Beauty was the Titcomb’s pony that pulled my grandparents and my mother and her younger brother in a cart to Corinna, the nearest town, in the good weather; while in winter they took the sleigh the opposite way going to church in Stetson. Across the road was the rutted dirt path through the grass of the church yard where my grandparents and parents are now buried. My grandparents knew Alice, whose home sat on the corner under an old apple tree. My sister has kept one of Beauty’s shoes (a horse shoe is supposed to bring good luck) although we only know of Beauty through our mother’s voice.
During the early years of talk shows, I saw an interview in which a man explained he had been to many professionals with no improvement in his mental health. Then he’d found a person who’d reversed his thinking about the connection between thought and emotion. I remember my avid interest in his story, and by the time he’d finished, my thinking, too, had dramatically transformed. It was the first time I’d heard that to change my emotions, I had to first change my thought. I’d had a sudden image of a cart with a horse behind it pushing with its nose. Half-laughing, I thought I’ve got the horse behind the cart rather than in front, and the image stuck.
My realization is, “A thought produces emotions that align with it. When they are distressing, it is the thought at the source that needs to be examined and re-cast. Then the emotions naturally change.”