Tag: break the stigma

Scatterbrained Showers

On By adonkumentaryIn donkey, farm2 Comments

Finally, my favorite days. I’ve written about them before: the days where it’s warm in the sun and cool in the shade. On and off I take my flannel shirt as I move across the yard beneath spotted shadows of spring-heavy trees. The ground went from washed out to tangled jungle in a mere handful of days, so I’m tending to her with my myriad of second-hand tools that clink and clank with rusted age. Yard work is my favorite work, especially on temperately blissful days like this one. Like the eager plants around me, I could swear every cell in my body is reaching for the sun.

Bodhi and Tee are playing donkey games in the yard while Bunny stands at the fence  grooming the neighbor’s horse with her teeth. Around my legs, Ron Swanson the Rooster and Trixie the dog chase each other endlessly. This unlikely friendship is one that even the grumpiest of curmudgeons can’t help but smile about. I post about them often on my Instagram, if you’re a ‘grammer.



My last post was a dreary one in which I swore the storms were never going to end. It’s difficult to feel optimistic when the ground is continually washed away along with any real hope for stability and growth while the world around is a blur of colors that you can’t see through clearly even though you want to so badly. And indeed there is more rain in the forecast in the coming week.

But as I stand outside among my funny family of seemingly sunshine-drunk animals and leaves that are practically unfolding before my eyes, I’m reminded that all of this is just an infinite series of small moments. One after another they come, an endless film strip that moves so quickly sometimes, it’s hard to tell what you’re looking at until it’s passed—images already fading softly in your memory.

The sun has dropped behind the trees now with only small bits of light shining through the holes between the leaves as a chill crawls along my arms. I untie the flannel shirt from around my waist and head towards the barn where the donkeys bray because sunset means dinner time and they know I’ll be there with their hay. I always will. I suppose those routines are roots in their own way.

As light slips down the barn walls, I take pause with my donkeys, stretching the fleeting moment as long as I can because with them, I am present. I am here. I am rooted so firmly that no amount of scatterbrained showers can wash me away. Day after day, the donkeys remind me of this. They hold down my kite string when the wind turns wild.

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Like pulling eggs delicately from the chicken coop, I think the best we can do sometimes is pick up one moment at a time as they come, examine them, and tuck them carefully into our apron. Some of the eggs might be bad—it happens—but typically, as long as you’re handling them the right way, they’re going to be just fine.

Moonlit Mind

On By adonkumentaryIn anxiety, UncategorizedLeave a comment

It’s the middle of the night. Last time I looked at the digital clock on my nightstand, it said “2:44” and that seems like hours ago. I’m laying on my back with the blanket balled up beneath my chin and my eyes closed, hoping that somehow, someway, sleep will take me. I know in my gut that it won’t, but I try anyway.

I do this more often than not—lay awake at night hoping for sleep typically without success. It’s a common thing for us to do, to have our minds flooded with fragments of every small memory, distant worry, running checklist, and distracting thought the second our heads hit the pillow: I know this because I see enough of my friends post memes about busy-minded insomnia to know I’m not alone. But damn, if it isn’t exhausting. I sigh, roll over into a fetal position, and open my eyes to see that it’s 3:30 now. One of my dogs must sense my movement because from across the room, I hear the tinkling of a collar.

At this point, the bed is no longer comfortable and the silence and darkness have become a perfect and chaotic breeding ground for toxic thoughts to pour from the pockets of insecurities that I carry around, so I slide out from under the blankets. It’s cold out here. Draped over the dresser is my flannel shirt which I grab and wrap myself in as I head into the living room. Tucker, the dog with the tinkling collar, follows me.

The floor glows blue in stretched out moonlight and is cold under my feet. I sit in my favorite spot on the couch and pull a throw blanket over myself. This side of the couch—my preferred side—is a perfect looking spot next to a window that faces the barn where my three donkeys are snuggled in, hopefully nuzzled together and not busy-minded like me. The thought of their thoughts makes me smile. Last week, my vet came out to perform Bodhi’s castration and as he was waking from his sedative, the vet told me he often wonders if donkeys dream. “They’re so smart, you know,” he told me in his gruff, East-Texas accent, “and I’m just curious what they must dream about. Surely they do.” I adored my vet before this comment but when he said that, my admiration for him leveled up. He gets donkeys. He wonders about their dreams.

He, my vet, was there the day Tink died. It was a Saturday afternoon and we had to call him out in an emergency. He was there within 20 minutes of our call and stayed until we said our final goodbye. At the time, I didn’t know him very well, but he hugged me tight when I crumbled and began to weep. I left smudged mascara marks on his brown vest. I think about that often.

The barn is blue in the moonlight and above it, a perfectly clear, cold sky twinkles with a few, bright stars. It’s been dropping down to the 20’s at night which for us here in Texas is brutal. The throw blanket tugs and I break my gaze with the barn to see Tucker nosing the blanket. Tucker will be 10 this year and for at least the past 6 years, he finds his way to me every single time I sit in my spot on the couch with a throw blanket and my legs curled up beneath me. I adjust myself and lift the blanket, allowing him to hop up and curl into a perfect dog ball next to my legs. I cover him with the blanket and he sighs. This is our assumed position.

I stroke the shape of Tucker’s back and look back to the barn. Bodhi’s recovering beautifully from his castration. I’ve seen many donkeys castrated and it’s never phased me a bit, but seeing your own baby who you used to bottle feed under the knife like that is a whole other story. He’s a little fighter though, our orphaned donkey who tried to steal the Christmas tree. He’s already back to his same, silly shenanigans.

Somewhere in the distance, I hear a dog bark. Tucker tenses and from under the blanket, the shape of his ears perk. “Shhh,” I say to him, stroking his head, “it’s okay.” He sighs again and relaxes.

But is it? Is it okay? Who am I to know? Maybe a dog is barking because someone’s house is getting robbed somewhere. Or maybe someone has abandoned their dog and he or she is terrified and calling out for rescue. Or maybe that dog heard another dog who heard another dog and the bark chain actually started out in Louisiana somewhere because a tree fell down in someone’s backyard. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s okay.

I wonder if my vet was able to get the mascara smudges off of his brown vest? I haven’t been able to work up the nerve to ask him or to offer to buy him a new vest if he wasn’t able to get the stains out. I mean, in my experience, mascara comes out of clothes pretty easily, but what if? How can I know and why am I afraid to ask? And how is it that we can exist on the cellular level and a cosmic level all at the same time? Our cells are constantly regenerating and our imaginations can wander anywhere in the known (or unknown) universe. Isn’t that wild? How infinite we are? And so how, in our vastness, can insecurities about trivial things travel around with us everywhere we go? Why does it matter? Who cares about what other people think and why am I still worrying about a conversation that went badly with an old friend a decade ago?

Tucker sighs again and I realize my whole body has become tense. I close my eyes and take in a deep breath all the way to the bottom of my lungs. I hold it there for a few seconds, then sigh it out. I do this again, breathe in all the way, hold it, and let it go. I do this over and over and over until it’s quiet…until my muscles relax over my bones like jelly.  Mascara does come out of clothes. I know this. And sometimes, dogs bark for no reason and conversations go badly. It just happens. That’s okay.

The clock above the mantle says it’s nearly 4:30am and so I figure I ought to go ahead and get my day started. I pat Tucker on the rump, grab my coat and boots, and head out in the cold morning to feed the donkeys and muck their stalls. The moon is bright behind the trees leaving everything a glowing blue.

I breathe in deep, the air cold in my gut, and sigh it out in a small cloud that floats away towards the few stars competing with the moon’s gaze. Cosmic, indeed.

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The Cutest Grinch

On By adonkumentaryIn Uncategorized1 Comment

It’s a typical mid-morning here at the ranch where I’m folding laundry back in the bedroom and King Ranch is fixing something (I’m not sure what) in Little Foot’s room. Outside, it’s unseasonably warm (thank you, Texas weather) and everything has a golden crispness to it beneath a cloudless sky. I have an audiobook playing through my phone, “First, We Make the Beast Beautiful” by Sarah Wilson. It’s an amazing listen and for anyone who lives with or struggles with anxiety, I highly recommend giving it a go. It’s a book that for me, is full of life-changers.

I’ve nearly reached the bottom of the laundry basket when from the living room, I hear a crash and the tinkling sound of delicate things bouncing across the tile floor. I drop the yoga pants from my hands and rush toward the noise. Both of our dogs are barking and running in nervous circles and from down the hall, King Ranch and Little Foot come running.

At a shaky, 45 degree angle, our Christmas tree is headed towards the open back door. Ornaments and needles are falling like raindrops and the light cord is about to pop from the wall outlet.

King Ranch lunges for the tree as I dash to wrap my arms around the culprit engaging in this Grinch-like thievery…Bodhi, our not-so-baby donkey. Somewhere beyond the barking dogs, I can hear Little Foot crying, “No! Not the tree! No!” and small, grunting curses from a struggling King Ranch. Bodhi whips his head back and forth with a branch clamped between his teeth, sending more ornaments and needles scattering across the floor when finally, he lets go.

I shuffle Bodhi outside as King Ranch props the tree back up vertically. “No. Bad donkey,” I say to Bodhi, pointing my index finger at his nose which has a few pine needles stuck to it. He looks at me with wide, playful eyes — I swear, he’s laughing. Ha. Now I am, too. I can’t be mad at this face. I wrap my arms around Bodhi’s neck and scratch the sides of his face. He leans his weight into me. Little stinker.

I’m sad to report that none of this was caught on video, the chaos having exploded too abruptly, but I do have video evidence of what it looks like to have a baby donkey know how to open your back door:

 

After re-adjusting the tree, picking up the ornaments, and reassuring Little Foot that Bodhi was just trying to share the tree and not steal it (we had to make a deal with him that we would put a tree in the barn next year so the donkeys could have one, too), our day resumed with its mundane tasks. I backed my book up to where I’d left off and, although covered in donkey hair and pine-needles, I picked up the yoga pants I’d dropped and resumed folding.

—

This happened a few weeks back and I’ve only just had the opportunity to write about it. Since then, I’ve been trying to list out my goals for this year and besides the usual trying to live healthier, watch our money, do good deeds daily, etc., I’ve landed on wanting the new year to be filled with a bit more sobering innocence. This is an already mean enough world with lots of dark and scary things…but sometimes, your baby donkey sneaks into your house and tries to steal your Christmas tree. And sometimes, days are just otherwise mundane.

One of the things Sarah Wilson talks about in her book I mentioned above are tasks that you do daily — making the bed every single morning, for example, or spending a little time every day while the coffee is brewing to meditate (the cool thing about meditating being that even if you’re bad at it, it still helps!) and how grounding those rituals become if you actually stick to them.

Most importantly, there is a lot of good happening everywhere all the time. There are sparks of light in the dark. There are people who hear you and see you and want to embrace you for your good and your bad because they see that at your core, you are a being worthy of love. There’s a lot of cute and a lot of innocent and I think those things are worth highlighting. It may not make the bad stuff go away, but like that old saying goes, “It’s better to light a single candle than curse the darkness.”

I think that’s what I’d like to do better this year: light more candles.

Happy New Year, y’all. Let’s take this a day at a time 🙂

NamasBRAY.

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P.S. I want to thank all of y’all who have shown so much support for my children’s book that came out nearly two months ago. I would love to hear your feedback / see photos of you, your kiddos, your critters enjoying the book. If you’d like to share, please send me an email at adonkumentary@gmail.com. And if you haven’t snagged your copy yet, there are still some available! Get yours here: Tink the Bravest Donkey

P.P.S. If you’re interested in getting a copy of the book I mention above, “First We Make the Beast Beautiful,” you can find it here. I promise, it doesn’t disappoint.