A legend doesn’t always designate a person
The book I’m writing includes many legends. In the Dictionary According to Rhonda, “legend” doesn’t always designate a person or animal. Legend is more often a story, recollection or action; or some combination of those.
I believe each of my predecessors earned — with the right to own — the other meaning of that term. Each is a compilation of experience and action, through every generation back to Eve. They broke new trails, braved every kind of trial, every extreme of weather, and threat of untamed predators (animal and human). They traversed the unknown successfully!
John Wayne and Johnny Cash portray such people through their individual art forms. Tough! Smart! Honest! Generous! Authors spread them across thousands of pages, both fiction and non-fiction … heroes and villains.
Some slogan says, “Heroes are made, not born.” Another says, “Heroes are born, not made.” My family benefits whichever way we choose to interpret those things.
Only God is perfect, so the villain side exists among us like the Eskimo’s two dogs inside. The black one wins, then the white one … but the fight goes on.
Both sides of my family fit all those descriptions and portrayals — most of all me … because I am all of them! Sedgwick and Coy — and all the outlaws and in-laws who came before, Thompsons and Comptons, German and English, Irish and Scot!
I felt hero worship from younger relatives through the years God poured blessings over me with my horses -- training, competition, opportunities and awesome awards and rewards. I did not deserve that. I could never have done it without the horses. However, they would never have done it without the training I gave them. I would not have had the horses without the blessings of income God poured upon my family, enabling us to purchase them. Or if God hadn’t brought them across our path for us to choose! Nor would I have had the wisdom to train them without the experience and the people and the teaching I was privileged to benefit from.
Generations of horse knowledge and wisdom and experience fed into my genetic base. Generations of exceptional mental and physical excellence built the genetic base of all the horses I was bles’t to work with. God put all those components together, then added the time to spend training, and the work with livestock we all were privileged to do that gave us experience.
The wind and the heat and the sweat – and the wind and the cold and the wet – the long an’ the far and the worse hills to climb – helped build any ’rep I’ve called mine … including any inclination I ever had toward poetry.
Rhythm of horse is a rhyme kind’a force, laced with marvelous richness of scent, the sage an’ the rain sort’a wash out the pain — help forget all the miles that remain — before we even think about rest! Yet our life choice is best — blest by freedom an’ joy, undeserved, unearned … much unpaid. Though if I get my say, it’ll be for one more day, soft glow of dawn an’ a day far too long, horse an’ dog each a part of my song.
Hard work has always earned all that it could in my family lineage — but hard work can never outdo the blessings of God!
Partnership was the key to the successes my horses and I enjoyed, but God made, and held, and opened or closed the doors as he deemed best. I have sought and requested his partnership as long as I can remember — most of all since I was 14 and claimed all he has for me on my knees at a church altar. Forgiveness was the first necessity.
Ongoing guidance is equally important … gained through fellowship, most of all with him but also with his Word and his true followers, believers and “doer’s of the Word.” Only by consistently being “doer’s of the Word” can we say we “follow him.” Only by the constancy of his guiding hand can we be either a “doer” or a “follower.” We never walk alone, unless we purposely choose a side road or a shortcut.
I wish I could have known the earliest of my family legends, but only in Daddy’s Thompson line did I get past two generations — with tiny Great-grandma Ida Thompson, who never lost her German accent. That was the will of God.
Knowing or not knowing ancestors has no bearing on their blood that gives us life and their genes that shape and drive us, mentally and physically. The One who matters is the Maker — of them, all who came before, and me.
He’s my Tutor, Planner, Provider, Consultant, Guide, Leader, Protector, ever present, ever attentive, ever able. He has also been each of those things to every ancestor of mine who chose to allow Him to.
Therein lies the key to joy along the way. I didn’t say “glee” or “laughter.” Yet I know he serves up “joy” in the midst of whatever mess we may be in, whether we survive on this side or not. It is left to us to seek and find the “joy” he provides, then either embrace it or turn away and neglect it.
I am a seeker of that assurance some psalmists and all the saints had, that “surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our life, and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever, Amen.” I don’t believe that means floating around on a cloud with a pair of wings and a halo, strumming a harp — yet again I don’t know that it doesn’t mean that. I can’t know, so I don’t need to know.
As far as “legends I know” when I typed that chapter title, it meant everyone I know who’s part of my family on either side, or of the one I married into and wear the name of, is a hero!
Each one is the only one of them that ever has or ever will walk or ride a horse on the face of this earth. Each one has or will do their best or their worst, and has or will be where God designates him or her to be while eternity rolls on. I always ask him to let me be right here, in Wyoming. I’m convinced there’s no place better, an’ the Bible says heaven is gon’na come through the clouds down here … “Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam, where the deer an’ the antelope play; where seldom is heard, a discouraging word, an’ the skies are not cloudy all day! Home, home on the range! where the deer an’ the antelope play … where seldom is heard a discouraging word, an’ the skies are not cloudy all day. …”
