The Fall, otherwise known as Calamity Carolyn and the Demon Mare

I flew through the air, landing with a silent but hard thud on tightly packed dirt and small gravel. My tail bone and the small of my back were the first things to hit the ground and my head was the last, but I remember the crack of the helmet as the base of my head collided with earth.

Looking up, I couldn't sit up, and the pain was horrendous, taking over my whole body. The day before I'd fallen too, the first time I'd ever done so, in the arena, luckily on soft soil. My pride was hurt more than anything and tears I could not stop rushed down my face. I got back on too, after he offered me a hug.

"I want you to get back on. That's the only way to not be scared."

Minutes later he would suggest I lope her, the she-demon as I would later call her. I did too, pressing my heel into her off-side, driving her nose into the corner and sitting my ass to the saddle, knowing she'd be keyed up and ready to leap into her remarkably fast stride, a controlled gallop.

Seconds before the trail ride, I'd decided to wear a helmet, a decision that would later save my life. My head hit the ground twice that day, both on hard packed ground, not the cushy embrace of arena soil.

Fifteen minutes after the she-demon took off, galloping at near 35 miles an hour, a creature with her own mind, one that could trip and fall hoof over head at any moment, I held on, keeping my seat and the back pockets of my jeans to the saddle. I rode that gallop well, but not prepared and too tired for her when she stopped abruptly, dropping her inside shoulder so I slipped off her side.

When I finally got up, my instinct was telling me not to get back in the saddle that day, but the women told me to get up on the "safe horse."

I surmise that his second girth strap prompted him to buck as the strap slid back into the soft and sensitive spot on his hind legs and belly. According to other eyewitness accounts, I held on to the saddle horn, absorbing each buck until he unseated me, I flew through the air and hit the hard ground, luckily with my head protected by a helmet.

All I remember is one second I was on him and the next I was mid-air, my brain flashing to navy blue and then black as I landed. Seconds later I looked up at the grey sky and tears fell as I was terrified a second strike to the back might render me paralyzed.

Twenty minutes and two falls later, I could not sit up, and fire paramedics braced my neck and back, getting me on a stretcher and into an ambulance as I was rushed off to Huntington Memorial.

Up until that point, I'd never been on morphine, and an hour after being on the pain killer drip, I hurled everything in my belly. I had an IV attached to me for a few hours, sat on a radiation bed for x-rays. Nothing was damaged, just a bruised tail bone. Just?

Since then I've done a lot, but I've never quite gotten over that fear. I'll never forget the first time I loped a horse; one of the most freeing things in the world. The closest to flying. Animal and animal communicating, velocity and wind combining to create a sense of freedom.

I've been in the saddle a few times since the accident, and I've loped too, but I always have the fear. It's like the naivete that exists before your heart is broken for the first time.

All I can say is I'm still here. Decisions have become increasingly heavy for me to make, each weighted so much more than they used to be. But, I'm still here. I am afraid but choose to move forward, and despite the falls I've ridden again.

Dan H. Pink to the Rescue

In one of my previous posts, I claimed that Malcolm Gladwell is my prophet (Jesus makes the list too, although strangely or intelligently I remain irreligious). I must add another prophet to the roster: the author, Dan H. Pink.

Dan H. Pink, whose latest book, Drive, takes a question like "what motivates people, what drives us?" and turns the readers' world upside down with obscure, but scientifically derived proof; he shows that how we motivate people in school and in corporate settings, is just wrong.

We all know how business works; you go to work, sometimes accomplishing tasks you do or don't like, you're managed, you pass go, collect $200 (or more in a paycheck, if lucky) and hopefully you don't need a get-out-of-jail-free-card. No, but seriously, the concept is pretty easy. The lucky few are those that love what they do.

Pink calls this system Motivation 2.0. It's more complex than our basic needs of survival, Motivation 1.0, which include the need to eat, find shelter, get clothed and breed. Motivation 2.0 is all about carrots and sticks. You do something good, you get paid (a carrot) and if you don't do what you should you get a punishment (a stick). The whole belief that Motivation 2.0 works off is that people don't want to work, they don't want to be challenged, and that in all circumstances people will most often shirk from work and remain passive.

But Pink lays out a substantial argument against this. He claims that science proves that people want to be engaged, they want to work, they want to have purpose. We are not passive beings, but give us the right task, or allow us to take a task and complete it our own way on our own time with the people of our choosing, and you'll find that people are actually motivated to do that kind of work. Pink makes the claim that given the baseline reward--- a salary, a way to make a living, people are motivated largely by the type of work they can do. They are motivated when they can approach work that is meaningful for them, that is challenging and engaging. Workers in these circumstances typically bypass the chance to change work, even if it comes at a $10,000 or $20,000 bonus.

Perhaps this is why CEOs typically ask for more and more outlandish sums of money to do their jobs; the work doesn't engage them, or they didn't choose the work because they love it. Instead, they are motivated by money, and no matter what sum of money they are given, the money high wears off, leaving them still unmotivated and therefore jonesing for their next bonus increase.

I know Pink is right, and it's not just because he and his editorial team researched dozens of behavioral studies that suggested people are motivated by the independence they have in their tasks, the way they can get better and better at something, the purpose they find in their work. I know Pink is right because my hope everyday is that I will be compensated a living wage to work at a job I LOVE. The first thing I look at in happiness is not the dollar figure, but the work.

After all, if we all have to work to make a living and we give more time of our lives to work than to sleeping or making babies or chatting with girlfriends, then it only makes sense that our motivation stems from the ability for us to do what we love instead of making a shitload of money. The most precious and finite thing we have on this earth is time. How do you want to spend it? I bet most would find more motivation in spending that time doing something they enjoy than bringing home more money. I know I would.

Bring it on Pink! I call for you and Gladwell to continue researching about the ways we can make life and this world more happy and enjoyable.

He scowls at me, his brow furrowing, the faint crows' feet around his eyes showing more now.

"I don't like Portland. It's just like the Valley. The same people, the same young kids with the same attitude."

It shouldn't have hurt me, because I know what he's saying, and now that I've seen Portland with fresh eyes, I agree. But there are nuances here a visit of two or three days can't find. Or maybe the nuances are no longer here but in my mind and heart, when Portland had amazed me as a 17 year old, checking out the colleges I would attend.

In the face of the recession, the Pearl District sickened me, people sucking down $4 coffees as a homeless man stands outside of Whole Foods. Clothing stores that use labor in third world countries, but still charge Americans an arm and a leg for the products. A whole district built and gentrified from warehouses and skid rows, beautified by trees and LEED buildings, so now living becomes less affordable. Great. But on the verge of a pool of homelessness, where the homeless line the streets of downtown and Chinatown waiting for a meal or a handout.

It's not Portland's fault, because it happens in LA all the time.

Sometimes a city can give one person an experience it does not afford to another. Cities are fluid, ever changing and maybe we hit the city on a bad few days. Perhaps. But I here what he's saying and I agree. The same desperation, dirt and apathy abound from LA to a small rainy city up north.

Goodbye Portland

I'm listening to the melancholic organ line in the background of Justin Townes Earle's plaintive "Midnight at the movies" as I think about the past few weeks. I've traveled through Seattle and Portland with Andrew, showing him bits of me, parts of the places that have informed my life.

Portland no longer feels like home, although the verdant forests along the 205 stretch of highway into Oregon City welcomed me back to friends. I was taken aback about how the line between city and country was so vague in the outlying parts of metro Portland's cities.

My eyes are new to Portland, as I haven't seen it in over a year, and as I've just come from LA and Seattle, I see how truly tiny the downtown is. How truly tiny the city is. No wonder then, that in my senior year, before I'd even graduated and moved out, I felt the restlessness creeping up inside me. How did Portland hold me for a year? I'm someone who, on some days, finds the mass sprawl of LA boring.

Returning to University of Portland, walking around campus in the midst of spring time beauty, I hoped for it to capture me in some way. But it didn't. I didn't feel the emotional tug on my heart that I had expected even when I visited the spot on the bluff, facing the St Johns Bridge where I would look out wistfully to the river, remembering it as the place where I had a bittersweet goodbye kiss. The place where I wrote about my feelings, wrote about my fears, hopes, my changing life after graduation.

All I felt was a strange numbness, as if all the pain and all the happiness and pathos of the past years has dissipated, leaving UP when I did, so that now when I return, there is nothing but new people and new students. UP, and Portland, is no longer my place, and as it surprises me, it feels right too.

Thanks to Andrew's good job, vacation pay, and something called my federal income tax return, I was able to witness two people, a dear friend of mine and her fiance, join hands in marriage. This time last year I was dating someone who was not interested in a relationship and my friends and I were uncommitted to men. Now, I find myself in a relationship I thought could never exist, one friend married, the other engaged. What a difference a year makes.

And yet, I haven't really changed. I'm still too hard on myself, still restless and itching for adventure. Still somewhere between faith and doubt, anxiety and calmness and contentment and existential angst.