GREEN HORSE

Have you ever asked the universe for a sign to help you make a decision, to know your life is moving in the right direction, or to let someone, who has passed over, know how much you miss them? I wanted a sign sooooo badly to let me know bringing my family to NeuroCytonix was the right thing to do, but I didn’t know what the sign should look like.

With much on mind as I was preparing for the trip I couldn’t conjure up a sign so I decided to sleep on it. The next morning just as I was waking and in a lucid dream state, I saw the face of a horse, nose to nose with me. I could smell it, hear it and feel it. Then, there was a flash of green. As soon as my eyes opened, I thought “Okay, my sign is a green horse.” I told no one about this except Julius because he is a good secret keeper. When I checked my phone, I saw a message from a friend that said, “I don’t know what this means but here it is,” He sent me an emoji of a rider on a bucking horse with a plate of spaghetti on the rider’s head. It was funny and well timed, but it wasn’t green.

From that point on, as I went about my tasks, I began looking for my green horse.

A couple of months ago I didn’t know who Laura Lynne Jackson was, but then a podcast interview with her popped into my feed during a long ride home from deinstalling an art piece from a show. The kids were with me and my daughter is a big believer in angels, magic and lucky possibilities. Laura Lynne is a Certified Medium who went through rigorous testing so she could volunteer for the Forever Family Foundation to help families through the grieving process of losing their children. Of most interest to me was Laura Lynne’s conviction that every one of us has this special ability to pick up on the signs around us from those we love and other guides on “the-other-side.” But our busy lives and pre-occupations make us blind to seeing or feeling such things.

Laurel Lynne suggests remaining open to the multitude of ways that your sign could appear. So, my green horse may not be a horse at all, but a tattoo of a horse on someone’s arm, or a cloud formation. Could it be a green horse shoe? What about an old Ford Pinto, painted green? Possibly. At the very least, it would be a fun game in the midst of too much seriousness.

A few days went by, a panic attack ran through, but no green horses crossed my path. Finally, when we were settled into our hotel in Monterrey, MexicoI told my daughter about the green horse so she could be on the lookout too. The “game” was officially on. Surely, it wouldn’t be that hard to find a green horse…….I couldn’t have been more wrong. There were no green sea horses at the aquarium, but there were a lot of neon green coral with the sea horses. Did that count? My daughter said, “yes.” I said “no.” There were no green horseflies in the Children’s Museum even with the many bug references including a green print of a common house fly. In the multicoloured animal clings on the side of an elevator, my daughter found a yellow horse and a green fox (Is a green fox a young, naive fox?)  There were no horse formations within the green foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountainsides. No green horse painted on any of the coil pots and retablos from La Milarca Museum in the park, where we walked Lilac. No green horses in any of the artisan’s booths at the Sunday street festival, and not one green horse reference during the multitude of rides we took in various routes back and forth from the Research Center, not a gift shop, salon or bar called The Green Horse. Nothing.

I even asked our support staff from the NeuroCytonix Center if there happened to be a Mexican legend of a green horse somewhere in the area? She knew of none. So, I turned to the internet and found an old Mexican tale of a witch and a green horse, but it was much too obscure for me to accept as my sign. When I googled “Green Horse” it said the term is used to describe young, untamed horses so I took out my scope and checked the foothills from our window looking for wild horses. Nothing. The days kept passing and there were no green horses anywhere to be found.

Julius’ sessions were going well. To my surprise, he was already showing positive changes. I was prepared to see no changes until after we completed the protocol. That should have been enough of a sign, that he was improving. But, I couldn’t help myself. Every drive and walk had me looking. Every meal with verde sauce had me checking for “Cabrillo” (horse) in the name (not the ingredients) and there wasn’t one restaurant called Cabrillo de Verde. Even on the TV in our room I looked for green horses. Surely there would be one in Oz, The Great and Powerful, a spin off of The Wizard of Oz. Remember the horse-of-many-colours? We enjoyed the movie, but there were no green horses- even in Emerald City. EMERALD City!! We watched the Avatar movies. They are filled with creatures of blues and greens. Some of them kinda looked like horses. Neytiri, the main Avatar character, actually has a line in the first movie where she says about the horse-like creatures, “They are not horses.”

Our time passed quickly and with only a week left of Julius’ sessions I accepted that a green horse was just too unique of a sign to have chosen. I considered how well Julius was doing. His eyes were working together. He had no painful, spastic episodes. I could rotate both of his shoulders. He could lift and turn his head. He had no acid reflex or his other typical gastric issues. He started swallowing and he was working hard to roll over in bed. Above all, he was alert and happy. We all were. My daughter turned 10 and everyone celebrated her day. (That’s a story in and of itself!) Now, she likes to say, “I am a decade!”

My attention began shifting back to our transition home and I started feeling anxious again. The work. The responsibilities. The chores. The medical. The finances. The management of it all stretching myself to unhealthy levels of stress. It is a practice in life-balance. We all do it in one way or another. I’m in awe of the families that we’ve met. Every one of us has figured out how to be here, for our children. Most, like us, have gotten help. Our backgrounds and languages differ, but we share a truly special culture through our children and they are beautiful in all their differences. I felt grateful and started working out ways within my head to make changes at home that could ease the demands. So, we stopped looking for green horses.

Maybe the real sign I was searching for wasn’t a physical sign at all, but something else. Maybe it had to do with validations about the thing you are doing and whether or not that thing makes organic connections for a good you couldn’t even picture; Like the “white car guy” (That’s what my daughter calls him), the guy who saw us in the median of the road while we were waiting for an clearing so we could cross. He jumped out of his parked white sedan, stoically walked into the middle of the road with arms out and stopped the traffic for us!!

And I think about the four cross walks that lead to the park near our hotel. It was so hard to get across them due to gaps that were open on each edge for water drainage. But one night it was all different. We were well practiced by then at getting Julius’ chair across the four gaps carefully so we wouldn’t break a wheel, but one day we just stopped and stood in the median across from the park strategising how to get the rest of the way across because construction workers had blocked the other side. I was agitated. What could be so important that the workers would block a cross walk? They saw us and both our groups just stared at each other. For a few seconds, no one moved. The foreman shouted something and the workers in orange vests came back to life, ran over and lifted us the rest of the way across, like we weighed nothing more than a helium balloon. We laughed and thanked them, and took a couple of photos, still unaware of what they were doing. The next time we returned, the crew was gone and, we saw what they had done. They installed drainage grates over the gaps, levelling the mounded crosswalk, a detail that made crossing the street to the park wheelchair (and stroller) accessible. How I wish they could have seen our faces to know how much their work meant to us. And what perfect timing that we had the opportunity to see each other during the process of the work they were doing. They saw, first hand how important there work was to others and we got to see the faces behind the work that helped us tremendously. These are the kinds of things we experienced throughout our time in Monterrey. It’s like you are trying to avoid a tide, or trying to get out of one that feels entrapping, but the tide is exactly where you need to be for movement to happen.

And, there are all of you, who have chosen to support us, whether you know us directly or not, with no guarantee this would help Julius. Like me, maybe you wanted to see if it was possible? Maybe the best of signs are in actions and shifts that happen through people. 

With only a few days left of our time and the last day of a textile show at the Mexican History Museum we ventured out again, back through the tunnel, to Monterrey City Center where a textile exhibit was on its last day at the Museum of Mexican History. I’m crazy about textiles and didn’t want to miss the show. The intricacy of designs in hand woven Mexican fabrics is extremely varied in colour, textures and themes. They are breathtaking to see in person.
Downtown Monterey is more crowded and congested than our side of the tunnel. Our driver dropped us at the curb and pointed to the angular building. He helped unfold the wheelchair stroller at the top of a wide, steep stairwell that descended down to the museum. I gestured to him asking where the wheelchair access entrance was. He didn’t know, but walked on up ahead and around, asking others. Then gestured to us where we needed to go.

Bridged walkways and benched concrete that zigzagged down to the river below met ferry boats that took turns picking up tourists. The driver assured me that was our way to the museum so we trusted and pushed forward, moving over the water to the opposite side. We followed a section of the river, as we rolled further away from the history museum, paralleling the large plaza in front of it. At the bend in the river we could see a strip of local vendors set up with their wares, mostly trinkets imported from China camouflaged as locally made by stickers with the Monterrey name taped on them. “Do you see a way across?” I asked my girl. “I think we have to go all the way over there,” she said pointing to the other side of the marketplace. I had to be really cautious about Julius’ chair because many of the stamped tiles that decorated the path beneath his wheels were broken and sharp. The water was to our right and to our left was a retaining wall that braced the patios of more buildings above our eye level.   

I was still manoeuvring Jules’ wheelchair around shards of tiles as we neared the end of the walkway, where the view widened, and I heard my daughter casually say, “That’s a stubby horse.” I looked up from the wheels, in the direction she was facing. On an upper tier of the plaza extending to the left of us, high on a chunky platform was a robust sculpture by Fernando Botero, a Columbian artists whose unmistakable paintings and sculptures are installed world wide. I was stunned, I hadn’t thought about my sign for days. “It’s green,” I said, almost in disbelief. “Oh yeah,” my girl chimed, “It is green!” She also hadn’t been thinking about our quest to find the green horse. The bronze metal of the sculpture had been through patination, a chemical process that gave the surface a distinctive green lustre. When I approached the piece, It towered over me. It’s colossal head framed by a cotton sky was majestic. Its face pointed downward and, like a noble guardian, it looked right into me, our noses pointing towards each other. The iconic figure could not have been a more fitting sign: me being an artist and my sign coming in this way- through a massive, rotund Botero sculpture that represented strength and nobility. Had Julius not been with us, we would have missed it. “Look, Jules!” I said, “It’s our green horse!” Both of my son’s eyes looked up with perfect coordination. “Are you crying, mom?” asked his sis. How could I not be?

Note: Julius was on the lower level in his wheelchair, watching from below.

Construction workers making the crosswalk wheelchair accessible, carried Julius across