As we get older, hopefully we get wiser – or sometimes, we keep stepping in the same pile of poop in the same corral of asses…I experience both scenarios on a regular basis.
It seems like the last few years, the insights of wisdom and the dirty boots have been coming more hard and fast. Today, I was driving home from my Sister’s. I passed the corner store, where my better half said she saw a cowboy tie off a horse the other day. As I drove closer to home, I marveled at the Spring-looking sky, against what are miraculously still semi-green hills. I was thinking about the birds I see everywhere – how they choose to fly together.
I have learned that it is not that birds fly together so they don’t get lost. In fact, each has an ability to determine Due-North via a magnetic substance in their head. They can fly where they need to go by themselves.
Birds fly together to encourage each other. The Geese that honk when they fly are most often, encouraging the leader and each other to keep going – like a rally cry. Joining Twitter has been more like that for me than even being in my Family. I come from a group of relatives so self-reliant, that sometimes, we forget what it’s like to work with and for the mutual benefit of a Group. Twitter Peeps sharing, problem-solving, encouraging, venting, and innovating is evolving this Peepster into a new Bird. I want to honk while flying, feeling the counter-wind of other wings, sharing a common vision of what’s below and in front of me.
Enter the horse tied off at the corner store. The Cowboy in question definitely did not have access to a jet pack, but probably had access to a car. What does riding a horse to a corner store get you? It gets you a slower trip. Time to reflect, look, listen, feel, smell: The experience of choosing how one gets somewhere.
One of my most favorite people was Carla Fry, now part of the Big Hollywood in the Sky. At the time she died, she was a mere early forty-something. She was Executive Producer at New Line, the highest-ranking woman in Hollywood, and in charge of production for the ‘Lord of the Rings’ Trilogy. I met her towards the end of her life, and spent more time with her than anyone else in the last month of her life. She said something that I will never forget as we chatted one afternoon: She looked out her window to her rose bushes and said, “If I had it to do all over again, I would garden roses.” This statement floored me because in the end, she just wanted the quiet connection to flowers – that she could nurture and enjoy – a far cry from her experience as Studio Executive.
If Carla were here today, she would advocate me flying with other birds and riding my proverbial horse to the corner store – with a rose in my mouth. I hope to look back at some point, after the completion of some migration so to speak, and see that I have indeed, lived “Carla-fied” – heeded, and then exceeded at the Art of Living.
Katherine Bennett's Aesthetic Verbatecture 