After Pamela Rickenbach and Rachel Barlow set up Pamela’s blog Saturday morning, we went to Pompanuck Farm for a blogging workshop, and it was a special day for me, and I hope for Pamela and the creative people who are trying to find their voices and place in the world.
This was a powerful experience for me, and for Maria. In a very elemental way, my blog saved my life, it gave me the means to see and understand myself, and a way to work out the pain and anger and confusion that had ravaged my life. Maria’s blog has helped make it possible to be an artist in our small town in upstate New York, it has helped her find her own voice and truth and sense of self. It has made it possible to sell her work.
Pamela spoke quite eloquently about the need for people – especially women – to show up, to speak for themselves, to believe that their stories are important. We are coming back tomorrow morning to talk more specifically about how the personal, creative and commercial ambitions of people can come to life on blogs, the new medium of individual and creative expression in the Corporate Nation, where creativity has become a mass-marketed profit center for large corporations.
Pompanuck Farm is itself a beautiful expression of creativity and spirituality, it is a wonderful place to share ideas and try them out. Pamela is the director of Blue Star Equiculture, the draft horse sanctuary in Palmer, Massachusetts. Pamela is a brave and brilliant visionary, she has devoted her life to saving and speaking for the horses who have helped human beings build our world.
Her year has been shattering in some ways. Her beloved husband Paul Moshimer committed suicide earlier in the year, she was continuously assaulted by elements of the animal rights movement who believe it is cruel for horses to work, she has struggled in the midst of this awful grief to re-structure Blue Star, bring in a vigorous and far-sighted board of directors, and keep the more than 30 big horses on the farm healthy and safe.
Her new blog, Yacu-Carolina.org will be a powerful new voice for Pamela, she is a mystic. I believe Blue Star is the way forward for people who love animals and love Mother Earth and who wish to keep animals in our world. There, people and animals are both treated with love and respect, and Pamela has always understood that the way to save the animals of our world is to keep them in the everyday lives of people and honor the work they have always done for human beings.
The people at the workshop spoke movingly about the things they seek, their creative and personal hopes for expression, their desire to channel their energy and inner spirits into a blog, to build their own communities, figure out their passions. It felt great, a perfect day in so many ways. Another coming tomorrow. Tonight, we will take Pamela out to celebrate her new blog. Whatever she feels, whatever she does, yacu-carolina.org will remind us that she has shown up for life, and is living it fully and bravely.