Ever since I was a little girl, I was obsessed with horses. But not the kind of obsessed, where I just simply wanted a horse. No, my obsession was much deeper. I wanted to BE a horse. Looking back, I can see the makings of a personality that isn't satisfied until the essence of a thing is completely and fully understood. Maybe obsession isn't the right word. It was more like PURPOSE, right from the beginning. Maybe even what some would call DESTINEY. 

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But. . . I did not grow up having any connection to horses aside from my all-consuming desire. My mother, did give me a birthday where my friends and I went for a trail ride. And my piano teacher's neighbors had two horses that I coaxed to the fence with carrots and apples while waiting for my lesson every week. And then I grew up, carried on with the business of school, college, working, relationships. Life carried me away. 

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After fumbling around and not finding much sense of purpose after getting my BA in Sociology, I decided I should go to grad school. I knew I was good at being an academic, and I wasn't really ready to be an adult, so an extended stay in the ivory tower sounded like just what I needed. . . to hide away from the world for a bit longer. 

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I chose a highly unique subject to study, Depth Psychology. I had always been intensely curious about my own depths, invested in the meaning of my dreams and drawn in by the mystery of consciousness and the soul. 

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So there I was, a graduate student at Pacifica Graduate Institute, into my second year of my program. And then it started happening. The dreaming. The horses came back to me. Every night for weeks on end, without fail, the horses would come to me in my dreams. Dreams so vivid and intense, it was impossible for me to brush them off and believe they had no meaning. They became so loud, so big, I couldn't ignore what was happening. 

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So, I had to respond. I found a little barn near where I lived that had a few horses. I drove down one day and found the woman that owned them, and I pleaded my case as to why she had to let me come and work in her barn for free, in exchange for learning about her horses. 

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All of my studies in graduate school quickly began to swirl around my experiences I was having with horses, dream horses and waking-world horses. And my dissertation "Equus in the Moon: A re-membering of the horse-human relationship" became the culmination of my time and effort at Pacifica. Before I completed my PhD, I had been gifted my first horse, Saltos (his full name was Salto de Fe, meaning Leap of Faith,) and had started teaching other people. I worked at numerous other barns, soaking up every bit of information and experience that I could, developing my own theories and methodologies along the way. 

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So many years later, I find myself on my own farm here in TN with eleven horses, one blue heeler, a barn cat, and a husband that loves horses as much as I do. These are the broad strokes of my story. The outlines of the design of my purpose. There have been many challenges, a lot of pain and heartbreak along the path that got me to this point. My horses carried me through all of it. Every iteration of my work is imbued with the life lessons they have taught me.