So much to do, so little time

Lif riding Cassie in an endurance race, probably in CA, probably in the 1980s

I’m one of those people who always has too much to do. That’s solid truth. My To Do list goes on and on and on, from big-ticket items to small.

The list starts with finishing my straw bale house (generations of birds have been born in the sections of walls that aren’t plastered yet). It includes gardening, messing around with photography, playing with fabric (and finishing bed quilts and wall hangings promised to people years ago), plus maintaining web and social media accounts – my own as well as clients’. It moves on to working with the horses, and hiking with the dogs. Not to mention the daily ranch and household chores, grocery shopping, and like that. There’s more, but hey.

Oh, and did I mention writing? That thing I do that takes up hours and hours of my day, every day, and pretty much ensures that not much of those other things on the list get done?

Yeah. Writing. I have a bunch of stories started, a few novels drafted, some graphic novels sketched out, literary agents to query, books and stories to promote. Then there’s the blogging – and isn’t that a wormhole. Once you start blogging, you’ve got to keep it up. Not only do readers expect it, but if a blogger ever wants to get noticed by search engines, she’s got to have a presence on the web. And that means regular blogging, not blogging-when-you-remember-to-do-it kind of blogging.

I’m an irregular person. What can I say. Schedules are guaranteed to turn me off and turn me away. And yet sometimes it just has to be done.

looselettingness

This morning I was frittering away my limited free time (who am I kidding – what free time) poking around Facebook when I read an interesting post shared by a friend about horsemanship and the dressage concept of Losgelassenheit (“looselettingness”, a balance of relaxation and tension in both horse and rider). I commented that I was writing about that years ago, using the term “spiritual horsemanship”.

Talk about wormholes. I hadn’t posted to that blog in so long I had forgotten it existed. I wasn’t even sure where it was. So I googled it and found it – and was I surprised. It was good. The next thing I knew I was copying and pasting each entry into one of my word processing programs for writers (Scrivener).

I had started my Spiritual Horsemanship blog back in 2006 with the intention of using the posts to draft a book. I thought it was a good idea but it was intense trying to write about it, to dig deep into concepts I knew with my body but not with my thinking/speaking mind. My posting slowed down until twenty-five thousand words and eight years later I gave up. I got side-tracked blogging about music and magic. Eventually I compiled that writing and made it into a book, Mage Music, and then moved on to other things.

Fast forward to today

I’ve got so much to do! I’m so behind!  And yet… somehow Spiritual Horsemanship seems like a good project to dive into.  I shouldn’t.  But I want to — and not later on down the line. 

Miss Etta, part of the family & expecting to share a meal

Now.  To Do lists be damned.