Rocking Toward Bliss

Rebloom Retreat May 2025

I recently watched a short contemplation about the Fire Horse, the Chinese New Year … a reflection on pace, intensity, and the way life can surge forward if we let it. I expected insight. Something philosophical, perhaps. Instead, what arrived was stillness … not what comes because everything outside has gone quiet, but the quiet that finds its way inward after a season of constant motion, the one that feels familiar, almost like coming home.

Over the past year, my rhythm changed without asking my permission. A traumatic moment, my father’s heart attack, shifted something deep inside me. Life tapped my shoulder and whispered, slow down. I didn’t respond immediately, and certainly not perfectly, but eventually I softened into a different tempo.

I began paying attention to what truly mattered.
Not how much information I could gather,
but the wisdom already living within me.

After watching that contemplation, a memory surfaced … or maybe more accurately, a story I’ve heard so many times it feels like memory. I could see myself on my childhood rocking horse, leaning forward with each push, the motion growing bigger and bolder. My father used to laugh when he told it, saying I would giggle louder and louder with every forward swing. He also admitted it made them nervous; they were certain I’d tip it over or fall at any moment.

I never did.

What stayed with him was the joy.
What stayed with me, apparently, was the motion.

There’s something almost poetic in that: the early love of rhythm, the forward pull, the sense of becoming one with the movement rather than trying to control it. I sometimes wonder if that was the beginning of my affection for horses, not just the horses themselves, but the feeling they carry. Even now, being near a horse brings an unmistakable calm over me. Their quiet strength, their steady breath, the way they respond to energy rather than noise … it all feels familiar. Perhaps that gentle rocking back and forth planted something deeper than anyone realized … a comfort with motion, a trust in momentum, a partnership with movement rather than resistance to it.

Riding with Jim on our honeymoon 2014 … a Horse year.

I was born in 1966, a Horse year. It’s the same era that carried the spirit of the Summer of Love, innovation, and cultural change. There’s poetry in that timing. A life that began in a season of collective acceleration now finding deep appeal in the quiet center between breaths. The world galloped forward, and here I am, discovering the grace of a gentle rock instead.

These days, my work feels simmered rather than rushed.
Ideas unfold instead of being chased.

I feel less drawn to cramming knowledge into already full spaces and more drawn to listening, really listening, for understanding. One fills shelves. The other fills the soul.

Cumberland Island 2022

Bliss, I am discovering, isn’t a burst of fireworks or a grand arrival.
It is a rocking motion.
A returning.
A recognition of the wisdom that has been present all along, simply waiting for room to speak.

Physically, mentally, spiritually, this season of life feels less like a race and more like a rhythm. The world still moves quickly, but I no longer feel compelled to match its speed. There is a certain freedom in trusting my own pace, in allowing insight to rise naturally instead of forcing it to appear.

I think of that rocking motion often now … the forward tilt, the backward return, the gentle certainty of movement without urgency. Somewhere along the way I realized that bliss isn’t always found by galloping ahead. Sometimes it is found in the quiet back-and-forth, in the simple act of slowing enough to hear the wisdom that has been within me all along.

Pensacola 2022