Glimpses of My
Personal Journey
The following
are excerpts from my years of journaling. Journaling, as well
as visual arts, has been a tool for healing that I have utilized
for 35 years since the age of 18. This writing is presented as
a "train of consciousness" and thus this intro to help you pull
it together and make some sense of it hopefully. You are a witness
to the importance of Process not Product. Writing/journaling is
being proven and now offered in many workshops and clinics on
healing the mind and body. Perhaps you too may be called to this
healing art form.
I have
chosen to carry on this Creativity Heals work in conjunction with
the National MS Society because my affiliation is strong and of
long duration. Once again, as with the "The Race Against MS" (the
thoroughbred racing program we co-created in the 1980's), I speak
out to offer ways to help by getting involved and by doing something
positive.
My life
has also centered around nature and horses as they too are great
healers. This is something I have always known and utilized, and
their time to be recognized as partners in healing has come. For
me, three key elements to living well are: love, nature and creative
expression.
I start
with Patagonia, as I have lived there part time for the last 16
years. For 10 of those years, I was a happily married woman and
first time Mother who went into full remission. Following my divorce
in 1997, the stress of being a single mother with MS, losing my
husband and lifestyle, rebuilding another life in Colorado, and
literally another home in Argentina, has taken a toll on my health
and decision-making process. It is once again my art, nature and
horses that are leading me to recovery. Thus I share with you
glimpses of that journey.
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Patagonia.....
Seventeen years ago I had never
even heard of the place. Now it was looming over me with a cloud
of anxiety. My precious daughter, Sky, at thirteen is soon to depart
for Patagonia
in the cordillera of Argentina. Far away from me, unreachable by
phone. There is no phone or electricity on the hidden away and vast
estancia, no roads, three hours by horse into the Casco.
"Estancia
Ranquilco"
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New Orleans.....
1976, at age twenty seven
I lay paralyzed in a hospital in Uptown New Orleans....with two
thoroughbred racehorses in training, a mother in a nearby hospital
with cancer....an only brother, a quadriplegic, at home making
it as best he could. Things for the "Golden Girl" were not looking
up.
1959 childhood in Iowa....The enchanting and mysterious mist rises
gently off the river as I awaken on the summer porch to the music
of bird song. In the distance the horses neigh and I wonder if
the deer are playing with them. Sans Souci Island surrounded by
the Cedar River, a branch off the mighty Mississippi that flows
through and gave New Orleans, the place of my birth, a reason
to be. Rivers, the blood of this earth, our first Mother. "A
River Runs Through My Heart."
It's my signature now on my art and the letters I scribble. Why?
Who cares? I DO. I care about the rivers of the world. I care
about The Mother that gives us all so much. The roots of our healing
of mind, body, and spirit are in the Earth. "Heal ourselves,
Heal the Earth."
"Ginny
- The Golden Girl - and her first race hors
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Colorado.....
8.000 feet high in the aspens,
light dancing in the "quaking leaves". Here I sit at a computer
trying to share with you a bit of my personal journey. Not because
I think I have all the answers. No way. We all take our current
best guesses educated by experience, intuition, divine providence,
friends, loved ones - whatever has crossed our paths of late.
The one thing I have learned, at least for myself, is that I must
share and reach out to others. Maybe just a kind smile, a hug,
"I understand, I've been there or close to it." Empathy, compassion,
words the "Golden Girl" did not live with prior to 1976, and the
onset of Multiple Sclerosis.
"High
Colorado"
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Patagonia.....
Never far
from my mind and heart. El Rio Trocoman - "Condor huddled against
the Wind" - in Mapuche native language. Ginny, in 1988, the new
Mother, huddled against and with the winds of change. Deep, lasting
change brought about with the visceral contact with the Earth. A
newborn nursing at my breast, dependent on ME! No roads, no doctors,
no grocery stores, no phone, a short wave radio that sometimes works....Oh,
but a new husband I worshipped blindly...An adventure of a lifetime.
"A River Runs Through My Heart"
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Patagonia.....To
Return or Not?
 I
have fear in my being, as in 2001, while on the way to my Estancia
Trocoman, once part of Ranquilco, my fever, for the third time in
four years since our divorce in 1997, reached to 104 degrees, dropping
me in my tracks, parts of me paralyzed and helpless. Buta Mallin,
lying on the cold stone floor of the cattle outpost of my now ex-husband's
100,000 acre estancia.
With only the kind wife of the capitaz and Sky supporting me. The
pigs had gotten into my Avonex (self-injectable interferon for my
MS) and I was nearly delirious. How could I go on to my adobe home
that I was determined to build after living in the stone, castle-like
mansion where we had once dwelled as a family - and I was once "La
Patrona", of all the lands you could see for miles? ".....
La Patrona in Exile now.
"Adobe Home
- Before"
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"Packing
In - Enough is Enough !!" "Adobe
Home - After" |
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