The right people, attraction, the right attention, learning, and positive feedback// Could it be thats all it takes? And bunches of random stuff.

Stories make a case for love in many forms on Valentines day.

Transcript

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Hi this is Ishi Abel with the Horse Human Connection I'm going to talk about all kinds of random things that seem rather unrelated but I think by the end of the podcast you'll see how maybe they loosely tie together. Today is Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day to me is all about love and I have spent the entire day by myself fully enjoying my own company and doing all kinds of fun things like Cleaning the house with lots of joy, going to the river with my dog, going out for a hamburger and fries to celebrate losing a few pounds. Things that might not make sense to you, but they make sense to me. What a lot of you probably don't know, because I don't talk about it, Some of my background is in natural building, natural building as in building mud houses, mud ovens, mud benches, and when I say mud, I mean sand, clay, and straw in a combination called cob. That's cob with one b c o b. And I had a teacher of this, Yonto Evans, and his lovely wife, Linda Evans, had rediscovered How to make this natural building material that was used to build houses. Oh back, I think maybe in the 15 and 17 hundreds in Great Britain. And people in the 1970s, a repopularity of these type of homes, and they began to get sold even the very old ones, because this type of building can last. 300, 500 years, but it may fall into some disrepair. So this man, Yonto Evans, decided to, right here in Oregon, he was a, an architectural professor at the U of O, I believe figure out how to reinvent this building material. He was a Welshman and he wanted to be able to. Recreate and teach people to repair these old homes because he thought they were so, so beautiful. And the original Cobb homes, if you know Reuben Kincaid as an artist, is like these well lit little cottages by streams with thatched roofs. A lot of those were Cobb houses. So they have very thick walls, which allows the light to come in quite softly. And they're super charming. They're akin to adobe, but they're sculpted, not brick. And they often have a plaster on them. Anyway, I'm making this really long, but it might be important. So I went to go study and I studied there with Yanto and Yanto is also a gardener, had a half acre garden that would feed all the people that came to the workshops. And we were in the garden one day and he was showing me some things. And I remarked that I thought the plants were doing well.

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No doubt because of his attention and care.

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And he looked at me and he said, yes, and so are you because of my attention. And I got the feeling that Yanto didn't necessarily like everybody, but he, he taught. And, and I felt, I felt special that he recognized that I asked a lot of questions and was very, very focused on learning. And what he said. was so true and so important. And so I went home and decided to build a cob house. They said, start small, build an oven or a bench. And I didn't hear that part. I just heard the part that when we left, we were ready to build. So I started to build a house. It was a rather large house for a cob house, but a rather small house for a conventional home. I'm not going to go into that whole story. Maybe that's another podcast. But. One of the people I met in the journey of building this cub house, which ended up taking me ten summers was a man who was a mason. And I don't remember, I think, but one of, either his first name or his last name was Irwin, I think. He was about 10 years older than me, maybe a little bit more. And I had found his website. He did all of these incredibly artistic chimneys and buildings and whole homes. And he was a master Mason. Anyways, he'd retired here in Oregon and. He would work sometimes. So he came out to take a look at my project and decided he could take the job and that I might be able to work with him or one of my kids might be able to work with him we decided he would come out and he would start this building and I watched. I watched him and after one of my kids tried and another one of my friends tried, he said, why don't you give it a try? So I got in there and I learned how to lay stone. Which is some serious work, but I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And with this man's gentle attention, his conversation and the disciplined hours that he kept. And the discipline of the work, now mind you, we were working in the sun, there was an oak tree nearby which we were able to sit under to eat our lunch every day, but we started at 7, we stopped for lunch at noon, we went back to work at 1, and we worked until 3. 30. And there were, you know, the rocks weigh a bit, and we're picking up these rocks, they're all spread out where we're making this, this foundation, stem wall, and it was amazing. the things that he taught me, like how to use the level, how to make the mix of the mortar, how to make sure the mortar was right, how to keep the mortar so it would last the longest, how to tell when it was too old, how to pick the stones, how to lay the stones out, and like doing a jigsaw puzzle where you become familiar with all the pieces and near the end of the puzzle you Your mind without thinking about it or knowing knows where the next right piece is. It was like that with the stones. After a little while you knew which one was going to fit perfectly into the space you had just built for it. Anyways. It was some of the best three of my life. And I think back at that time, I needed the hard work, I needed the discipline, I needed somebody to show me that I could do this, that I could build a house. I didn't know how to build a house. Sure, I'd been to Ianto's workshop for two weeks, and I thought I knew how to build a house. Ten years later, I knew how to build a house. But those three weeks, I learned how to lay stone. And that was the beginning. And you know, a foundation is a good beginning to anything, whether it's course training or a new relationship or your home. I have so much gratitude for that man, those teachings, and that three weeks of my life. And it was hot. It was the beginning of August. And here in Southern Oregon, the beginning of August is often 95 to 105. And so we weren't just like working in the sun. We were working in the sun. And, and, and sweating and. But it was fabulous. It was absolutely fabulous. Oh, at some point, I remember either reading part of, or hearing, hearing someone else talk about it, or perhaps I read a summary of it, or maybe it was a talk show about Dr. Wayne Dyer. And, yeah. In this, I know he's written a lot of books, he said a lot of wise things, but this one thing that sticks in my head is he was doing this experiment and living in Hawaii and the experiment was to greet everybody with the warmest hello and smile he could for a year and see how it changed things for him. And I think he wrote a book about it. I'm not, I'm not even sure. But I remember at the time thinking, wow, that's a lot of work. Like people have to be ready to take on that kind of thing. Because not all of us are in a good mood all of the time. But we can get there and. Even when I heard that, I thought, what a lovely thing to aspire to. And of course it's going to come back to you in many, many shades. And of course it's easier to do when you're in Hawaii, where it's sunny every day and everybody's open and friendly, but it's something to aspire to. And I bring it up because. Like everybody, we've all been through some stuff in our lives. We've all been through some traumas, and bad times, and good times, and sad times, and people dying in grief, and at some point, it shifts and changes. And Dr. Dyer's experiment can get to a place where it's not just an experiment, it's your life. And it's not an effort. It just happens. I don't know if my life is going to be like this forever, but right now, it's probably the best it's ever been. And I've been through some, I've been through some pretty rough things in the last four years. I'm not going to talk about all that. I'm going to talk about the good stuff and the people that have affected me in really positive ways. So, my very first therapist she's probably deceased by now. But she might not be. Her name was Barbara and she was wonderful. After the therapy was done, we still kept in touch. I actually worked for her as a cook for a while. She decided to go and leave the San Francisco Bay Area and the Stanford, near Stanford, where her husband was a professor, and go to Montana, where her daughter had horses. And way back then, she said to me, she wasn't a rider, and I didn't really understand, but she said to me, I just like to be around them, to brush them, to sit in the stall with them. And I'm thinking, man, Montana gets cold. You must really like those horses a lot. Like it must be fulfilling her in some way that I did not understand. And I'm talking, this is like probably just before 1990. So I don't think there was a lot of horse therapy going on. I don't think there was, Linda Kohav had written her wonderful book, The Tao of Equus, that seemed to be like, She seems to be the grandmother of equine assisted practices to me. I mean, maybe I, maybe there's something I don't know. But there was definitely something I didn't know back then that Barbara did, and that's that horses soothed her soul. She was a wonderful influence on me, and, and probably really saved me. Many, many more years of painful experiences by, by seeing her in my early 20s. And she did a lot of Santre and Jungian work. So I mentioned that because it kind of comes full circle. So not that long ago, my current therapist told me she was leaving the office. We're not done with the EMDR. I panicked. She's like, she's leaving. I'm like, Oh no. I didn't tell you yet. I said, no. Well, she has been a big fan of my podcasts my new therapist. Turns out that all of this talking about horses has inspired her to go to a different office where she has the opportunity to work as the therapist part of a horse horse professional therapist team in. serious equine therapy. And I just, I can't help but note like the full circle there, first therapist, hopefully last therapist, and and how they're both leaving at the end of, of my treatment to go and be with horses. So people that have helped me, right? That's the subject here. How we can help each other. The impact we sometimes make on people without really realizing it. So recently, I started chatting with somebody and I got a little bit of attention. And it's not like I never get attention. It's not like that at all. I, I, I enjoy attention from the opposite sex here and there. Including my second ex husband, and I have people tell me that I'm beautiful, whether I am or not, doesn't really matter. I don't think of myself that way, but I've been wondering why. It is very odd for me at my age, my advanced age of 62, to be admired physically because I don't feel attractive physically necessarily. I've kind of been hiding in men's clothes and doing ranch chores in muck boots with no makeup and beanie caps for several years now. Not thinking too much about makeup or shoes or any of those things. And when I do get recognized, it's for things like this podcast. Or my skill sets in building that I learned in Cobb. Or, you know, driving a tractor well. Or just kind of being smart. Because I think I'm a little bit of that. But not for physical beauty. That's, that's an odd thing. And so most of the time I dismiss that, like, Oh, what's not real or somebody saying that because they want something. Somehow, this attention landed in a place that woke me up in a way that I wanted to respond where I hadn't before. And reminded me reminded it isn't a strong enough word. When you've so completely forgotten that you ever felt like a woman, to be reminded is a big deal. So, it's, it's true that with the help of My massage therapist, who is an awakened, joyful person, my therapist that I'm doing EMDR with, that I'm almost finished with, and other people in my life, lots of good friends and family, that I'm, I'm at a cusp where blossoming again, that I'm at a cusp where blossoming again. It was ripe, but to, to be able to pay attention to without understanding why something is, but when we have attractions, sometimes it's God or spirit or however you think of that, the God of your understanding, letting you know to pay attention. Sometimes I think attractions with people are about coveting qualities that they have. I mean, I think about some of the people I've been attracted to. Or that have been attracted to me. And I think it's not so much me, it's something that I, it's a quality that I possess that they would like to have and vice versa. Whatever all of that is, or whatever, whatever wakes people up and makes them pay attention, whatever spark happens between two people, not knowing what the reason is ever. But knowing how we can open each other's hearts and inspire each other to the umpteenth degree. I am enjoying girly things again, like makeup and high heels, and I've gone back to dance classes, even though, you know, I talked about them a little bit in the podcast. I really was thinking, well, I probably won't do that again. I'm, you know, I'm 62. Do I really need to be in a dance class? But I'm loving it. I don't want to perform. You know, I don't want the pressure of all that you know, in a recital or what have you, but I love being in the dance class with other women and the exercise and the challenge of it. I am putting myself out in public more, and COVID affected a lot of us very, very deeply. And I am just now getting to the place where. I can be out again around larger groups of people or in a city or driving at night. These things that I've been inspired to do all because of some attention. Like it boggles my mind, but I'm growing as a person. I'm happy. So here's the thing that I did. I don't talk about that much. I'm not really going to go into it, but some of the dark things. In the last few years, I'm just going to list some of them. I had two car accidents. They weren't, they weren't major, but they were inconvenient. I had a very bad computer virus on my phone and my computer. Had to have that taken care of. I had an identity theft. That's kind of a lot in one year for most people, right? I also had, had bought a house. that was full of mold that I didn't know about that had to be torn down. I lost almost all of my personal belongings. I lived in a garage and then thankfully in a garage in a yurt for two years. And my son died. There were a lot of things that spiraled me into a really dark place. So the mere fact that I Wake up with joy in my heart every day is a miracle. The fact that I'm open again to having new experiences and moving past the trauma is a miracle. The fact that I somehow managed to pull a podcast together with very low tech skills, very, very low. I've mentioned Buzzsprout before and they have been wonderful. So my question with these stories, Is, and it's rather in the title, can the right attention, can somebody giving you loving attention and holding space and teaching you a skill and imbuing a time in your life with discipline and positive feedback for what you're learning? Could that be all that we're really after? Could that be the secret to happiness and joy? It's probably a little more complicated than that, but what I don't want to do is underestimate those things. And certainly parents, good parents, even mediocre parents do those things for their kids. And horse trainers and horse lovers and horse owners and horse keepers do those things for their horses. And those things are love. And it's Valentine's Day. So all of that just seems so appropriate. To be joyous, happy, and free. I think that's what we all want. And I know those things mean different things to different people, but I feel that way today. Much more so than I did four months ago. And then I felt it much more than I had a year ago. And when I look at the dark time, and then I look at people that have come back into my life and come into my life, even for brief periods, the impact. That we have on each other when we have open hearts, when we have love for each other, when we slow down and pay attention, give attention, give positive feedback and teach and teach with discipline. It is true magic. Happy Valentine's day.