Sometimes I take Minnie, my 3 year old off the track thoroughbred filly, into the arena. She’s very curious and likes to walk herself from obstacle to obstacle, checking them out. Last week, there was a new obstacle – an adorable little brown bottle-fed calf called Buttercup. Minnie wasn’t quite sure what to think of Buttercup, but she was fascinated. First, she put her nose on the calf’s back, then her tail, then her head. Buttercup stood still for this inspection and reached out her dark tongue and licked Minnie right on the nose. Minnie startled, drew her head up sharply and stepped back, tense and alert. I could just hear her saying, What on earth was that? If you’ve never felt a cow’s tongue, suffice it to say they are rough, not quite like sandpaper, but rough. So it’s not surprising that this new sensation and unexpected movement spooked my baby horse. But Minnie’s curiosity quickly overcame her concern, and within seconds, she was sniffing the calf again, and before long she was following her around the arena wanting to play.
That happened to me this weekend. I’d spent a glorious morning enjoying an incredible burst of creativity – you know, when you write and write and write just trying to catch up with the inspiration? When I came up for air, I thought, I’ll just see how much it would cost to purchase the equipment to do the documentary. So I researched and researched and researched – cameras and codecs, workflows and wireless mics, backups and batteries, which editing software was best these days. And I scared myself. Like Minnie when Buttercup licked her nose, I drew back, tense and alert, and the thoughts came fast and furious – what was I thinking this is why I quit when I did it’s so expensive and complicated and it’s not going to make any money and Netflix only accepts projects from cameras far beyond my budget and I have 3 horses to support and I won’t ask for help and I’ll lose years of my life and at the end I’ll get divorced. Whoa. I’m definitely not going to make a documentary, I can just do the podcast, it will be great and much easier, and that is that, and that was enough to quell my fear and calm me down. But the next morning, my curiosity overcame my concern, and I started to sniff the calf again. Maybe I don’t have to buy a bunch of complicated equipment. There was a film in the Sundance Film Festival that was shot on an iPhone. I don’t need to buy anything right. this. minute. I actually do have the money in savings to make an investment in equipment. Like Minnie, I sniffed the back, the tail, the head. It took me longer than it took her, but in the end, I too decided this calf, this documentary project, was something I wanted to continue to explore and might just turn out to be someone I could play with.
