All These Things Count...

As you have probably gathered by now I packed a lot of living into my life inbetween all the many hospital stays, knowing there would come the time when my physical battles became more and more incapacitating...which is where I now am.  However I am exceedingly grateful for being able to have done so much.

There is a great deal of talk about having a bucket list these days.  And for me there are only two things I would had loved to have been able to do I was unable to get done.

One thing I touched on in a previous blog was I took flying lessons.  I love flying.  I was about to begin my third lesson when my blood counts plummeted again and I got whisked off to a pediatric cancer ward for a new bone marrow drug, having to be isolated for a long period of time.  This was during the same time I met Michael who was also on the ward, and we did the infamous Goldfish Caper together I wrote about earlier.

Since I was in the ward so long, by the time I got out I had life, work, and a horse waiting to plunge back into.  So I never got to complete learning how to fly and that is something I wished I had been able to finish doing.

Yet even more than that the one HUGE thing I have longed to do since I can remember is to combine two of the things I love most, which are horses and beaches.  For I have always wanted to gallop a horse on a beach.  This for me would have been "The Ultimate" thing to do.

As it is galloping a horse bareback on a beach will have to remain elusive.  And yet, I have been so blessed to be on each of my seven horses bareback, soaring freely across many vast fields without wings.

Did you know many live their entire lives within twenty miles from where they were born?  Or spend their lives working in a profession unfulfilling to them?

Despite all my challenges I have lived or been all over this country with my horses working as a Theatre Scene Designer.  Both horses and Theatre Scene Design held my heart with a passion too deep for words.  Both horses and a career as a Scene Designer should have been beyond my reach.  Unattainable.  Crazy to dare go after.

But I did anyway because they were my deep abiding passion.

Perhaps I never got my pilot's license or galloped a horse along a beach yet I have been able to do a thousand things many have never done.  For you see, I am one of the lucky ones who still got to live a life so very deep.  So very full.  

And most of all, so very, very BIG.