Be Careful What You Ask For

It’s September, fall, a tender season. The month I fell in love at first sight with Lookout Valley Ranch. 

You hear people say “Be careful what you ask for...” and I had always thought that meant a man, who will then trap you with his imperfections or a job that turns sour when you are faced with the daily grind, or a house that drains all your money. Something tangible that doesn’t live up to its promise. In September 1997 what I wished for was to feel something, anything. What I wanted was to break through the cocoon of fake indifference and self-protection it had taken years for me to construct. Simply put, I wanted to be free of whatever was holding me hostage in my life. I wanted to feel alive.

I was searching for something to drastically change my reality when I came upon a classified ad in the Denver Post for a ranch–– “Barns and corrals and a log cabin— Lookout Valley Ranch. Come visit and we guarantee you’ll fall in love.” The next week, on a whim, my husband Joe and I drove down to the Wet Mountains to see it.

What I didn’t understand about changing my reality was that it wasn’t as simple as relocating. What I didn’t understand until it was too late was that shattering the cocoon would leave my heart unprotected.  What I had no way of knowing was how scary that could be.

Here is the description in A Tree with My Name on It: Finding a Way Home of the moment I first saw the ranch:

We were following a fence line along a grove of trees when suddenly the road opened to a wide valley bordered by brilliant gold aspen. Nestled amid endless grassy meadows, crisscrossed by a meandering stream, was a butter-yellow stucco house, a big barn, a log cabin, and an old wooden corral, all glistening in the late morning sun under a deep blue September sky. Three horses—a bay, a chestnut, and a palomino—were grazing along the creek. My heart began pounding like a drum.

At the end of our visit, we walked to the top of a small hill standing sentinel at the curve of the road.

From where I stood, I could see clearly why it was called Lookout Valley Ranch. The ranch house and barns and corral, small from where we stood, were nestled in the heart of the valley. The stream zigzagged from one end to the other, etched into the green and gold of the late summer grasses. The horses, their heads down, were barely moving as they grazed alongside it. Then, suddenly a wind stirred and something spooked Rain, and he took off galloping toward us, the others following. My breath caught in my throat at the sight, my heart racing.

 “Imagine,” Joe said, coming over to stand beside me, “everything you can see from here would be ours, this whole valley and mountain, even across the road.”

I wasn’t listening. It would be a few years before that idea would mean anything to me. At that moment, something else was speaking to me. Something more intangible, deeper, a faint memory, a longing, for what I wasn’t sure.

Now I know the longing that was ignited on that Sunday in September was a crack in the armor around my heart. For the next four years, living at the ranch, I slowly chipped away at the edifice of denial and mental constructs I had created to survive. What I discovered was that once a heart is open, it can feel pure joy–– cantering up the hill on Rain, waking up to the brilliance of the spring fields of dandelions, coming upon a tree with my initials carved in its trunk in a grove of gold leaved aspens. But what I also I discovered was that once your heart is open, it can be broken.  Sometimes, the poignancy of the simplest things hurt. Leaning against the corral fence with my dogs Bronco and Abby watching the sun go down behind the mountain would break my heart, the vast night sky overflowing with stars, the wind flattening the long grass, a herd of deer racing along the tree line, all could be heartbreaking.   

In my memoir I describe a time when sailing down the road from Westcliffe I came up behind a school bus downshifting on the steep grade:

The back window of the bus was crammed with sports bags piled up around an orange water cooler; the seats were filled with boys with baseball hats turned backward. Out of the blue, the thought came to me that it was the Custer County Bobcats headed to Rye for a Friday evening game, and without warning, I burst into tears. It was fall, high school football season, and I knew I would never again see my son play in a high school football game.

What I was realizing deep in my bones, was the truth of impermanence, a truth that every self-respecting Buddhist knows. But for as long as I had kept that knowledge in my head, it was only a phrase. When I moved to the ranch I longed to free myself from the grip of my mind and open my heart to the richness of life. But what I found was that to know in your heart the truth that everything changes, and you don’t ever get change without loss, was painful. It was the same hurt as the ache of unrequited love, the sorrow of a child leaving home, the pain of a friend dying. As the reality began to penetrate my being, there was nothing I could do but feel it. All of it.

Twenty-eight years later, sitting on my porch on a September morning I could feel that tender heart of summer’s end. The sense of loss, of everything changing. The air feels different, there is an edge of cool, leaves are falling from the cottonwood. The lush peach season is over, it’s time to add crisp apples to my granola. Today a family of deer came by, reminding me of those days at the ranch. So much beauty, so much sorrow. I believe John Prine captured the whole heartbreaking wonderful truth of living in his song Summer’s End - 

The moon and stars hang out in bars just talking
I still love that picture of us walking
Just like that ol' house we thought was haunted
Summer's end came faster than we wanted

Come on home..Come on home.. you don't have to be alone

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