Pamela Rickenbach’s life is compelling, to say the least. I hope she will begin sharing it on her new blog beginning on Saturday. Her life is an exotic life of mystery, love, spirituality, abuse, pain, redemption and,  of course, the horses, always the horses. Her story is a testament to the joys and pitfalls of a life with animals, she has given herself selflessly to the horses and has given herself nothing.

She possesses very few of the things most people own – her own house, a car, money in the bank.  Or a blog. She lives out of her passion and her beliefs.

Pamela will tell you she is rich beyond measure, and has everything she needs. Like the mystics before her, some might say she has little. Pamela is a hot and shining star, she burns very brightly in her passion, I have always felt I might burn or melt if I stayed too close, and as much as I love her, I am mindful of the need to sometimes project myself from such intensity, I have often suffered from it in my life.

In so doing, I have preserved our special and nourishing friendship. She and Maria are sisters in some ways, I can see it, but don’t always understand it, and I like to understand things that most people are happy to simply accept. On the surface, Maria and Pamela might seem to be different, at the core they are very alike. You can see it very clearly when they are together, the ease and comfort are striking. I think Pamela sometimes looks at me in the same wary way that I sometimes look at her, yet there it is, we end up loving and trusting one another, a gift, I think, to both.

Pamela is deeply immersed in the history and culture and mysticism of the horses, she can talk about them forever, she tells so many spell-binding tales of their myths and meaning.

She is extraordinarily open, trusting and sensitive. This has hurt her again and again in her life. For some very sad reason, some elements of the animal rights movement have targeted for her because she supports the idea of working horses (they consider it abuse), and she is attacked relentlessly and cruelly. Paul was deeply upset by these attacks, I believe it contributed to his depression.

Pamela preaches a very different philosophy about animals, we share this view: animals ought never to be used to harm people, animals the people who live, love and work with them also needs rights, love and supporst.

Some people brush off the hateful side to being public in America, I usually do. Pamela struggles with it, it goes through her skin, anger and hatred are simply alien to her. She grew up in the jungles and villages of South America, saved by medicine men, adopted by Native-American leaders, abused by other men. Her love of horses brought her to the carriage trade in Philadelphia, then to Blue Star.

This year, a great tragedy befell her. Her friend, partner, lover and husband, Paul Moshimer took  his own life, he hung himself from a tree on the farm. Pamela is strong and brave, she held herself together in so many ways, fell apart in others. It was an incomprehensible thing, they had only been married a few months. Pamela also suffers from a brain injury that sometimes makes emotions more intense.

But she is working bravely to come back from that awful blow. Blue Star has a powerhouse new board of directors, an exciting plan for the future, a great commitment to the big horses that have shaped and helped build our world.

When Pamela came to the Open House in October with her two big and beautiful draft horses, Merlin and Foxy, it seemed a turning point. I did not think she would be able to come.

Perhaps she needed to get away. Perhaps there is magic at Bedlam Farm, I’m too close to see it, but I sometimes feel it. There is surely magic at Blue Star Equiculture, Pamela is the spirit of the place.

I scrapped the Blogging Workshop I was planning for this weekend at Pompanuck.  Farm and Maria and I decided to turn it into a Blog For Pamela workshop, eight or nine creative people are coming in support of Pamela and to learn about blogging.

My friend Rachel Barlow, an artist and tech support whiz, is coming to the farm early in the morning, we will build Pamela a blog and then we’ll head to Pompanuck, we will sit in the big and beautiful Round House and we will learn about blogs. Pamela and I will write about it over the weekend. We’ll go back and forth between the farm, Pompanuck and the Round House Cafe where Scott Carrino  is going to set aside a table for us. We will do more teaching and learning at the cafe.

This experience with Pamela is helping me focus my teaching. Instead of holding big workshops to talk about blogs and writing, I want to plan some small ones, to focus on individual people, their lives and how creativity and technology can work together to give them voice and alter their lives. Blogs, after all, are intensely personal. So should teaching about them.

“Blog,” is a clunky word for so graceful, creative and important a creative evolution and outlet. As the corporate grip has tightened it’s grip on media, theater,  publishing, work,  film and journalism, the blog has risen to give voice to creativity and voice and to save individual expression. Blogs are about identity as much as anything else.

The creative artist and individual has been driven to the margins by the corporate invasion of ideas, the margins are where so many talented people now live and work. Creatives always find a space to live.  There are millions of bloggers, they are keeping ideas and creativity alive.

Pamela is unique in the world. There is no label or category that fits her. Like me, she does not fit comfortably or easily into any group or organization, certainly not into any corporate structure, and this is, after all, becoming a Corporate Nation. She and I are both lovers of Thomas Paine, the idiosyncratic prophet and rabble-rouser who preached revolution.  It is perhaps already too late to ever get the country completely back, they seem to have bought the political system too.

So a blog for Pamela is important, it has meaning beyond her. It has meaning for the future of animals, for the very idea of individuality and voice, and also for the way in which we treat one another. Pamela does not ever use her love of animals to promote the hatred of human beings.

Pamela stands for something, and hopefully, her new blog will help her give voice to her important beliefs, wherever she is, whatever she does. People can follow her anywhere.

This work with the horses is, in a way, her ministry. Pamela speaks to an attitude of the heart, which approaches life with a loving and open attentiveness, which is capable of being passionately present with no thought of what comes next, which accepts each moment as a gift from the horses to be lived to the fullest. Which treats all living things with dignity and respect.

Pamela invites us to practice the little ways of love, a kind word, a smile, any gesture that promotes love and friendship.

For her, this is the message of the horses, the story they have to tell us, the story she has been called to tell, and to which she has devoted her life. She believes the horses must remain among us, that we will either learn to live in harmony or perish together. It should be an amazing blog, filled with heart and myth and insight. I can’t wait to read it.

(We will both  be writing about this experience as it occurs this weekend. I mean, what else would one expect from bloggers?)