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.
