Ten Times I Said No To Love: Chapter 10
The Allowing
In this season of giving, if you feel the call to help people whose lives have been irrevocably altered by the devastation of Hurricane Helene, this constantly updated list of vetted sources is a great place to start. More than 60 days have passed since the storm blew through the mountains, but people are still rebuilding their lives as winter makes living harder. Please help if you can.
On this Thanksgiving Day, I’m posting the final chapter of Ten Times I Said No To Love. I’ll get to that in a second. I didn’t plan for this chapter to coincide with a day set aside for gratitude but I’m glad it worked out this way.
I suck at giving thanks. I know I should start and end my day with it — I feel better when I do — but I forget to make thanks a practice in my life. I’m hardwired for using all available brain space to nitpick problems.
I had this chapter all written this weekend and ready to be made fresh and tidy with transcribing and edits early this week. I felt like I had the stray strings of my life gathered up and I was moving into a flow again, but Monday morning greeted Christopher and me with a virus that has pretty much stopped us in our tracks. I had my opening thoughts all ready to post here, but there’s nothing like a gastro bug that will make one stop what they’re doing and move into the energy of allowing.
I recently had a session with Candice Webster in South Africa. She went viral in a video showing her unique approach to energy work assisted by her herd of horses. My session with her deserves its own post, but what Candice encouraged me to do was learn how to allow.
I’m good at fighting — not too good at accepting.
On this American holiday of gratitude, I invite you to join me in allowing.
What are you resisting? What can you invite in?
If You’re New to Stable Roots
Before my wedding and the storm, I was in the middle of posting a chapter each week of my rebellious love story, Ten Times I Said No To Love. It’s easy for us to pass love off — as a concept/emotion/feeling — as trite and predictable and boring. I want to revolutionize our relationship with love stories. The world needs them now more than ever.
You can find previous chapters here:
|| Chapter One || Chapter Two || Chapter Three || Chapter Four || Chapter Five || Chapter Six || Chapter Seven || Chapter Eight || Chapter Nine ||
Chapter 10 is about placing all the bets on the dark horse, and cracking the black crows of our hearts open to allow love the space to flow in.
Let’s get started.
Chapter 10:
The Allowing
The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
- Tennessee Williams
To spend any amount of time with the horses and mark some growth in our experience, we must allow ourselves to receive. It’s hard because demanding feels like progress to us humans. Receiving feels like the easy way out. But in my bones, I know this allowing to be true as I know oxygen is essential to life. Resistance keeps me from allowing the horses the power to transform me fully and nowhere is this more apparent than when one of them is sick.
Bentley is a big, black horse that draws people in with his beauty like a dark pegasus from myth. He is more archetype than animal, compact and short-necked, long-bodied and luminous.
He wouldn’t pass a PPE, the exam veterinarians use to assign a numerical scale to physical function. It’s a tool that people use to decide if a horse is worth buying. The test can be basic or complex, budgeted by the buyer or the seller. Recent radiographs are a bonus that attracts potential buyers.
I wouldn’t pass a pre-purchase exam either.
Despite his adult stature, Bentley was an ugly baby who arrived from Canada on a big semi-trailer packed with foals bound for homes in North America. He was born from the Premarin industry, a human hormone replacement drug that doesn’t try hard to mask its ingredients — Pregnant, Mare’s, Urine.
I was hired to care for Bentley before he arrived and learned to adapt biohazard methods when he stepped off the trailer dripping snot and bulging from his lymph nodes because of Strangles, a highly infectious virus that also doesn’t try hard for a name. It’s easily transported on human clothing and it wreaks havoc on a herd, but an early infection ensures lifelong immunity. The scars where Bentley’s glands swelled and burst still mark his face and throat.
What does Bentley have to do with my love story?
This big, black horse has called me home to myself more in the two decades we’ve been together than any other horse.
He has taught me what it means to allow. And without these hard-earned lessons, I would never have been able to move past all my initial defenses to take the love Christopher offers.
This is how:
Remember the dream I had where I imagined a beautiful farmhouse filled with people gathered for Thanksgiving dinner? I almost lived it, fitting myself into containers to be an acceptable partner and stepmother in a house of pain and dysfunction.
On the Thanksgiving day I had imagined all my life, a house filled with people, I poured milk into my grandmother’s dish in a lovely kitchen and almost didn’t answer the phone buzzing in my apron pocket. But it rang and rang again.
I left the boxes of Christmas decorations waiting to be spread across a symmetrical tree and raced across town to the bumpy farm driveway toward Bentley, who was choking.
Choke in a horse is different from a human. They don’t breathe through their throat like we do. So there’s time to resolve the problem, but the panic of it can send the horse into shock.
The veterinarian on holiday call attended to a bigger emergency so Bentley and I were left alone for a few hours with the task of manually manipulating the obstruction down his massive esophagus.
I was too gentle at first as I pressed against his throat. I hadn’t learned yet how my sense of touch could extend beyond my skin to feel into instead of simply feel.
His mane and fur were covered in dirty bedding where he’d rolled to relieve the pain. Waves of panic rolled through him, his muscles tensing as my hands slipped through his sweat. My touch didn’t seem to make a difference.
The vet, by phone, encouraged me to push harder into his neck. We danced with his pain for hours, him coming to his senses and pinning his ears for me to leave him alone, and me sinking back into him as the trauma drew him inward and veiled his eyes. We rode through each other in waves. I couldn’t force his big self to accept anything, I had to wait for my touch to receive an invitation.
When he would bear it, I braced again the wall for leverage and I pressed as hard as I could into the weighted, massiveness of his presence in the world, in the farm, in my life. Eventually, my mind stopped human-whirling and joined Bentley in the connected intelligence of trust.
I got out of my own way to see beyond my eyes. And as the blockage cleared I slumped back against the stall wall and sighed out a breath of release. Bentley’s eyes closed low and deep in rest.
By Christmas, I left the beautiful house with its tidy kitchen and children who weren’t mine to raise. Without Bentley’s interruption in my idealized day, I would have sold my soul to a dream.
I Place My Bets On the Dark Horse
It all started with another big, black horse. And another before him.
Falstaff arrived at my farm as one of my first school horses when I started my program. Tommy, the cowboy mentor alerted me that a kid had a Shire for sale and the horse knew more than he expected.
Falstaff began life as a highly specialized military horse that pulled funeral carts in Arlington cemetery. He was ill-suited to the job and was eventually given to a coastal police force that had no more luck adapting him to a life of service. They gave him to a teen girl who moved him to the mountains and couldn’t afford to feed him.
From the moment I first watched Falstaff move, I realized he channeled the energy of yet another black horse I had as a teenager. I neglected that horse when I discovered boys (this is a theme in most horse girl’s lives) so Falstaff felt like an opportunity for active, full-force penance — a personal flagellation of care. I bought him immediately and poured my heart into him.
Falstaff hung out with me as I mended the barn walls. We went on walks together. He carried me on his back willingly and carefully. He was the cover boy for articles I wrote and the mascot for my fledgling farm before it even had a name.
If you asked me how long Falstaff was with me, I would say nine months, a year, forever.
But his big, deep eyes and white-blazed face, the little heart on his left knee, his itchy leg feathers, and giant feet were with me three short months before he became sick and died in surgery.
I stood in an empty stall in the vet hospital and signed paperwork on clipboards as I wept. I cried until my stomach hurt. I cried all the long way down the mountain with my empty trailer clanging behind my truck. I cried as I hung his halter on the wall of the tack room that he had followed me, like a pup, inside that morning as I drew a syringe with painkillers.
My heart split open and flew loose like a hundred, hungry crows spreading out to find the body of my friend: Where is he?
I decided, as I sat, wrung out and aching, on the loft steps, that I would never love anything or anyone so completely that its loss sliced a hole out of my life.
A Susurrous of Crows
I’m barely able to stand up straight after hysterectomy surgery when a message from the barn tells me that something is wrong with Bentley. He refused lunch, laid down, and can barely stand before he’s down again.
I go into motion for colic watch, taking his heartbeat and respiration, calling the vet. We take turns keeping Bentley walking in the arena. He pauses and tries to go down again and our voices raise as we urge him forward.
After the expense and heartbreak of Falstaff, I do not consider surgery an option for horses in my herd. Recovery is complex if they pull through at all. The money saved is used to help another horse that needs a home. My horses are old, most in the twenties and thirties. Insurance options usually stop at the age of fifteen.
The vet uses his hand and arm to feel what is happening inside Bentley. His colon is displaced by gas. The prognosis is bleak and I’m instructed to keep Bentley moving through the night with the hope that his colon will right itself if he passes gas.
I set up a vigil in the ring, a lantern illuminating the sand, a votive prayer to saints, incense to carry my intentions up and I periodically chase Bentley to make him run and by running — hopefully — fart.
We’ve been together for over twenty years, but I will always be haunted by the question without an answer — what comes first, the fart or the buck? Bentley’s explosions are mythic and I take advantage of his powerful flatulence as our world comes down to the bare-body essentials of survival.
He and I have worked often at liberty — the thing we call untethered communication with a horse that is all gesture and movement — no equipment or force. It’s like dancing without a leader, a consensual feeling of grace.
Bentley alternates between lying down in the damp sand and flying with me along the long edges of the arena. Horses are biologically stoic. In the wild, sickness and pain are vulnerabilities that make them easy targets for predators. So when they show us they’re sick, their needs are dire. I’ve drawn enough symbolic vultures in my life to intimately understand the impulse to mask. I thank Bentley for trusting me enough to hold his pain safely, for him to know that I will not take advantage of it.
He is every horse I could not save and all the horses that have broken my heart.
As the night wears on and his movements slow, when he lies on the ground and the vibrations of his moans roll through me like a beached whale, I refuse to accept this is the end of our time together. But the hundred crows are already pecking at my heart in mourning.
We practice grief in our minds as a form of protection, but the truth is that we catastrophize because we are afraid. And fear is wasted treasure.
I force Bentley up. I urge him to run. He shakes his head at me angrily but trots away and puts himself through the motions in a galloped revolution of the arena. As he moves, the hungry crows form a susurrous of hope.
When he’s finished, he runs to where I stand in the center of the ring and stops abruptly in front of me, a question in his eyes and perked ears.
I start to sing to him.
At first, I make sounds, a low humming in my chest. Bentley comes nearer and presses his forehead into the vibrations of my body. The sensations make words in my mouth, old songs, mountain music, a gospel tune carried by my grandmother from the hearts of women who made her, and those before them, and before even them.
I sing my intention, my intuition, into Bentley and I cry as I pray, “Stay here with me for a little while longer. We have work to do. You have things to teach me.”
Bentley sighs long and soft.
His body releases its tight grip of pain.
I release my tight grip of pain.
We both breathe together.
As dawn breaks, Bentley eats a small breakfast. I watch him and I’m mesmerized by the earthy sound of his slurps.
Bright, black crows rest with alertness on the branches of the big, white oak near us. I’m weary from the night’s vigil, but I know that Bentley has cracked me open to a deeper understanding.
And the limited vocabulary of my rational mind knows the word for it is: love.
Allowing My Way Home
When I get really tired of being afraid of what’s coming I’ll ask for what I want. But the asking erupts from weariness, not desire. I’m still working on changing that. Fear makes a great motivator but it’s a crappy way to live a life.
I’m also unreasonably spontaneous for someone who pathologically plans.
When do I get to see you again? I text, and it’s just a line in a long conversation.
It’s been a few days since Christopher and I explored the woods. We send messages continuously and the conversation has made itself comfortable in my head like it’s always been there, the ideal witness to my mundane discoveries: the clouds are really nice tonight; I’m watering the plants; the plants seem happy on the porch; the new horse is settling in; my mother picked up dinner tonight, etc.
It’s 1:30 in the morning when I send: When do I get to see you again?
Right now?
Okay.
I fuss about Christopher needing to eat. He tells me he hasn’t been very hungry lately — like me.
Why can’t you eat? I write.
You know.
He tells me he’ll see me in thirteen minutes, because like every other time in our lives we live close without planning it.
I’ll later learn that he waited on a passing train instead of racing it because he didn’t want to do something and not be here because he had something to look forward to.
I sit on the back porch and wait to hear his footsteps as he rounds the farmhouse and follows the leafy path through the trees.
I don’t have a plan for us. I don’t want plans anymore.
I watch him emerge from the shadows of the warm, summer night. His hair has come loose around his face and he’s barefoot and grounded and kind, a part of the earth and separate from the world. He’s a changeling, a forest elemental, a gift of spring water, trees, and turkey feathers.
I’ve lived so long under the chains of society’s expectations when I have only truly felt at home on the bare, rich loam of earthen possibility.
As he comes near me, I come to peace with myself — not because being with Christopher changes me, but because being with him allows me to be me. I don’t have to sell my wildness to purchase security with him. I can love him by leaf and skin and metaphor. I can love him like a poem, those words that bridge this world with the other.
I have been afraid of my own power for so long that I’d rather burn myself to ashes instead of allowing myself permission to ask, to take, to touch — something that I want rather than something I’m told to want.
As he comes up the steps, he tells me that he chose to take the long way here instead of rushing to beat the train.
I stand up from where I sit at the table, close the distance between us, and pull his mouth to mine.
We are made from stories: our past and present, our futures, regret and delight, longing and warnings, giving and taking. It takes all of my experiences to understand how important this kiss is.
We pause and stare at each other in amazement.
“Oh my God.”
“Wow. I just thought I was coming over to hang out.”
“We can do that too.”
“I’d rather do this,” he says, and kisses me again.
And the black crows fly back to the cracked pieces of my heart. From this moment everything has changed, but the shift isn’t a difference, it’s a re-balancing, like having spent a lifetime searching for something that was with me all along.
I realize that I exist.
Christopher, like the horses, grounds me back into myself.
Later, we notice the sunrise and we part to experience our day, then we come back together. We do this again and again in a rhythm that is as natural as the seasons and as comfortable as coming home.
Giving Thanks
Along the old fence lines in the upper field, cedar trees erupt from the cool, fall grasses.
“This one will take up the entire room,” I say, but the fact isn’t really a deterrent.
As a kid, I hated scavenging the fields for Christmas trees. I craved one of the orderly, symmetrical, cultivated pines from the stands in the city. Scraggly cedars from the edges of the hay fields made me feel trapped inside my rural ancestry. A civilized tree with fancy decorations satisfied my longing for normalcy, a scrubbed and sanitized vision that also satisfied my longing for safety.
A crow watches us from the adjoining fence, a notetaker scratching stories and keeping watch.
“I like this one,” Christopher says.
The spiny needles prick my skin as I hold the branches up for Christopher to saw the trunk.
Symmetrical trees hold no interest for me anymore.
We take the tree back to the farmhouse, filling the front room with the scent of the forest. After the holidays, we will place the fallen tree into the smooth water of the pond where the bare limbs will house fish and turtles in a transmutation of cycles, nature bearing witness to human signatures.
As we cook Thanksgiving food together, I am aware of how much I have limited myself with my dreams. The whole point is that we can’t tell the future, and it’s a good thing. Because left to my own devices, I would diminish my awe of what’s in front of me through fear and control.
Our only task is to find nourishment in the dark together.
This series may be over but the stories I’m going to tell you about the farm and my life with Christopher are not. I’ve spent too long looking for stories outside myself instead of writing the ones I’m living. These ten chapters taught me so many things, writing them out, sharing them with you. I’ve had a great time introducing Christopher to you and now that you know him — and me — even better, I’m going to keep using this space to share our experiences with you and to thank you for being here beside me as I write my way back home every week.
I’m extraordinarily thankful for you.
We’re going to wait until the weekend to cook Thanksgiving dinner this year. And we’ll eventually go to the upper field and take a scraggly cedar from the fence line. But there’s no rush. We’ll take what we’re given and make it work.
I know what it’s like to be alone on the holidays. I have lived that way far more often than I have shared these days in company. If you feel lost and need someone to talk to, send me a message. I’m sending you so much love from this little farm in the middle of the foothills. Let’s write our way home together.
Love,
Kim
Your comments about searching for scraggly cedar Christmas trees brought back memories. We didn't have store-bought trees until I was a teenager. I still have the habit of noting possible future candidates whenever I walk through the woods where I grew up. Your writing style reminds me of something by Donna Tartt - eloquent and unhurried. Thanks for sharing.
Again, yes! Your words on asking for what you want and fear of your own power… and allowing! We need a lot of encouragement to remember our true selves (not change ourselves). Thanks for keeping the light on.