different teacher. But even more often we don't retake it but it gave us an interest in ANOTHER class so we sign up for it....

Now... as to the longevity of a relationship... aka CLASS for this analogy... We don't (at least I've never heard anyone doing this) choose classes because of the number of parts they have... IE Psych 101/102/103/104... Like that... "I'm only going to take classes I think will never end"...

Yet we try and do with relationships... "OMG What is WRONG with me??? It ENDED!!! I finished part 104 and THERE IS NO MORE!!!! How did this happen? How did I CHOOSE so wrong? But I LOVE that class!"...

So why do we treat our learning experiences with other people…aka relationships, so differently…Actually we DON’T treat our friendships as though they are life sentences…We get that friends come and go and that it’s not always a reflection on us, or our choices.

When it comes to romantic relationships though, we constantly see people staying in classes..or uh.. relationships… that seem to have ended. Refusing to leave, until they became negative, unhappy people.... All so they wouldn't have to feel like failures for choosing a class that didn’t last forever.

I do know that there are relationships that go on for a lifetime. I hope we can all say we know at least one couple like that… A couple that, if we want to continue the class analogy, you can liken to students moving on to other, less traditional settings than the classroom... Maybe to do an internship, or some sort of study program or research project that goes on for years...

I have dated several men over the past 2 yrs. A couple of them have caused me excessive growth. I have to confess, I’m not a quick study.

The most recent I call my Butterscotch Pony….I’ll explain. I started riding a horses when I was 4 yrs old. 

 

My mother made us ride bareback until we could saddle our own horse (unless we could con some adult to saddle our horses for us) because she knew it would improve our “seat” and it worked. I rode like I was I was an Indian in a wild west show.

Then, in second grade she did the MOST insulting thing. She signed me up for HORSEBACK RIDING LESSONS!!!!! I was stunned. Was she insane? Had she not seen me ride?

I went to the large stable near our home and was further humiliated to find I was assigned to ride A PONY!!!!!  It was official. My mother hated me.

Well, it turned out I didn’t know it all. At 48 that no longer surprises me, but then it was a shock.

On this PONY, named Butterscotch, I learned to ride Western Pleasure in horse shows. Yes, to sum it up, they taught me to have class… They did have to put a rubber band on my wrist so I could remember to keep it on my thigh and look proper.. But later they moved me up to a full sized horse and taught me to ride English… Oh my God, That was like bareback with class AND a slight saddle. I LOVED it!

So this past fall I met a man and I knew right away that he was not a keeper. He could not carry on a conversation with me, but he made me smile and he was nice to go places with and hang out. He was so kind and loving to me and my kids that while I didn’t think he was meant to stay forever I could see that he was teaching me many things. How to just be… be still.. be looked at adoringly.. how to let someone in my space and relax.. Unexpected lessons. Not unlike that Butterscotch pony.

We spent time together when the Spirit Guides were with their dad. There were so many things that didn’t fit and I told my friends every time they asked that he was not the one for me, but just the one for right now.

He’d drift away at times and I wouldn’t hear from him for days. I didn’t worry because I had known that eventually one of us would have to go..

Then I went to Colorado for Christmas with the Guides and had stress. The Ex and the gal who is like my sister, and 27 yrs younger than he, are now dating… yeah… I think it’ll be on an upcoming episode of Geraldo…but I’ve left my mental track….In the middle of all the….being nice and gracious, on my part…the Butterscotch Pony came back in contact… And he was like a lighthouse marking the harbor back home. A beacon back to my REAL life that I’d thought was so dull and uneventful just a week before.

When I returned to Oklahoma before New Years we spent the next week together and had so much fun. I no longer found fault with him because I’d already decided he wasn’t a keeper. I didn’t have to evaluate him for the long haul, just enjoy him for today…

That’s when it happened. I see it now in hindsight. I had the thought “I could just keep him, you know” …just as a guy I did things with… a boyfriend that just stayed that way. If we never lived together, or took it any further it could just be boyfriend/girlfriend stuff. Separate houses and lives but together. At least until my kids were grown and “on their own”.

Two days later he was gone. And I haven’t seen him since. It was a sad parting. I still don’t understand it.

I hurt to this day, a month later. But I think I’m starting to understand why.

I asked my girlfriend LD, who is gorgeous and brilliant and a dating expert, why. Why did this happen? How did I go from “take him or leave him” to “but I LOVE him” ?

Hormones, she said. Women get hormonally attached when they have sex with a man.

Well that’s not fair, I said. Why don’t the men get attached and she said that men have to go out and hunt/provide and if the women didn’t get attached they’d just leave and the children would starve….

Hmmm…… Okay…. I can see that…..but WAIT! I slept with BP repeatedly, in the beginning, and never got attached. Not even a little bit. I thought he was GONE before Christmas…

And it hit me….I CHANGED MY STORY ABOUT HIM!!!!!!!!!!

In the beginning I told the story to anyone who would listen that he was not a keeper, but just someone to snuggle with on the couch and have fun sex and go places…. Just until the right one came along… And when he’d drift away it would take a day to notice that I hadn’t heard from him… No hormonal attachment, no sadness or heartbreak…

Then AFTER Christmas and the drama on the prairie, I CHANGED MY STORY

I started telling a story that I could just keep him until my kids were grown.. live in separate houses, be boyfriend/girlfriend open endedly…. And WHAM! The hormones descended, and the expectations followed and so did the sadness, disappointment, and hit to my self esteem when he left…

That’s when I realized it’s not out of a fear of being wrong that we cling to relationships that have outlived their expiration date…It’s because we told ourselves a story about them…A fairy tale even…Like “This is the ONE!” or “My last first kiss” and so on….

It is in TELLING a story that we unknowingly enlist our inner mental Border Collie… That amazing creature will go in search of any and all evidence to back up any thought we think for more than a minute….

I’ve mentioned here before that I teach my children that they will find what they look for… That they can walk into a room with 12 people in it, 6 nice and 6 jerks, and if they have a belief that people are always out to get something from you they will run into only the jerks…

When there were just as many nice people there. The odds were that they could have run into them instead…But it’s like those keys we couldn’t find… We get what we match up to vibrationaly…Our vibration is determined by the way we feel, which is determined by the thoughts we think…Or as I like to call it, the story we tell…

Butterscotch Pony’s abrupt departure kicked up some negative beliefs that I had not been able to put to rest before. They say that a belief is just a thought you keep thinking, so I knew I had to start with the underlying thought behind feeling bad…

I was thinking I was “not good enough”,  “not worth fighting for”, “not worth doing what it takes to keep”…. And I’ve experienced being treated this way since the Ex….but ESPECIALLY the Golf Pro!

The thing is I KNOW I am a good person, and good wife/girlfriend, a good friend! All the men that left told me that I was like no one they’d ever known. That they could be themselves around me in a way they never had with anyone else…

After enough of them said that, I ended up telling myself the story that after finding me they decided there must be OTHER fantastic women they hadn’t discovered too and they better go look….Along with the  “not worth it” stories….

My friend LD set me straight though… she rewrote my story and I’ve been telling it HER way… And you know what? It makes sense… It FEELS good, which is our EGS (emotional guidance system) telling us we’re on the right road, believing a true thought…

She said “I want you to rewrite the story from "I'm worth having but not worth keeping." to "I'm worth having SO much that even emotionally unavailable men who know they don't have their ducks in a row and can't keep me can't resist trying."

I think you have to realize that they all WANT you. YOU have to pay attention …and decide if what they offer is enough or not. And if it's not, let them move on and say "NEXT!" and DON'T talk yourself into keeping them when you know they're not EVERYTHING you want. This is not about YOU not being worth keeping, this is about you ALLOWING unavailable men who can't keep ANYONE to come into your life and your heart...”

I know that we stay in relationships that make us feel bad because of other stories we tell as well… Stories like “this is the best guy I’ve ever had, even though he’s not all I want.” “There’s no one else beating down my door and I’m afraid that if I let this go I’ll be alone”… And I know that, for some, being alone is worse misery than being with someone who makes them feel bad…

It’s hard to tell a new story when you’ve spent so long with the old one… I know…Sometimes it’s a start to just stop telling the old one… and …maybe question it a bit…

I’m working on it… I’ll keep you posted…

 Angels on your body,

Prairie Girl.

Vibrate me - Part 2

First an update…. Yes it was my sweet dog Ranger who died this summer…The hole he left in our life has been spackled… 

but it’s apparently taken two dogs to do it….

Shortly after he died I was at Cowboy Zeke’s place and he had acquired an extra dog…. One that was no longer wanted where she lived cause they had bred her until they worried her hips had gone bad… Zeke didn’t want her, already having 2 dogs himself, but didn’t want these people to kill her as she was one of the “sweetest animals on Earth”… So she came to live with me.. Her hips may not last a long time but she is happy, and active and in no pain….

Vegas

About the same time, back in Colorado where the Spirit Guides were, Ranger’s daughter had puppies and the kids insisted they needed one of Ranger’s grandpuppies… Incidentally, Sally got one too…. The woman who’s never had a dog in the house now lets this little twerp SIT ON HER LAP ON THE COUCH! She is crazy about her…

I in NO way wanted a puppy… I would have been happy with Vegas (the dog from Zeke)… but Tallulah Belle, or Tullah (as we call her for short) is growing on me… She, too, is one of the sweetest animals on the planet…

Tallulah Belle

Now, for a long delayed tumbleweed…. Sorry about the wait… I guess it just had to simmer a bit…

Now- Vibrate me… Part 2 - I want what I want…

For years I have said “the Universe/God has a knack for giving you exactly what you want about 2 weeks after you stop wanting it.”

What I have come to understand is that this saying, while often appearing correct, is NOT an accurate statement…

I don’t know about you but I have guilt about wanting things… situations… whatever…I feel guilty for a couple reasons, the first being that it feels ungrateful to want more than I have.

 I was raised to be grateful… Count my blessings…And I am, I do. I whole heartedly understand the importance of gratitude…

Yet still …I want…

Wanting, wanting, wanting…… Seriously, who told us wanting was bad? Well, I catch myself chastising my kids for wanting… when it’s me they want to buy the stuff…

Honestly, would we have the technology we have if someone hadn’t wanted… more time? More productivity? You get the drift…

I have come to the realization that wanting is GOOD. It creates, inspires, motivates,  makes us grow.. achieve.. get better at something.. improve…

I mean honestly, there always has been, and always will be, something that we can point at and say “If I had that I’d feel better/look better/ have more fun/or something”…..

So, I don’t tell the Spirit Guides to NOT want and just be thankful anymore..

I tell them now that it’s good that they want, but I might not be the Source of their desires…

I tell them they need to come up with a means to get what they want “other than the mother”…

So… Tanner’s been learning to count out the change from his piggy bank, and the checkers at Walmart are very patient as he does….Like when he bought this bike... true story.

 

But lets get back to the wanting…. What do we want?

What is it that pops that first little thought bubble of desire in our awareness?

The girl growing up in a mansion with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth doesn’t go around wanting mansions or pools or cars.. “Well no shit Sherlock” I hear you say… but stay with me.. What DOES she want? Well, it varies I’m sure but, most likely something she DOESN’T have…

Well we know what mine has been for the past 10 months.. Since waking up from a miserable marriage during which I was stuffing myself with food to numb out from… I got the “glimpse”… The taste… of something that I might have considered “urban legend”.  Or at the very least, only for other people…Until I learned that it not only existed but I could experience it.

I think that often we do not actually know what we want until we notice we do not have it.. We see someone else with it, or we experience discomfort due to a lack of it…

I didn’t know I wanted a man who really “got” me… understood, me. A man that would talk to me about spiritual and psychological, meaning of life things, as well as what he was doing, until the Golf Pro… Now a man that “gets” me, and can use words is top of the list of things I look for… But there were things I wanted like honesty and faithfulness that he lacked… so… Next!

This left me back to wanting….wanting… that sweet desire… What I am now told is the first step to changing my life? Well, that’s a relief cause I do want what I want….

According to Abraham-Hicks and the Law Of Attraction… Asking for what you want is the first of three steps….

They say that we ASK in everything we do… just living life. That with every experience we have we refine what we want and don’t want… What we like and don’t like… We don't even have to ask out loud. God, or The Universe, knows what we want, what is in our hearts. It hears even when we haven’t articulated the thoughts completely…

So every time I experience something I do not want, like a guy that lies.. well, except to tell me I AM the most wonderful woman on Earth…I am picky about my lies… I’ll make sure he “gets the memo”…. Or a lack of money come bill time.. Or unfriendly people at the store… Anything that I DON’T want/like or makes me feel bad… According to the Law Of Attraction, The Universe is up there making note of it all…automatically adding to, and subtracting from items on my “desire” list…then creates it…This is step two - IT IS GIVEN.

So according to this line of thought, the Universe answers my prayers automatically and everything I want is put in a “vibrational reality”… It’s already in existence but to see it I have to vibrate at the same frequency, so to speak.. Kind of like the keys I can’t see the first 12 times I look for them in the exact spot they turn out to be….

Okay, I’ll try to suspend my disbelief for just a spell… try to believe who.. or rather what quantum physics says I am… a vibrational being…But if this Law Of Attraction theory is true, where is what I want? If I create it just by wanting it how do I get my mitts on it? How do I SEE it? Touch it?

Do I really have to stop wanting it like the saying above says?

We’ve all heard people say “I just gave up and decided I’d be alone and he showed up”…Or, “When you least expect it the perfect man will show up”….I hate it when people say those to me… It’s all I can do not to throw up on their shoes…

That makes it sound like I can’t/won’t get what I want as long as I want it…I mean how the Sam Elliot does THAT work… Why would I be happy to get something I no longer want?

How do I stop expecting it! I WANT it! So I look for it everywhere! According to that school of thought, I am keeping AWAY what I want by simply WANTNG it! Like telling a person who’s starving as soon as they stop wanting to eat the food will arrive…I want to smack someone over this thought…

But…..doesn’t there have to be some truth to it? I mean with all the giving up people do that yields them exactly what they stopped wanting?...

What’s interesting is that in SO many areas of my life this stuff is dead on… I always have enough money to meet my needs and a lot of my desires… People are amazingly good to me 99.9% of the time… I guess I gotta have that itsy bitsy percentage for “contrast”… To keep refining my “want” list…Or so they tell me…

According to the Law Of Attraction we DON'T get what we want because we stop WANTING it, it’s impossible to stop wanting what we want..….It’s not the WANTING that keeps it away. It’s noticing what we want hasn’t arrived yet… Tricky huh?

Well it’s very true for the business part of my life…I’ve told you how my business has grown since I’ve been here right? I have a waiting list of 24 customer quilts that stays pretty consistent… In Colorado I had 6 or 8 one time in 6 yrs…the rest of the time it was never more than 1 or 2 waiting..

Someone asked me the other day how I grew my business…did I advertise, or what? I told them I ignored it… I’ve spent the last 6 months working on myself, and my beliefs about relationships… As I focused on relationship my business boomed all on it’s own…and I still don’t have a relationship…. Notice me noticing? Yeah… I’m working on it.

This brings me to step three in this Law Of Attraction stuff… ALLOW it in. Apparently, to get the things I’ve created on my vibrational desire list, I have to change my vibration to match them... Because vibrations make the unseen reality a seen one…

I hear you saying …”WTF? (only in words not letters) I’m with ya.. How am I supposed to change my vibration? Go sit on the washer during the spin cycle?... WTF?”

The claim is that it’s as easy as falling off that same washer…but that it’s foreign so it takes doing it on purpose…..We have to change the way we feel….our emotions…In essence we have to FEEL our way to the non ringing phone so it can ring in our hands as we get to it…To use Cousin Julie as an example…

So how do I change my “vibration”?... Well supposedly by THINKING about what I want until I can “feel” how good it would feel to have it….

Thought is the rocket ship that takes us to where we go in life…basically creating our life…. and FEELINGS are the GPS that tell me where I am and if it’s on the way to where I WANT to go…

I get what I think about… just like I tell my kids “you find what you look for”…Anything I think about enough that it causes me to have emotions about will get bigger in my life…

I don’t know when, or remember who, but at some point in my life I was told that my emotions were NOT to be listened to because they were transient, fleeting, not be counted on or acted upon.. I was told they were to be ignored and I was to just do things regardless of how I felt…

I have now learned that my feelings… emotions…are like the dashboard of my rocket ship… they tell me not only my fuel levels,  and temperature, they tell me my heading, and trajectory…. They are my compass…And my thoughts are the fuel…

I now understand there is a need for balance here though.

Recently I have seen people, who’ve become aware of their emotions, after being cut off from them for so long, begin to WORSHIP them the way a person living 100 yrs ago might do a cell phone after seeing it for the first time. It would seem like some sort of magical creature or god, instead of just a useful tool...

It’s important for me to pay attention to what I’m feeling, but not to expect everyone around me to validate, accept, understand, put up with my emotions… That would be like if the low fuel light came on in my car and I pulled over and stopped traffic so I could announce it to the world like it meant something Earth shattering to them…

It doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me.. it’s MY car.. It’s important to MY journey.. If I ignore it I am gonna end up stranded and walking, but it’s just information. Not a proclamation from God…I am supposed to DO something about it… MYSELF.

It’s no one’s job but my own to switch between paying attention to the important information on my dashboard, and maintaining my PRIMARY focus…. WHERE I WANT TO GO!

That is what I’m trying to learn to do in my life… keep my focus on where I WANT to go.. what I WANT to feel…how I WANT to be… not what IS…

Kinda like a story someone told me recently about a guy who wanted to learn to drive a race car.. They put him in a car that could be remotely sent into a high speed spin …This is apparently done to teach drivers how to handle such an incident during a race. They told him the only way to recover from a spin was to keep your eyes on where you wanted to go… If you looked at the wall you would go into the wall, so look down the track where you WANT to go…

So, in light of these possible truths (heck what do I know, we’ve already established my eyes are brown) I am trying to pay attention to, and control my emotions instead of letting them control me….I’m trying to find my “happy place” as Sally calls it… I call it riding a fast moving horse….BAREBACK

She started trying to get this “happy/peaceful” concept into my head last year when the heartbreak that started this journey occurred. “Find your happy place, find your happy place” she said…She even said it earlier today. And as I find my “happy”, my life works… I get more happy…

But lest anyone be misled into thinking I have this all figured out…. Next I’m going tell you about riding fast moving “horses of happiness” and falling head first into horse shit..

I HATE it when it happens. It makes me feel like a complete fraud to ever have told you anything so Pollyanna positive like I do…

When I fall face first and am lying bruised and discouraged blowing manure bubbles, I wish I could delete this whole blog…. True story… 

This is only mud, not manure, but it illustrates my feeling.

But my mama ALWAYS made me get back on my horse when I fell off in real life… threatened me with a stick if the truth be told…

So I get back on my spiritual horse as well… and I’m working on my riding skills…balance… vibrating in time with my horse…I’ll  tell you about adventures in that next…

Where In The World Is Prairie Girl?

Well…technically I’m still in Oklahoma… But I’ve spent the past few months in a kind of “immersion training”… You know like when you take a class on how to speak a foreign language and then get dropped in the country where it’s spoken, and you don’t eat if you can’t ask for it in their native tongue… Like that…

I wrote part one of what I THOUGHT I had been learning, but it turns out it was only the class description… The advertisement if you will.. Seems that the Universe thought I should take the whole class before I wrote anymore about it like I KNEW anything…
 
It’s been an eventful summer in an uneventful way.. Nothing Earth shattering, but for educational purposes it was good… even when it felt bad..


The Spirit Guides went to spend the summer in Colorado, and my wishing for “adult conversation” turned into wishing for ANY conversation…





I REFUSED to carry on conversations with the dog…. Then the dog died… true story…


So I sat here alone…..


I had quilt work…

I had play,

I’d go to cousin Julie’s pool several times a week.. It was too hot to be outside unless you were in the water… Over 30 days in a row of over 100 degree heat and no rain..

But I was alone 99% of the time.


I had a few dates..

 
I had cyberspace cowboys calling and writing..... I learned a lot…. Some of it the hard way….sort of like how using a slightly wrong inflection when speaking another language can get you a completely different dinner order….

I have learned so much and come so far from this time last year… I now expect peace every day instead of hoping for it… Happy is what I aim for now… I’ve learned the importance of happy…

I promise to finish writing what I started last spring… It sometimes feels overwhelming. Like there is so much to say I don’t even know where to begin…

I’ve got some quilt work that has a deadline but I’ll try not to be gone so long…

Angels on your bodies.


Prairie Girl..

What are you mad for? You won! - A Cowboy Zeke story…

Through a series of coincidences, in which I don’t believe, I met a vagabond, saddle tramp, cowboy, named Zeke…

Zeke has cowboy’d his whole adult life.. Working on ranches from Australia, to Hawaii. California to Texas, up into Oklahoma, and everywhere in between.

Living in remote cow camps, often alone, with no electricity or phone has made him a bit of a hermit… or else his natural hermit inclination is what made the life of a lone cowboy sing to him like a siren’s song….

After injuries too numerous to count, but all of which singly would have put a different type into retirement long ago,  he has now been forbidden to ride a horse. As one who has probably spent more time on a horse than on his own two feet, this is a new twist in his giddyup…

This new twist in his career is part of how our paths happened to cross.. He is a saddle maker and leather carver… I make quilts that LOOK like tooled saddle leather… Kinda cool huh?

So I drive him crazy, well I have that effect on a lot of people, but with him it’s by asking questions…I find him fascinating… and hysterically funny.. I have decided I might have to start wearing some sort of diaper when we have, what he’s begun to call, “story time”.. Instead of milk and cookies he gives me beer and chips... and I am inspired in both my art and my recent growth and development program…

I hope there will be more Zeke-isms to share with you in the future, (he promised me one about how a snake broke his nose.. he says involves crying and screamin’ like a girl).

I complained that no one laughs when I tell his armadillo story. He says “it’s because when you tell it they don’t believe you, but when I tell it they think this fella is just crazy enough to have done that”…..

One story he told struck me so timely (and funny) I had to stop him mid sentence in Walmart (we run into each other in weirdly random places) and write it down…I thought you would like it…

“Why are you mad, you won!”

Cowboy Zeke, being the hermit that he is, has developed a habit of talking to his animals like they are people.. He tells the horse he’s riding that there’s going to be a jackrabbit in the sage bush up ahead and not to freak out… Then lectures the horse for freaking out after the rabbit breaks from the bush as predicted…

The other cowboys give him a hard time saying “that horse can’t understand you, what you talkin to him for”… This doesn’t faze Zeke in the least…

When he loads his horse in the trailer he says “get in the truck” as the horse gets in… After awhile his brother, and the other cowboys on his brother’s ranch started doing the same thing…

The horses learned very quickly what those words meant… The boys could be across the yard and say to their horse “get in the truck” and the horse would go over and hop in the trailer…

It got to be sort of fun to see just how far away from the truck and trailer a guy could be and get his horse to load…A sort of friendly competition developed…

One day while moving cattle the guys were almost 2 miles away from the truck when they came to a gate… One of the cowboys hopped off his horse to open it… his horse waited patiently off to the side as the crew passed. As Zeke rode by he told the waiting horse “get in the truck” and to everyone’s surprise the horse trotted off toward where they’d left the trailer…Leaving his cowboy spittin, and stompin mad…

Somebody called for another truck to come get the angry cowboy, and the rest of the crew went off to finish the work…

As Zeke rode by the cowboy he said “What are you mad for? You won! Your horse loaded from the furthest away!”

I told Zeke if I was that cowboy I’d have dragged him off his horse and left him standing there.. he said no he was on a big Percheron (draft horse) cross and the guy couldn’t get to him…

As I thought about it I realized that the cowboy not only won the distance thing.. he got a nice opportunity to take a break in the shade…

Depending on how he chose to look at it it wasn’t a bad thing at all… He got a reprieve from work AND the reputation of having a pretty dang smart horse…

That’s how it is with “happy” in all of life… it’s all how you look at it…I’m making a concerted effort to be aware of how I look at my life… I now know that’s it’s not just a trivial pastime… it’s important.. How I choose to look at the “now” I’m in is creating my very next “now”…

Angels on your body.

Prairie Girl

It’s a vibration thing…Part 1

First I have to say that this is gonna get long..Long enough it’s gonna need to be a multi-parter…. Brace yourself.. Or if you don’t feel up to the extended version I’ll sum up…

1)   Savor, relish, or at the very least be content with, what is…NOW.. Meaning enjoy EVERY delicious taste of the meal you’re eating right this minute, right where you’re eating.. Don’t regret not eating at the Chilis across the street.. eat there tomorrow if you want.

2)   Emotions really are important. The communications received previously in our lifetime stating otherwise were wrong…If you’re feeling EMOTIONALLY bad..sad, down, negative… it’s a clue that you are believing an untrue thought and/or are disconnected from who/what you truly are…

3)   Feel good NOW… Be happy, content, or peaceful no matter what.. it’s important! AND.. it’s creating your next “now”…

Okay… back to our regularly scheduled tumbleweed….

It has been a while since my last transmission…or…uh… tumbleweed… but see, for the last month all I would have been able to say is that I felt like I was lying on a bed of nails, and that the lesson seemed to be “it hurts less if you don’t squirm, just let the nails penetrate’… Not a very appealing read huh?…..

So… I waited. I have learned on this journey that if I will wait….oh, and not close down my heart…. that’s important…then the lesson plan God, or The Universe, has will emerge…

What I’ve learned has been worth the wait…

What you ask could have made me feel like I was lying on a bed of nails?  Well, I’ll get to that in a minute….First I want to talk about vibrations,  and about asking and receiving….

I have said many times that I believe that we are spiritual beings having a human experience.. I think possibly all religions, or spiritual practices, could find agreement on that fact at least.. But what about this, what if it’s more accurate to say we are vibrational beings?

That would make both science and religion correct wouldn’t it?

Quantum physics has long said that all things, seen and unseen, are just molecules vibrating (or something like that… they use all the scientific words) …

It says that the only reason we see what we see is the vibration it’s moving at…We don’t see some things that exist, like gases, yet we know they are there…. You and I are both breathing invisible air as I speak…

I won’t get into the things that are right in front of you that are “seen” but you don’t see them until you’ve looked 12 times… like….your car keys….That’s important to consider, but a whole other post..

I’m gonna keep this about me for the moment…Almost 2 months ago I asked a question (and wrote this next part).. Right before I had my crisis of faith and wrote Then God must not have a heart… I mentioned in that post that I had written a post asking we could see if we weren’t blinded by our vision… This next part is from what I wrote then…………………

In his fabulous book, Bridge Across Forever, Richard Bach says.. “Do we tune visions out of our eyes, and UFOs and ghosts? Do we tune out tastes, do we tune down our senses, until we discover that the physical world is what we expect it to be, and not a miracle more?”

It is said that a person who looses one of their senses will develop “super senses” in the ones that remain…. So then they must be already in us right?.. These super senses…We must have them innately? Have we just dumbed… numbed… ourselves down?

Yesterday cousin Julie was telling me about her super sense… She’s a hairdresser and has, more times than she can count, told a customer in her chair to “hold that thought” while she reached for a silent phone that began ringing just as she got to it…She felt the ringing before she heard it…

She attributes this to loosing her hearing earlier in life. It happened in one ear at a time and was corrected by surgery… But it seemingly woke up a dormant sense… So great is this awareness of vibrations that she can just now, 15 yrs after her last surgery, stand to be in an auditorium with wooden seats and control the urge to throw up from sensory overload…

What does any of this have to do with the price of quilting in Oklahoma?... I have no idea… It’s just what is floating around in my brain tonight when I should be sleeping…

These notes on tumbleweeds… documenting my journey to find.. what?  Love, yes… but equally as important peace.. How does one find peace in chaos and pain? How do you find hope in heartbreak and confusion?

………………..Interesting huh? Two months ago I started pondering vibrations not having a clue they would be relevant in my search for peace…I’ll be telling you more about them in the next posts..

The other day I was looking back at previous blog posts and noticed there is a something repeatedly happening in them.. I ask, or seek, an answer to a question … And a blog post or two later find I am writing about the answer… Seemingly having forgotten about asking the question…

Kind of like “when the student is ready, the teacher appears” maybe?

I kept asking for.. looking for.. peace… and the love of my life…and suddenly, teachers specializing in both appeared..

I am not a person who believes for a moment that there is only one road to Rome, so to speak. It was the realization that all roads lead there that made me leave organized religion 25 years ago.

I’ve since likened myself to a Baleen Whale… you know the toothless kind that have a mouth of broom like bristles instead… They take in a mouth full of ocean and the Baleen filters out the water and keeps the fish…I like to listen to many schools of thought, and keep the things that resonate with my Spirit…

Recently 3 different teachers/writers have showed up on my radar that seem to be teaching different subjects, but the end result is the same…..Peace.. They even use the same wording but in a different context…

It gives me goose bumps to think about.. Which, by the way, one of the teachers says is a sign that you’re aligned with your Source…. Hmmm… I like that thought..

So this brings me back to the bed of nails bit.. What made me feel like I was lying on a bed of nails?

Wanting… Wanting what I didn’t even dream I could have.. didn’t even know to want..You know what I’m talking about…You know what I want… the mate of my soul…

I want what I thought I had with the Golf Pro. He came into my life at a completely serendipitous moment.  After I’d spent 12 years being put down and treated unkindly and disrespectfully he was healing like a balm.

He knew me from 20 years before and claimed to “see” me… “get” me… and adore me for who I am. He was someone who could communicate to me all that he felt about me.

He was SO good with words. And I discovered how important words and ideas are to  me. I was like a person who had been starved now sitting at a buffet… Or uh, to use the analogy I used in the very first post here…”An Ethiopian fed steak for 10 months then sent back home with a bad case of food poisoning, and a craving for red meat.”

I thought God must really love me. What a perfect man at the most perfect time…

But then food poisoning…He started being unkind and blaming me for it, then ended up lying, cheating, and using me….And I put up with it for way longer than I should because of the “belief” that it was “of God” or something..

You who have read this story from the beginning know how I have grown from that starting point to the present awareness of how powerful we ourselves are as spiritual.. vibrational.. beings…

I have over the past 10 months practiced an energetic experiment, and have had the experience of new men coming into my life with even more of the characteristics I want. They’ve expanded my list of desired qualities, and added some to the do NOT want list as well…

But none of them are the ONE.. And they were actually making the longing for him painful.

The past few weeks have been a constant calling out of my spirit to either bring me to the relationship I so crave or else just let me flippin’ be peaceful and happy without him….

Hence the ‘”bed of nails” effect.

BFF Jan said “WHAT! Do I need to have you hospitalized? You think you need a man so bad it feels like lying on a bed of nails?!?!”

I don’t NEED a man for ANYTHING… nope.. ..not even THAT… I can take out the trash all by myself…lol

And I do NOT want just any man.. I am not lonely like THAT…I was married for 12 years and was lonelier than I EVER was living alone.…

I want communion.. I want connection on all levels… The kind that can only be achieved with the lover of your body and soul…I want happily ever after…til death....at least.

The Work of Byron Katie, I told you of in the previous posts. could only take me so far.. I came up against a brick wall.. no “question” to do the 4 questions on…If you’ve checked into those posts you know what I’m talking about…

No I don’t need a mate of my soul.. yes I want mate of my soul.. but the reality is he’s yet to show up…so.. he’s not supposed to be here yet… but… I long for him… see the issue? 

Just lay back and let the nails penetrate.. stop squirming…argue with reality and you loose…

I’ve asked God to take the desire away! Geez looeez, if I’m supposed to be this way let me be peaceful this way….

There it is again…a request for peace…..

I had it last week… Peace…I deeply, honestly, truly had it for the better part of the week…I was on top of the world content and happy…As is…. I have the teachings of Abraham-Hicks to thank for that.. look it up on Youtube… Go to Youtube.com and do a search titled just that Abraham-Hicks there..You can listen for hours… it will change your life…True story.

All the things I’m learning now have been around for years. I often feel like I’m the last to know about things… Apparently, I wasn’t ready for it… or at the very least I didn’t ask…

This blog has been all about asking.. Which seems to be the first step in changing your whole life..

I have had some sayings I’ve bandied about like facts of life over the years… I’ve even shared them on this blog before..

1)   The Universe/God has a knack for giving you exactly what you want about 2 weeks after you stop wanting it.

2)   Whatever you look for that’s what you’ll see.

3)   The journey is often as memorable as the destination.

What I’ve learned the past few weeks explains why these statements have withstood the test of time..

I’m gonna start with the first one….wanting…I hope it’s okay, but I’m gonna tell you what I’ve learned about them in multiple posts…Otherwise they’ll be so big no tumbleweed will be able to roll with them….

Thank you for accompanying me on this journey.. I hope my going down some of these paths makes you feel like you’ve had a nice road trip and didn’t have to pay for the gas…

Angels on your bodies…

Prairie Girl

Who Would I Be Without My "Story"?

This is the question that replays over and over in my head these days… Thanks to Byron Katie and The Work..

Who would I be without the story that I chose the wrong men in my past? That men I cared about and even loved didn’t value me? That I attract narcissistic men? That no man will be all that I want.. and stay? That I’m lonely? That no man I love will “see/get” me.

Who am I without all those stories to tell? Without these “descriptions” of me, and my life?

What if…. What if I just… dropped them. You know, just…didn’t believe them… tell them…What if I questioned the thoughts behind the beliefs?

I mean, do I know for sure that the men I loved didn’t value me? Just because they didn’t behave the way I thought they should?

Do I know for sure that no man will be all I want and stay?

Do I know for sure that I am lonely?...  ah that is trickier…Well.. no there are people in my life.. Just no man to share it with me in the “way” I think I’d like.. You know, winking at me across the dinner table, or over homework. Sharing his thoughts and dreams with me... snuggling up against me every night in my bed.

Do I know for sure I need a man to do that with me… well no.. I don’t.

Do I know for SURE I WANT a man to do that with me.. well YES.. the right man..

Who am I.. or better yet.. what do I get from those stories of how what is is not what is supposed to be? Well… pain, sadness, regret, hopelessness…

Who would I be if I just dropped those beliefs.. thoughts… stories?

Seriously?

I've come to believe that when we feel pain, we are believing an untrue thought... telling ourselves an untrue story...

It's not about rose colored glasses.. it's about the stories we tell...

If my lover says "I love you and I'll never leave you"  I say "good"... Then he turns and walks out the door.. If I tell myself "he's taking out the trash".. I feel good... If I tell myself "he's gone forever" I'm in pain...

Someone can take their body somewhere else, but saying we are separate from each other is like saying waves in the ocean are separate from each other...or the ocean..

Your wave may just be on a shore far away from mine... but we are all still connected.. That’s one of the side effects of being spiritual beings having a human experience…

Sometimes it's not the way we wish it would be, but reality is that it is as it should be.. Reality is God.. argue with reality and you lose…True story…pun intended.

I tell the story. YOU tell the story.

What if I just relaxed into being… here.. in the reality of what is.

Well… I would be without the pain, and angst of regret. I’d be without the fear of fucking up my future.

What if I let it be okay to be… pain free..

It’s like walking with a rock in my shoe. I’m used to the pain. I don’t know what it would feel like to take it out, so I don’t..

A woman I knew in Los Angeles who was a member of every Anonymous program known to man.. or woman… She told me once “we know how to do misery… pain…loss… but we don’t really know that we could handle happy.. What if we got happy, and then… lost it? It might be safer to stay in pain”.

But… I don’t want to stay in pain… I’m developing a real aversion to it, and a REAL taste for peace. Peace trumps even “happy” because happy can be fickle… but peace?.  Ahhh peace is bliss.

So how do I love “what is”?... Well.. I guess I start by loving me… as is… where is..

This is harder than you would imagine… Not because I suffer from low self-esteem, or doubts about my talents or abilities… I do not.. But loving myself smacks up against EVERYTHING we’re told as children..

“Don’t get above your raisin” Well, no one actually said THAT one to me.. but …how about.

“Don’t get too big for your britches now”. “Don’t getting all big headed –full of yourself- thinkin’ you’re better than everyone else”.

So how foreign it’s felt the past couple weeks to tell myself the things I would like to hear… Things like…

“I love you, and *I’ll* never leave you”.

“I love how you chose to learn and grow all the time and  the way you are willing to share all you’ve learned, even your supposed failures, with anyone and everyone”.

“I love what a good mother you are..I love how brave you are.. How you never give up on love or anything else for that matter”…

Any love song I hear on the radio, instead of hearing it and wishing a man would feel that way about me.. I let myself really feel that way about me…

It feels weird.. hokey even… and I feel a little embarrassed to tell it to you here… but the truth is loving myself/thinking to myself/talking to myself in that way does feel … like love…and amazingly… it brings the peace…

It’s also brought me a new wave of men… better men, kinder men, “step up” men…. Interesting, but no longer the goal, merely the side effect of the experiment.. the lesson if you will.

It’s still curious what can knock me off my stilettos.. but I now think I know the path to crawl back up onto them.. the way to get back to peace.

I do not know what is coming next in my adventure.. I do know that life is interesting.

Speaking of stilettos, mine will be making their stage debut over the next 3 days…. True story…I got the part of a white trash, southern floozy in the community theater play up town.. oh my God she is so much fun!…

My business is booming.. The most quilts I ever had on my waiting list before coming to Oklahoma is 8, I now have 17.

But I am learning that gratitude, while powerful, is not enough to bring peace and keep it. These good things -“ground appearing when I stepped into thin air” all happened… and yet I was still in pain…it was not until I learned to question my story..my thoughts…that I learned pain management ….and peace.

I’m learning it’s NOT about what I allow INTO my thoughts.. thoughts are like clouds they pass and do no good or harm.. not until they are latched onto and given meaning… power… belief…

We then go out and look for evidence to support our belief… A belief that is in reality a passing ball of fluff…

It’s not about what I allow to pass through my air space, it’s about what I do NOT question while it’s there.

Recently I even experimented with one of my oldest “stories”.. The one about sex that says I can’t lay my body down on a bed without leaving my heart behind… what a boring story..

I’m changing it to “any orgasm I don’t have to give myself is a good thing”.. Or how about this one “I can have sex when I want it, whether I need it or not… kinda like a bath”…Those are way more fun than either swearing off sex OR becoming heartbroken or attached after having it…and just for the record… so far so good… the new stories are working…

I’ll post more soon, but the Spirit Guides will be home soon… meaning “class time”… they are my BEST teachers… Oh how they can throw a monkey wrench into everything I think I know, leaving me sputtering and muttering on the floor… Wish me luck…

Please be advised these ramblings are just my current travel log and may have no real use for human consumption… I am aware that I may be completely full of shit… My eyes ARE brown you know… just sayin’…

Angels on your bodies.

Prairie Girl