(Ma-ree-nah O-zoo-nah), nee’ Sheryl Studley
I grew up believing that elves and fairies were as real as the children on my block. The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies, I took to be an encyclopedia, and my parents, career schoolteachers, did nothing to dissuade me. Indeed, I was lucky in that both my parents believed in the importance of moments, and the car would come to a halt for a particularly stunning view, the wonder of does and fawns under a stand of apple trees, or a hawk perched on a pole. To this day, I cannot drive without counting hawks. The quality of the mileage I consume, is daily measured by the quality of magic moments or wilderness friends seen, and counted. Many is the shaft of light hitting just so, I have pulled over to acknowledge. Many the moment I have collected. Somehow those moments of nature’s magic, and the hidden kingdoms of elves and fairies, fused seamlessly over the years, into a lifelong kinship with Nature in all her many guises.
I was born in Austin, Texas, where Dad was stationed after service in the Air Force in Korea. Both he and mom grew up in New York State and shortly after my birth, we returned there, then on to Vermont, and Rhode Island. My earliest memories are of the picturesque, small college town of Castleton, Vermont, with its main street lined with ancient sugar maple trees still then tapped every spring for syrup, the mapling houses, trout fishing in the creek, trails through the grasses, and the barn next door. Many is the woodchuck trail I followed through those grasses, convinced that there would be a leprechaun waiting, if I were only quiet enough. Many the dish of milk I made my long suffering mother leave outside for the leprechauns, like any good household.
I was blessed to grow up when there was still innocence in childhood, and the ability to run free and form a relationship with land and trees, rock and rill. My dad grew up spending his summers camping in the Adirondacks – just he and a buddy. From the time he was 12, his mother would put him on the train to the mountains, and expect him to return at a certain date to resume school. I think my father thought of nature as merely another, and perhaps better, parent. Despite, far closer supervision, he accorded me a similar privilege and I am grateful for it.
Having entered grade school in Rhode Island, I was accorded more independence. It was perfectly normal to take off after coming home from school, go wander through the woods a twenty minute walk to friends’ houses a few miles away, by myself, trusted to show up in time for supper. Rhode Island was Tippy, my beautiful, black and white English Shepherd, with yes, a dashing white tip to the end of his tail; the stream; the heirloom iris garden; (still to me, the most beautiful flower) the rhubarb patch and blackberries big as an adult thumb; making endless dams in the meadow and spending hours up on the bluff in the pine grove planted above our odd stucco house; skiing on barrel staves, then my first set of real skis, and eventually night skiing with Dad’s high school ski club, learning all the nations of the Iroquois confederacy, and how to climb trees. All in all, an odd and assorted collection of wonders that probably still defines who I am more than anything else.
Not only did my father interact with nature as if it were a family member, but he also firmly believed that the legacy and lore of those woods and mountains had been ceded to us, albeit unwillingly by her native custodians. I think I might have been the only blonde six year old not living in New York State who was quite cognizant of the fact that the Finger Lakes were named after the Iroquois tribes; could and still can recite their wonderful rolling names, like drumbeats at sunset; and who was reminded, often, that in fact, the U.S. Constitution was heavily influenced by the structure, rights and responsibilities of the Iroquois Confederation. “Just another thing we stole without giving them any credit,” my father would rail. Thus grew another strand to my soul’s innermost braid of magic, and woods -- justice. A fascinating heritage from a 6' 4" redheaded English/Irish Korean War vet grade school gym teacher.
The summer before fourth grade we moved to Poughkeepsie, in the historic Hudson River Valley area of New York. Dad was also an amateur war historian and had the extraordinary capacity to read about an event or an era and then make historical details come alive across the geography that spawned the events. Amongst a million other nooks and crannies, creeks and mountains, bridges and tunnels, West Point, the Hudson River, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, Ft. Ticonderoga and Lake Champlain all became scenes of childhood time travel. Land became textured not just with moments, and creatures but with a context, and a history.
My childhood was still defined by wonder, so books like The Secret Garden and The Borrowers chronicles were my talismans. Details of the battle of Lake Champlain zoomed through, and zoomed out again. But all those childhood history teachings went into a mental photograph album. Later, it would be a simple segue to the historical novels of Kenneth Roberts, where all the words would have a richness born of a million memories.
My mother had a wonderfully expressive reading voice and had read to me for thousands of childhood hours. Between the rhythm of her voice in my head, my father’s historical stories, and the real journeys we took, words in books took on texture, depth and sensory images. All those adventures brought books to life, gave words a full panoply of dimensions, spread them across time. New York State, indeed New England will forever hold for me, a depth of beauty that encompasses all senses and all dimensions.
However, Poughkeepsie also began the lifelong schism between the world of woods and animals I had grown up in and the mysterious world of humans: their likes and dislikes, the differences between inside and outside, belonging, not belonging, observer, participant. It was there I first experienced the dichotomy between animals, who always speak the truth and people who don’t. I lost my innocence in Poughkeepsie when my beautiful, gentle Tippy bit to protect me from taunting aggressive neighborhood boys and they lied him to his death. My beloved companion of countless forestral hours, partner in a million fantasies was gone. It was my first experience, but by no means my last, with justice betrayed. It was my first experience, but by no means my last, that there is a price to be paid for magic. And still both justice and magic are worth fighting for.
On a kinder note, the Hudson Valley brought the Mid-Hudson Valley Soccer League and years and years of involvement with soccer, becoming the first woman soccer referee, the first female member of the board, and then the co-founder with Dad, at his tart instigation, of the first girl’s soccer league. Titusville Road was the farm, and the apple orchard, the pond at the hill, and the pond in the pines, tobogganing, skating, skiing, exploring by bicycle, and the pool in the backyard, the torture of youth group, surviving junior high, and not high school and the refuge of Vassar.
I loved Vassar for many reasons before I ever went there. I met the libarary doing my high school senior thesis and have never fallen out of love with that whimsical, beautiful building. The grounds entranced me at once, and still provide refuge. Many of my classes have faded, but I still know personally the vast majority of her trees. I walk them like a lover doing inventory of a beloved’s face.
Graduation 1975, A.B. in Biology and Russian.
Onward to Mid-Hudson Valley Legal Services, and further discoveries in the world of harm and justice, the fascination of the puzzle of law, its power for good and evil. Society’s puzzle of boundaries and limitations, their origin, their enforcement, their evolution and development.
I followed the siren’s call of justice onward to law school, to San Diego, marriage, boats, and dolphins. Buffleheads, and the bay soothed my soul after the shocking death of my Dad in a car accident. I came to know life as water, tides, currents, waves and wind. Phosphorescent algae and pelicans rising from their diving patterns like a glimmering Phoenix. Baja and shells like sculptures. Beaches and the pound of sand underneath my feet. Living on a boat in the bay, driving in a hurricane, paddling against storm seas. Mornings after storms, the pungent aroma of ocean, and the soft lap of gentle bay sounds against the boat’s hull. 1981, graduation, the bar exam, and admission to the practice of law.
The ‘80s were years of law and horses, the rich fiesta of northern California, shorelines, redwoods, sea otters and gigantic pine cones, oak groves and manzanita and travels with Patches, my whimsical silky terrier. My marriage ended and my life with horses began. My lifelong sports passions found outlet in the world of horses, a delayed childhood dream. Every spare moment was spent immersed in all things horse, from Connemara ponies through Arabs, Quarterhorses, and Thoroughbreds on into Warmblood land. My hands, which had been trained to sports therapy on human athletes, began finding skills with four legged athletes. I traveled with, and to the horses, and learned. The sport of endurance riding brought me many more back country adventures. Horses enabled me to feel the earth intimately, the rhythms of topography translated from hoofbeats up through my body, earth in my spine. Learning how to touch the horses, really touch them, heal them, was like walking through the wardrobe into a foreign land, the culture of horse. I studied the law, studied horses, and did everything with Patches. Kinaesthetics™, my system of touch, was born, and some of the stories that live here on Kubabi.
Life spun, accidents and adventure led me to Arizona. A broken leg, a horse journey, and the Sonora became my physical and spiritual home. I traveled south of the border and met a soul mate. I fell in love and married Francisco Ozuna, sixth generation curandero of Yaqui and Apache heritage, and the Mexico years began. Challenged to follow my passions in the healing arts, I left the law and committed to maximizing my hands’ skills. Once again, my hands took me inside a culture.
While in Mexico, I was given the great gift of elder friendship and blessed with stories of the region when the Mexican bison still roamed the Sierra Madre, and the Aguila Real, the “Real Eagle”, a breathtaking eagle of immense proportions, amazingly enough still living, ruled the vast realm of mountain and desert rivers. After years of doing the things I thought I had to, college, graduate school, career, I was once again living a life of magic, where the wonder of the natural world was morning prayer, and breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, and evening song. Every moment was infused with preciousness, preserved and recorded in two languages, my own and the lilting, mellifluous tones of my adopted heartland. We built our home of the earth of our land, brick by brick. I lived in a house that breathed in rhythm with the earth. I felt my land beneath my back at night as years earlier I had felt the waves beneath my boat. We irrigated by meteor shower, comets flashing across the sky. My feet and my soul sunk deep, deep into the earth of the Sonora, her songs, her people, her legacy.
I gathered many dogs, and many moments. I was graced in that world with people of small domain and big hearts. My dearest friend was an old Yaqui cowboy named Don Pancho, a man of three burros, one dog, and many mountains. Many is the escapade we all had traveling to the forgotten places of the Sonora. Never trust your car and road conditions to a man who travels everywhere on burro back. But we survived to tell the tale, and laugh at the memories.
The Sonora for me was both a place of intense laughter, and beauty, and a place of intense challenges. Life is lived close to the bone in the Sonora. It is ever and always a land of extremes, of terrain, of moods, of weather, and of life. Death is as close as the baby in your hands, or the friend who dug your drainage ditch. If you want a grave – you dig it. If you want a body washed, you wash it. If you want to save a life, you do what it takes because even where there is backup, it may be too far or not available. Hospitals have great dedicated doctors and holes in care you could drive a semi through.
The Sonora provided me with a living laboratory for my hands, and I am grateful to each and every person who trusted me with their care. You honored me, and I will never, ever forget. I learned a thousand flavors of pain and disease. I learned what backs feel like when they have congestive heart failure, when the lungs are inflamed, when the kidneys are diseased, when the liver is failing, when the body is crumbling from cancer. I learned what tissue felt like in its extreme moments and in its precursor stages. I massaged a thousand bodies. I washed legs riddled with diabetic sores, and bandaged rotting cowboy feet, ulcerating from too many long hours standing wet in rubber boots, irrigating alfalfa fields. I rubbed the backs of pregnant girls, and the shoulders of old bus drivers. I took an oath and learned how to use, really use my hands to ease pain and discomfort.
Touch was my language, and it shaped my journey. From the woods to the athletes, to the horses, back to people, and always throughout as accompaniment to my days, the dogs.
At its height, my canine pack in Mexico numbered thirteen, a full bakers dozen. From aging Patches to the newest hound pup, it was a never ending kaleidoscope of dog culture. Sonoran culture, horse culture, dog culture. Many languages, common bridges. The dogs lived with me, with no fences, no leashes, just voice and touch and relationship. They only left by theft or death. I would go to the states for weeks at a time, and return to a howling, furry greeting. As soon as I crossed the creek, they could hear the car and know I was coming. To her dying day, Melissa, my little golden brindle girl never failed to be first at the gate, to welcome me home. When I returned for good to the states, it felt as if I had been ripped from the womb of a kingdom of song, and magic, poetry, and joy. The dogs were and remain my bridge to the world of wonder. And you learn, if you forgot, slowly, note by note, that song, and magic, poetry, and joy live inside of each of us. All we have to do is listen.
I am still a child of moments, and there are many in each day. I still have three of the Mexico pack left. They bridge the worlds for me, and their eccentricities remind me of my neighbors, and my village, my land, and my Sonoran life. The new dogs, the Shibas bring foolishness back to my days, and that is a great and marvelous thing. All my old cowboy friends are now dead. That world that I was gifted to know is fading. The Don Panchos of the world, the mancedor of the llegua bronca, has gone. But memory remains and the land remains - still. We have not yet killed all the magic places in the world. They still sing their songs to me. And I can still follow their trails home.
So now I work bridging the abyss between people and animals. Some days, my heart is too full, and words fail me. Some days my frustration clambers out like an old feral mule, kicking and striking in all directions. Some days I find just the right words to paint a picture of reality from the other side, from dog culture to human, from horse to human. Some days my language is good enough to send the dialogue the other way. My movements are precise enough, clear enough to take the language of space and movement and human words back to the world of dog and watch the light of understanding spark in their faces. It is a work in progress. After so many years, so many clumsy steps, I sometimes despair of ever being able to “speak”, really speak, in either direction, human or animal with any degree of the elegance I desire. I think unkind thoughts of Dr. Doolittle and grumble that Nature could have chosen a better minion than I for her handmaiden. But still I persist. My contract with Nature does not yet seem to have expired.
And always I write. Words give life meaning. Words paint the moments, and etch them for others to see. The stories on this site are borne of a life lived close to the earth, clumsily, at times lacking skills, but always and forever stopping for the moments. No matter where you are: city or country, east, west, north, or south, good health or bad, wealthy or poor, there are always moments. Moments of sublime beauty and joy. It is my hope that you and your children will enjoy these stories. From the inspiration of Don Pancho and I, to you, and yours, we send you our love.
Stay tuned for more books to come....
Maryna is the owner and director of training for Arizona Doggy Dude Ranch, http://www.azdoggyduderanch.com/, and the founder of the Kinaesthetics™ system of bodycare for humans, horses and dogs, http://www.dogbodycare.com/. Maryna is a long time journalist and photographer with credits ranging from Womens Sports, to Arabian, Equus Magazine, and Safehands, the Journal of the International Association of Canine Professionals, http://iacpdogs.org/. Maryna holds an A.B. in Russian and Biology from Vassar College, and a JD. from Thomas Jefferson School of Law.
