rambling rosemarie

I had the good fortune of being taught a lot of life lessons by an old cowboy named Dusty Rhodes. Yes, his name really was Dusty Rhodes and he really was a cowboy. I was a young girl who loved horses and he was an aging man who had horses and lots of patience. He saw in me something more than the casual horse lover. He saw a passion for all things horse and he cultivated that passion because he could relate. Most of what I know about working with people, I owe to Dusty. The same principles he used with horses work with people. I may expound on more of them in another post. For now I want to focus on what he taught me when we first got started. Dusty taught me that a horse was never going to think or act like anything other than what it was; a horse. If I was going to be any type of cowgirl, I had to get ready to be one [a cowgirl]. I had to be the one to learn to think a new way. I had to think like a horse. Training me to have horse sense started with basics for my safety....

The role of women in 21 st century America has shifted dramatically in just the last 50 years. I am old enough to have seen the mixing of roles from housewife to feminist as the wave of change crossed the United States, hitting some areas much harder than others. I grew up a child of the 60s living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I remember women burning bras, campaigning for what they saw as equal rights and flaunting their bodies as if being less clothed meant they would be more respected. It all seemed perfectly normal to me, it was all I ever knew. For a good part of my life I imagine I would have been described as a feminist, though I never actively sought the title and would not have spent two minutes thinking about it. I wasn’t expected to be anything different than what I was and I was never taught what it means to be a woman, let alone a woman of God. Whatever my expectations might have been for my life, being conformed to the image of Christ and living my life ...