June 10th 2023

Under the archway

I have always been honest with you all, perhaps because my own dignity demands it, and most likely because reflection and writing is one of the most important ways that I process the world and ground myself in it. So, in the spirit of transparency, it has been a very challenging week. The horses have been wonderful, my coworkers have been kind and generous with me, and things at the barn have hummed along. But my mind has been distracted and I have been quieter than usual. Earlier this week a friend posed a question trying to balance the increasingly common call to “feel your feelings” against the advice not to let one bad incident ruin your whole day. I’ve certainly found myself trying to walk this tightrope often, and this week especially. Emotions are tricky. When we ignore them and stuff them down they only seep out somewhere else, but we can also get trapped in a torrent of emotions without ever gaining much from it.

We’re moving some things around the barn and making space, and a coworker recently showed me a door that I’d never noticed. It had been covered by pallets of feed in a dark corner and I’d just never really looked at it or thought of it as anything other than a wall. Today I got to open the door and watch sunlight filter through the whole section of the barn. Feelings are like this. Sometimes they grind me to a halt looking solid, looming and impassable. But they aren’t. They are doors that you pass through. They lead you somewhere. They shed light on some corner you couldn’t see before. And sometimes it requires a friend to remind you that this is indeed just a feeling that you will walk through, and even under the archway the sunlight reaches out like tendrils to guide you forward.