On being "herd bound"

Above, a juvenile Great Blue Heron in a successful hunt!

Happy Saturday friends!

One of the things some horse people talk about in annoyed tones is when horses are "herd bound" meaning, they like their herd, they want to be with them, they don't "behave" when they are away from them, and they can't wait to get back to them.

When you have a new horse coming into an intact herd, they aren't bonded in with the other horses yet and you can come and go with them, taking them on walks or riding or clicker training, or whatever it is people do with them, without much of a fuss. That was the way it was with Rayn when I first got her. She and I bonded immediately over clicker training and she didn't yet know the herd of 14 horses I took her to live with so we spent a lot of time going on walks together or trail riding and it didn't bother her in the least. As she bonded with her herd and found her place among them, I would often just go hang out with them instead of taking her away from them. Even if we did go down the road, the herd would either watch us or even follow us along the fence. They were friends and they wanted to be together. Being away from each other didn't feel safe.

And that makes me think about how we as women (I'd say humans but 99.999% of you are women), could take a page from a horse herd and actually be more herd bound. We are missing out on having a supportive herd, we are separated in our homes, we don't go to the watering hole together, we don't take walks together, we don't eat together, we don't play :-) we are missing out on the joys of living in a herd!

But here at the ranch, there are some options, and I'd love for you to join us!

Click here to send me a text or an email to sign up!

AUTUMNAL EQUINOX MEDITATION WITH THE HERD
September 22nd
6:30—8:00pm
$20
Sunset is 7:10pm on the 22nd so think fairy lights, ponies, and mini donkeys! If you wonder what it's like here, this is a great time to come visit!

TUESDAY MORNING WOMEN'S CIRCLE
Tuesday, Oct 14th
10:00am—1:00pm 
6 weeks (Oct 14, 21, 28 and Nov 4, 11, 18)
$210 is the total (half up front to hold your spot)

WEDNESDAY EVENING WOMEN'S CIRCLE
Wednesday, Oct 15th
6:00pm—9:00pm
6 weeks (Oct 15, 22, 29 and Nov 5, 12, 19)
$210 is the total (half up front to hold your spot)

I TOLD A BUNCH OF LITTLE STORIES ON SUBSTACK THIS WEEK AND WANTED TO SHARE A FEW:

Can you tell I'm coming up to Mom's birthday (Sept 12) which is also the day that my mare Rayn (now in heaven) came home to me in 2012? 

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I think I must be so passionate about Women’s Circles because of her 👇🏽 That’s Mom and she was my best girlfriend until the day she crossed over to heaven in the fall of 2022. She was always there, always supportive, always up for talking, reminiscing, LAUGHING, she always had my back. She was SAFE. How often are we given unconditional love in our lives?

My goal is to offer that same feeling of love and safety for anyone who comes to the ranch.

When I think about it, it’s legacy safety, something that is passed down from a long line: My mom’s mom and my mom’s sister were her best friends. My Grandma’s mom was her best friend—this love and safety has been passed down through my maternal line, how beautiful.

If you need some love, support, and safety in your life, I have openings in my upcoming Tuesday morning Women’s Circle that starts Oct 14. 6 weeks, 10am-1pm, $210. Perfect for moms with kids in school (or with baby sitters), retirees, women with flexible schedules. You can read more about it here.

PS This colored pencil portrait I painted of her is called Wet Noodle because that’s what she said she felt like after a day at the beach, her favorite place to be 💜

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In my effort to post a little piece of my older art each day-here is a silly one from 2020. Pre-pandemic, pre-my mom’s cancer diagnosis, pre-moving the farm across the country to live close to her:

I had a dream where she and I were pigs! She loooved pigs and even had a little collection of piggy things (salt and pepper shakers, tiny figurines). In the dream this is what we looked like, both smiling and I was tucked under her chin. It was the sweetest, funniest little dream. When I woke up I had to paint it and then I mailed it to her. When she crossed over to heaven, I got it back. I’ll never forget the feeling of that dream💜

 

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Sometimes you just want to paint joy 🤩 🤸 This one was from 2022 after a dream I had of riding my mare Rayn. I brought her home on September 12, 2012 and I rode for the first 6 months with her telling me that she wasn’t supposed to be ridden. She didn’t tell me with any behaviors, she was always gentle and I often rode her bareback, but I could hear her in my head😊 I finally listened and our relationship BLOOMED. I never rode her in real life again but we would often ride in my dreams. She crossed the rainbow bridge last year and I miss her everyday.

We still sometimes ride together in dreams. 🥰

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As a self-taught artist, I’ve had to stumble upon realizations through trial and error and intuition. That was the case with the shirt portrait of this Border Collie back in 2005. I found a little niche market back in the early 2000s when I started agility classes with my own Border Collies. The agility teacher found out I could paint and asked if I could paint her favorite agility dog on a denim shirt. I never had but figured I could. News spread and soon I was painting a ton of these shirts. They were fun and easy and so much faster than the colored pencil portraits of people and animals that I was also doing during that time. Colored pencil portraits take so much time and often have about 30 layers!

At that point in my life I had been creating about 10 years or so and had told myself that I couldn’t paint on a canvas, I just wasn’t good enough, didn’t know enough, wasn’t a “fine artist.” Oh ho! The games our brains play with us 😂

So one day, as I was painting this dog on the back of a large, heavy duty denim shirt stretched and clipped to a board, the idea popped in: if this, then that. If I could paint this dog on a shirt, what was keeping me from painting on a canvas!?! I can still remember calling my mom and us laughing our heads off over it!

It’s so interesting all the stories we tell ourselves isn’t it? “I don’t like that because I’m not good enough”—never giving ourselves time to try, to learn, never giving ourselves grace. We would encourage a friend or a child to try and fail and try again but we are so hard on ourselves.

In my Women’s Circles I include an art component. We have time to be out with the horses in our circle and each person gets to share what’s on their heart with no interruption—then we head to the studio to play, talk, and have snacks. I always give a tracing to start with because almost everyone I’ve ever met is terrified of drawing. Who wants to start anything terrified? But after the image is traced onto the paper, we play with fun colors in watercolor, acrylic ink, watercolor crayons and more. Sometimes we add collage or write our thoughts out on the paper before painting. I add bits of instruction as we go, for people to take, or not, and by the end of 6 weeks, we each have a piece of art that looks different from everyone else’s. It’s the coolest thing to see. And during all that painting time we learned more about each other’s lives and stories, we created art, community and friendships. 💜

THE RANCH:

Our boarded horse Cash needed to have some dental work and was down at the lower pasture, Tori was not happy being separated. They are "herd bound" and I'm glad for it:

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The deer on the ranch have been a constant presence lately. I saw this doe and her twins so I went outside to get a picture. She raised her head and looked right at me. I mentally told her she and her babies were safe, that I loved having them all here, and was happy to see them looking healthy and happy. After about 30 seconds she went back to eating the fallen muscadine grapes. Once she wandered off into the woods, another mom and baby appeared from the left. I love seeing them in their little herds. Pretty soon the moms and babies will all come back together for the fall. Last year there were 12!

Another one I spotted from the kitchen window:

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OMG! Guess what? Remember when I started the community garden but then it fizzled because it got too hot and we hadn't yet finished creating the beds? It's slowly cooling off so I took Lucy out for a walk around the pond to see it and found...

TWELVE pumpkins growing out there! It's quite a jungle but soon it will be cool enough to work out there and finish the beds and get them settled for next year's planting. I'm looking forward to seeing these pumpkins turn orange! I've never grown them before and I didn't intend to grow them this time lol. Remember how last fall I asked people to bring me their pumpkins after Halloween so the goats could eat them? Remember how I ended up with a huge display of colorful pumpkins on my front porch? Well when the goats were done with them, I'd scoop up what was left and throw them in the compost heap. When I put dirt in the community garden, apparently I brought seeds with it and they sprouted all on their own. Cool.

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We've had this stuff blooming for a few years now and at first I thought it was Carolina Jessamine, then some sort of fall honeysuckle, but I just looked it up and found out it's called Sweet Autumn Clematis. Apparently in the south is can be "aggressively invasive" and I'm supposed to be worried. 

Ppppffftttt! 

Look how beautiful!

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Did you see the video of the Great Blue Heron at the top? It was so brown that I figured it was a young one or a female. A little research and I found out that the males and females look alike and the young ones look like this. This one had good parents to teach it, see how it went far away from the pond edge so if the fish got loose, it wouldn't fall back in the water? I've never been able to video a successful hunt and while it was a bit of a shaky video, I was excited! I took this photo below, realized that it had spied something, and quickly switched my phone to video to record the catch! Amazing to see that fish flipping around inside the bird's throat!

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It's been a week since the 19 trees were taken out (if you're new here and wondering why in the world we'd do that, click here to read the story) and B-Rad has been working hard on ripping up roots with the backhoe and smoothing out our front yard or as I like to call it the "moonscape." Finally getting to use up the yards and yards of compost we've been storing and hope to be planting grass seed this coming week:

I don't know why she likes the dirt so much...

THE MEMES:

This one made me snort laugh! But if you're still scratching your head, here you go:

This one will only jog your memory if you're a Star Trek: Next Generation fan (and I think I will restart that series, I haven't watched it in ages!)

And the NASA tampon thing from Google: NASA engineers did ask astronaut Sally Ride if 100 tampons were enough for her one-week mission in 1983. The question stemmed from a lack of understanding of female anatomy and menstrual needs in space, highlighting the sexism faced by early female astronauts. Ride later recalled the event, stating she responded that they could cut it in half.

The responses to the above meme were hysterical! Here are just a few:

1. I brushed my teeth once with vaginal cream. And then under this one:

a. My sister in law once borrowed my toothpaste and then came out asking why it tasted like bacon—it was our dog's toothpaste

b. I brushed my teeth with a tube of deep heat that was on the basin in my ex's bathroom

Me? I once, in the dim light of a nightlight, worried I was getting sick, gargled with an essential oil called Purification (lemongrass, citronella) instead of Thieves (cloves, cinnamon). 

You?

Have you been hearing about the "comet" 3I/Atlas? Click here to watch!

And the one that made me laugh the hardest and still does seeing it again now:

(And yet another Star Trek reference! Ha!)

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This is an AI-free newsletter! While I love to use AI to help me figure out a piece of software I don't understand, my intention is to use it to help me with the drudgery, never with writing, art, creation. All em dashes are intentional and mine, I was using them way before ChatGPT was a twinkle in Sam Altman's eye :-)

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The Mother Ranch on YouTube.

The Mother Ranch art on Substack.

Thank you for reading :-)

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