Freedom

I stare into my pictures and too often wish that I was there instead of here. Up there on that buckskin's back, feeling bold muscles beneath my thighs, my hair free behind me and the wind whipping tears from my eyes.

I never intended to be where I am now but can't tell you where I intended to be. The years of my life whiz through my fragmented memory like a horror movie filled with moments of joy and wonder. The day my son David was born, when I raced a horse on the beach of the Pacific Ocean, when I first looked at a bird and saw its freedom, when I wrote a story and liked it, when I picked up a camera and tried to chase a hummingbird around, and when my youngest, Brandon, decided to change his life around, so many small pieces that spelled hope. Those moments sporadic but there, all pulling at my insides, trying to tug at my essence and bring it to the core of my awareness.

The happiness was the antithesis of everything my father told me that I could have and so I pushed it away, settling for the misery he bottled my childhood into. I could have broken that bottle at any time, it was glass after all, but no one told me that it was okay.

When I made the decision to close my original blog and move my words away from the prying eyes of people who are so unhappy with their lives that they have to pick apart mine and other's, the freedom of my heart soared. It took so many years for me to realize that I could move away from my abusers and surround myself with nature and caring people, but that is my new direction. At the moment I'm not trying to please anyone other than myself. I'm not trying to be anyone else and am not unhappy with who I am. Free of the chains that have shackled me since early childhood and that I attached to boulders in later years, thinking that there was nothing better.

I am the product of my experiences but they are not who I am. I have not gotten over the abusive episodes but finally am through them and onto better things.

For the umpteenth time since returning to Idaho, I went searching for moose to shoot (photograph) and couldn't find them. Instead this buckskin pushed its way into my dreams and reminded me of some of the precious moments of the past and suddenly I realized that there were more to come.