I Went to the Woods and Lost 20 Years

Sunday, husband and I went to the woods, and I lost 20 years.
 

The big trees did it. The forest. The old growth. My pain-free knee. All contributed to my youthing process.

I read somewhere that old growth trees have over the years accumulated silica into their trunks. And when we are surrounded by that silica, it contributes to our well-being. Notice the difference sometime if you have an opportunity to experience the big trees.

Husband dear and I drove out east of Eugene, Oregon along the McKenzie River. I know I talked of that area before when we made the same drive during the summer. Now though, we wanted to see the area during its golden-leaf time before deciduous tree hibernation when the forest throws the gray cloak of winter over its sleeping trees. 

A little Maple putting on her PJ's

This trip also gave us a brunch for the soul, a stop at the Obsidian Grill at McKenzie Bridge. I'm raving again. That sandwich was just as good the second and third time as the first. I love the Obsidian chicken sandwich—happy organic chickens they say, bacon, an artisan bun smeared with what appeared to be Cajun spices, a poblano pepper, they didn't scrimp on the lettuce tomato or onion, and whatever their secret sauce is adds a vast amount of juice that takes a dozen napkins to sop up. It's great. I had enough chicken to share with Sweet Pea.

Sweet Pea on the road again.

The forest walk reminded me of something Dolores LaChapelle, author of Earth Wisdom wrote: “Patanjali, Buddha, Moses, and Jesus did not go to workshops or seminars or even churches. They went directly to nature; sat under a Bodhi tree of on top of a mountain or in a cave. We've been living off the residual remains of their inspiration for thousands of years, but this has almost run out. It is time to return to the source of this inspiration—the earth itself.”

Mine was just a little walk in the woods, A Hors d'oeuvre, a taste of the wilderness, but then we came home, and I had a deja' vu.

In Hawaii, we had no refrigerator.

Not again!

Our present fridge was on the fritz. It worked, but husband dear said we must defrost the refrigerator and the freezer for a water leakage had caused ice to build up behind the back panel.

In Hawaii, we used an ice chest for months. To celebrate getting a loan on the house we bought a refrigerator. It remained up-plugged though, for we didn't have enough solar power to run it.

Instead of using electricity, we used ice. Used to be people got a block of ice from an iceman who carried that massive chunk of frozen water on his shoulder, dumped it into your icebox, and that ice kept your food cold for a week or until the ice man came again.

The deja' vu came when I loaded some items in an ice chest. My choice, for I didn't want to be running to the refrigerator in the Way-back every few minutes.

We do have an extra refrigerator, thanks to our California experience where we rented a house without one, bought one, and hauled it to Oregon with us. Now we have two, well three, another in the Way-back that we inherited. The trouble is it doesn't get cold, but is beautiful, so it's a possibility someday.

I figured the Universe was making up for denying us refrigerators for a time.

A thousand years ago a Zen Master wrote this poem: 

Magical power,
      marvelous action!
Chopping wood,
      carrying water...”

On the road to enlightenment (ahem, I'm not claiming anything), one must still do the minutia of life, chop wood and carry water. The editors of NEW AGE JOURNAL wrote a book with that title: Chop Wood, Carry Water, and their take is a bit different from what I initially thought it meant.

Not only must we chop wood and carry water, meaning take care of business, but our spiritual journey can be because of it.

We do not need to spend our lives sitting piously on a mountain, our life, our journey, comes from the living of it.

I failed my spiritual test as I carried frozen food to the Way-back refrigerator. With all my grunting and grumbling and throwing a few expletives, the Universe would not have given me a gold star.

But then maybe She doesn't care. It was my choice. I could accomplish a task with a glad heart or have a fit.

A screaming fit still gets the job done!

But it's not so great on our nervous system.

Oh well, I'll get another chance when I haul all those frozen items back into the house and put our in-house refrigerator back together again.

P..S. This is super cool:

https://www.wired.com/story/meet-jim-allison-the-texan-who-just-won-a-nobel-cancer-breakthrough/

Circle the Wagons

I don't think we have a clue about our fellow man.

After writing about #Negativity Bias in the last blog I still wondered about people. Are we sitting at home in front of our tee vees gobbling up negativity while wondering why we feel like we have been dragged through a knothole backward?

If the media said that 138,000 people escaped poverty last year, as well as the one hundred years before that, that data would slide off us.

Progress is slow.

But an explosion is instantaneous.  A powerful brain hit.  

We preserve that explosion like mom canned her string beans in a mason jar. The brain takes out our mason jars filled with jaw-dropping memories and serves those memories for hors d’oeuvres.

On an eight-minute clip of an interview with Steven Pinker on the Joe Rogan show, Pinker said, and gives evidence to support it, that the world is becoming better— fewer wars, better education, medical advances, progress on lessening pollution.  However, since 1950, the media has become 70% worse. (Judged by the use of negative words used.) 

Where does that leave us?

Okay, we get up from our chair and poke our heads out the window, and the little birdies are chirping and flying limb to limb.

Hey, look at that! It’s not so bad after all.

John F. Kennedy said.
“Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man.”

Ever since I saw the movie Alpha about how dog's (aka wolves) and humans connected I have been intrigued with what the Native Americans called the Sacred Path. 

It is the path laid down by our ancestors in an attempt to show us the way to go, to help us find the big game that will sustain us through the winter. The Scout, the Shaman the Medicine woman, are all there to help us. All point to the physical and spiritual path. 

 

Recently I have been calling myself "The Scout" as in covered wagon days when a rider went out to search the area, and bring back news of the safest route to take, where to find the narrowest strip of river to cross, if there were hostiles in the vicinity and the best place to circle the wagons for the night.

I'm here to scout the Sacred Path, whatever that might be, and wherever it might take us.

 

I am neither a Shaman nor a Medicine Woman; I’m a seeker and a self-proclaimed Scout. 

When I lay something by the campfire, be it story or fact, it is for you to pick up or leave. It’s simply something I found on the trail. 

My “Tribe” will find me. 

As I clip-clop along the trail, I think that by innuindo the world is screwy, yet when I get back to the wagon train I notice how helpful people are, how ingenious, how friendly. All in all, it looks pretty good.

 

 

And here on this day in November, the world looks rosy, the bird's chirp, the deciduous trees are trading in their pajamas, yellow and red, and magenta, for a naked hibernation. They will hover under a blanket of frost or snow or ice, but come spring they will throw off their covers, and push out sweet buds that become silky leaves that shine with golden drops of sun, and spin in the rays of summer.

No scout worth their saddle soap would leave without adding something of value to the tribe. 

As I was riding hell-bent for leather down a mountain path, I caught this tidbit from Tim Harris. (The Four-hour Work Week) It’s his take of the gratitude list.

Each day put three things on your list.

1.     Name a person you are grateful for:

Not your kids, your spouse, or your girlfriend, you will use them up in a hurry, but someone from history, someone from high school, that teacher who sent you down a different path.

2.   Whatever you want

3.   Something small:

Potato chips, birdies, sunshine.

I am grateful for you.
I am grateful for my warm house.
I am grateful for the iced tea I sip as I write this.

See you after the next ride,
Jo

 Scout, Tonto's horse. How about being named after him? I wonder, though, why is Tonto riding with a saddle?

OW Brains and Wow Brains

Bless your Heart.

You came to this site.

I’m going to savor knowing you were here for 20 seconds.

Hum….dum de dum…

I’ve heard that letting a positive experience settle for 20 seconds changes the brain to be more receptive to good.

We often brush away a compliment, saying “Thank you,” and it slides off. 
Three seconds—it’s gone.

Have you noticed how we remember the bad stuff, but forget the good? 
I can hear you, "Oh, I remember the good stuff.” 

Of course, you do, especially those moments wrought with emotion.
It’s the way our brain works. 

Sitting in a Vet's office one day an elderly man asked me if I would like to see his cats.

"Sure," I said.

He showed me a picture of two dead cats.

 I almost fell off my chair.

He had no malice.  He genuinely needed to show me. I could see he loved those cats. Those emotionally packed hurts were emblazoned in his brain. 

That’s Negativity bias.

And what is negativity bias anyway? 

Dwelling on negativity is a function of the brain. 

Our beautiful brain is hardwired to put more weight on the negatives. As we evolved and faced danger, our hair-trigger reaction was to scream, “Tiger,” and run.
If we survived the event, we needed to remember it so we would never be in that situation again.  And we needed to go home and tell our fellows about it.

Dr. Rick Henson, a neuropsychologist, his book: Happiness: the New Brain, says:
“The brain is like Velcro for the negative, Teflon for the positive.” 

The problem is that those negative experiences—here in our “modern” age it is not usually from tigers, but from financial worries, relationship problems, work-related issues, early abuse, you get the picture. 

All that can create a bottle-neck in the brain. 

When our cells are stressed, a brain chemical called cortisol pours into our cells. And cells tend to replicate what they just got.

Our body gets used to the cortisol, our cells thrive on it, and want more.  The trouble is continual doses of cortisol wear down the body, leaving it prone to disease and pain. 
When we try to put aside old patterns of negativity, it makes our cells feel ill, and they want to go back to the old way. 

Here come the stories, such as: “I’m stuck, I can’t do it, I’m not built like that,” “I don’t have the capabilities,” but remember, 
Just as you are about ready to give up, a shift happens. 

Ow brains become Wow brains. 

A Wow brain tends to look at life as an exciting, adventurous experience instead of a dangerous one.

Creating new thought patterns is neurolinguistic programming.   

Dr. Hanson said he was a geeky kid and not well liked, but when he got to college, he made a discovery. Positive experiences create more positive experiences. If he held onto that encouragement, that compliment, that smile, wink, whatever, he began to feel better.

Thus he promotes the 20-second rule—savor that positive experience for 20 seconds and see what happens. 

I noticed, however, as I was doing his process of thinking of a happy event—I choose the day I got my horse—you know I am cuckoo over horses—well at least a couple in my life. As I tried to hold my happy thought about getting Boots, thoughts crept in of the day I lost him. 

That was Negativity bias.

Name it and let it go. 

Tame the old lizard brain.

Not an easy task.

Over ten years ago daughter dear and I attended The Calvalia horse extravaganza in Dallas Texas. I had to think of it when I came upon the photo of Fredric Pigon leaping with his gorgeous Calvalia stalion in the picture above. And being in Texas I had to buy a pair of cowboy boots. (Snake skin.) We had to have a steak too, (Not snake, beef.) and I have to admit, their beef steaks held the prize until years later they were beat by a Santa Fe New Mexico's bone-in ribeye.

The Texas policy of serving a steak is to give it its own plate, nothing else. Sides come, well, on the side in their own dishes.

The event we went to see, Calvalia, has many horses, yet their white ones are the showiest. I’ve seen trick riders before, but the girl that let out a “Whoop!” and came barreling into the arena (on a chestnut colored horse) like a bat out of hell, riding roman style, one foot on one horse one foot on another set the bar.

With my experience with horses, I learned that they, like people, are extremely susceptible to cortisol. And scientific journals have noted that a continual bathing of cortisol will actually shrink their brain. 

See, I did have a point talking about horses. For they have similarities with people. 

Horses, like people, are easily conditioned—that’s the reason they make such good workers and companions with people. And horses, like people, can damper their natural flight tendency. 

The reason horses buck:

 
Since horses are large animals, they are thought to be tough. They are athletes, strong, yet delicate. Their skin is seven times more sensitive than ours, and their legs—being their primary means of escape, are tendons and bone, not muscle from the knee down. Horses are sensitive to signals that our human eye can barely catch. I discovered, too, that when riding a horse, it will go toward your focus. Let’s say you keep your eyes glued on a fence post. Your horse will go straight to it.

Is it any wonder that I often compare gentling the horse to raising humans?

And you can see too, that I might think that wishing on them is magical.

 (My other blog is https://www.wishonwhitehorses.com)