I prefer being online more than I do being around other people

Pushing the article away, she got into my face, her yellow teeth and bad smoke breath forcing me to recoil. If we're sober, do we always have to be polite and rational? Or can we still tear things up and turn them upside down? An answer: the polar-bear plunge on New Year's morning. You wake up lucid and bright-eyed, aware that this is fresh time, the first blank article on the calendar. Your bikini or swim trunks are hidden under plaid coats and oversized sweaters, and you make your way with your favorite lunatics--or in perfect solitude--to the pool or ocean or lake, armed with piles of towels and wool blankets. You look out at the icy water, you look at one another, or you look inside yourself, you have second thoughts, and then someone grabs your hand and you jump together--breathless--wild--electrocuted by the cold--laughing--trying to get up and out, shivering, shrieking, and you wrap yourselves in blankets and race to the truck. When you get back home, you make a fire. Every cell of your body is radiant. Part of previous new years was the swagger and bravado after a big night, and there's nothing wrong with that. The swan dive into icy waters is worth bragging about too. I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. Poincare understood that connecting ideas by recognising patterns was at the core of the work of a scientist. Of course, this line of thinking does not only apply to scientists. Great investors also know how to `read between the columns', Stephen Koukoulas, an economist who has guided global banking corporations as well as prime ministers, told us. Everyone has access to the same stuff. What matters is the way you reach your conclusions. Koukoulas went on to tell us the story of an economist who had developed their own unique economic test, `The Oxford Street test'. The signs that this economist was reading went well beyond numbers. The economist was taking the economy's temperature using things such as people's moods, their shopping habits, business successes and the areas in which they could be seen.

Likewise, the `Lipstick Effect' has long been spoken about in marketing and economic circles. Alternatively, you can rest one hand on top of the other on your lap, palms facing up. Another option for the floor is to sit on a meditation bench or yoga block. Kneel on the ground and place the bench or block just under your bottom. Sit up tall and lengthen your spine. Notice if your head is leaning forward, and if so, draw it back to align just over your shoulders. Rest your hands on your knees, palms face down if you're cold and up if you're warm. Alternatively, you can rest one hand on top of the other on your lap, palms facing up. The standing posture is the least taught in breathwork but one that I find essential for certain practices, especially those around grounding or moving intense energy. This posture is very simple and is best done with shoes and socks off so that you can feel the connection to the floor or earth. Stand up tall with your feet hip width apart. Foals should be born on straw because it is cleaner than sawdust, but after the birth, any bedding can be used. The mare, too, needed to be cleaned. She showed me her affection as she usually does, by putting her head against my chest. As I spread the straw from the foaling stall onto the strawberry patch I noticed that another mother had triumphed that morning: three killdeer eggs laid in the vegetable garden on May 7 hatched overnight. Earlier, while I plowed, the killdeer mother stood her ground, shrieking at me and pounding her wings whenever I came near. She never abandoned her eggs, however, and I marked the nest with a surveyor's flag. A killdeer mother--I don't know whether it is the same one--lays eggs every year, in the garden, in the strawberry patch, or on the gravel driveway because the camouflage is so good. Whenever I hear the killdeer's shriek or see the slender, long-legged, energetic brown bird with white breast and black neck rings, I search out the nest and mark the location to avoid stepping on the eggs. Killdeer young fly immediately after hatching.

In this they are like foals, who must get up and learn the use of their legs at once in order to survive. Listen to me, she croaked. You're nobody special. It's a joke that you think you'll be the `one' that makes it out of here. There are millions of people who are thriving, who have second and third homes. All we have to do is find out what they know and do it. Still shaking her head, she ignored me, pushing her cart down to where the gaggle of negative women still congregated, replaying our conversation to them, peals of shrill laughter heard all over the shop. Going in the opposite direction to work in a connecting building, I felt myself slowing down and my shoulders sinking. There wasn't anyone in my life I could even talk to about these articles. I felt churning in my stomach and a knot tightening with good old FEAR. Would I really be here the next 30 years? Start off January with a little bit of masochism and a lot of pride, and eat Chinese leftovers or pancakes for dinner, and realize that you're not broken after all but stronger than you ever were before, and tingling, and ready. A couple of years ago, Jardine's friend Emily posted a photo online of herself in a helmet and leather jacket, standing with a big old powerful beast of a motorcycle--she and the bike were sparkling on the side of a California highway in the golden sun, and Emily was smiling in a deviously beautiful way. She'd joined a women-only motorcycle club, becoming one of a group of riders who lived for the road (one weekend a month) and took trips and camped for a night or two. Jardine grilled her on the specifics. Is it terrifying? Who are the other women? How did she find them? Who taught her to ride? Emily has to plan the rides around work and can only go on weekends when her ex takes their daughter, which leaves a slim window.

But it's a window nonetheless, and it's worth it to her to strategize. This theory is the result of people reading the signs (when economic times are tough lipstick sales go up and big-ticket-item sales go down). Experience and an understanding of people, sales and the climate in which he traded led Leonard Lauder of Estee Lauder to make the connection. Clair Jennifer, founder of Australian fashion brand Wombat, chooses locations for new stores based on `leafy trees and fluffy dogs'. These things are a cultural yardstick by which she measures her stores' likelihood of success. Now, `fluffy dogs and leafy streets' may sound about as far from scientific enquiry as you can get, but in fact it is a very distilled way of thinking. What Clair is actually doing is reading and tracking the psychographics of her customers in a way that purely demographic information or statistical population studies might miss. However, signs and signals are not always so obvious. We need to develop our observational skills and push beyond our own expectations and beliefs. Like most skills, insight is learned and earned. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe observed that `Man sieht was man weiss', which roughly translates to `You see what you know'. Notice if your head is leaning forward, and if so, draw it back to align just over your shoulders. Let your arms rest by your sides slightly turned out with your palms facing forward. Lying on your back is an ideal posture for restorative breathwork practices as well as practices where you are moving sadness or grief, tapping into intuition, or addressing sleep. There are two ways to practice lying down, with or without neck and low back support. To practice without support, simply lie down on the floor, preferably on a mat or blanket so you are comfortable. Rest your arms down by your sides or have one hand on your belly and one on your heart. To practice with support, lie down and place a soft pillow or rolled up blanket under your knees to support the low back and something similar under your neck. Rest your arms down by your sides or have one hand on your belly and one on your heart. A yoga teacher once told me that thirty minutes of home practice was the equivalent of a ninety-minute class.

That stuck with me because it made so much sense. Because the stallion was dapple gray, I guessed that the colt would become gray as he aged, so I decided to name him Callahan's Grayfell for his father and for the horse in Robinson Jeffers's narrative poem At the Birth of an Age. I guessed wrong: Grayfell stayed palomino-tan for two years and then turned dark bay, more like his mother than his father, although he inherited his sire's striking white blaze and distinctive white legs. After I had imprinted Grayfell several times, I let him return to his mother and opened the gate to allow them both to walk outside into the paddock. Some of the best moments are those when a foal first leaves the barn and sees how large the world is. Just yesterday he existed only as his mother's second heartbeat. Now he was part of the environment we all share--the emerald-green spring grass, the hills, the blue sky. On the second day of Grayfell's life, I turned him and Xanadu out into the pasture and watched him running for the first time. In the afternoon, when I brought them back in, we walked around some boards nailed to posts near the barn, which I suspect were once part of a cattle chute, loading bank, or corral. Grayfell, not knowing how to go around, and alarmed that his mother was walking away from him, leaped the two-foot obstacle--impressive for a colt only two days old. I continued the imprinting process multiple times each day for a week and all summer worked with him for about fifteen minutes several times a day. My father had and his father before him. As anxiety and trepidation flooded through me, my body began to change chemically. My heart rate dropped, my facial muscles slackened, and my movement became clumsy. The clock ticked more slowly, but the last paragraph I was reading before Janet rudely slapped the article out of my hands hit me, so I ducked into the bathroom to read it again. FACT: We all have over a trillion cells in our bodies with each cell having its own consciousness. When the brain is given a thought from our mind, the cerebrospinal system of nerves puts conscious communication with every part of our body based on whatever thought we are thinking. The system of nerves responds to every sensation: taste, sound, pain, light, heat, cold. Whatever thoughts we send to the cerebro-spinal nervous system determines what our body feels and reacts. This made sense to me.