Unexpected Blessings – Turning Landslides into Lessons of Love
Cassie Schuster, CTN, ND, MH
Falling off of a 1200 pound large animal is typically not considered a blessing by most sane folks. When it happened to me I was totally unprepared for the landslide of blessings that I would come to experience as a result of this heart-stopping moment in time. Looking back on that exceptional Saturday, I know in my heart there was no other way to get where I am today without going through the bone-crushing event.
The day began with my usual list of plans, hastily scribbled on the back of a used envelope. By 7:00 a.m. that Saturday my list was looping onto the front and sides of white space – as usual, I had filled it to the brim with “stuff” that just felt important to me. And so it went, checking off the list as I got each inky chore accomplished: clean the water troughs, check the pastures for weird stuff, tidy the hay loft, pick hooves, and so on. By 10:00 a.m. I decided to add one more thing to the list: ride Mur.
It had been months first of rain and wind, then moving our ranch to a new place, and then enduring the harsh summer heat – today was perfect for a little easy walkabout in the back pasture. I went to Mur and told him of the new plan which perked him up immediately. Mur came to our ranch to retire after a colorful life of dressage and then a rather dull life (his words, not mine) of being a lesson horse. We had spent the last 11 months with him relaxing, going barefoot after years in shoes, and the bonding was evident in our daily interaction. He shuffled his feet in his “happy dance” and followed me along the fence line, talking up a storm and pushing the mares out of his way in order to get to the gate. Laughing, I put my hand on his shoulder and moved him away, “not yet big boy, I have things to do yet”. I was tickled that Mur had been able to spend these months unwinding, getting healthy, and wanting to be with people. He had been unusually attentive and animated the last several weeks and this public display of silly animation from the otherwise grumpy gelding was icing on the cake for me!
Mur is like me – he prefers routine. Just try to give him his hay first before his feed and see the expression of “good grief, human” come over his lovely Romanesque face. Chores dutifully performed, it was finally time to have that little Saturday ride, or, landslide.
The trip from my cushy AP saddle to leaf-strewn pasture was swift, unexpected, and gave my ego a good whipping. For Mur, a seasoned dressage horse, this should have been a piece of cake for him.
I have several distinct memories from that day: everybody’s happy, I’m falling, and I’m turned inside-out with pain. I recall being huddled in the seat of the car while my husband drove willy-nilly to the emergency room. I recall the tiresome logic side of my chatterbox brain kicking in: did I shut the gate? Are we going to be back by dark? Did I leave anything off my list? Ack! Finally, all I wanted was to sleep and get out of the immense pain.
Sleep was the first thing that changed. Not one to embrace drug therapy I was determined to do this on my own terms. And that started the process – the process of change – the process of unraveling the safety net of my standard thoughts for survival. This was different. This was not drug-induced, but pain induced. But wait! I could dissolve the pain into a bejeweled comforter of brilliant white light in which I had the most creative, colorful, and meaningful thoughts! Was this MY brain? I was waking up and scribbling hastily in a new notebook (ok, that’s one area that I had to keep, the cache of notebooks for impulse writing) and by the next day I would have this story with characters of untold beauty and strength. After reading and re-reading two weeks of these stories it hit me like a bale of tightly packed alfalfa: it was ME in the story, with this newfound strength and clarity. Just who was this woman living inside me? Did I like her and want her to stay? Would she continue to grow and evolve or was this just a fluke to tease me? Can I really go through such a drastic change in less than a month? Can I turn this landslide of painful events into something bigger, with personal meaning and staying power?
