Rescue

When you think about conquering new mountaintops, and rescuing the remainder of your productive years, you don’t always have to set out for Mt. Everest. Sometimes you should start with the hill in your own backyard.

My saving grace lately has been channeling whatever creative energy I have into writing for one of my passions: a horse rescue.

I took over their good old-fashioned print newsletter for their non-computer-savvy supporters. I manage their Facebook page (a 37% increase in fans and activity over the past month, plus a surge in donations and a couple of potential adopters). I plan to do some stories for horse publications and press releases on upcoming fundraisers. If I charged them for this, I could make it my full-time gig.

But what fun. I think I’m getting more out of it than they are. I’m learning about how to use social media: (Squidoo… never even heard of it a week ago) …. and how to translate Facebook fans into donating members and get them to spread the word. I know who my demographic is (women between the ages of 35-44), how to appeal to their emotions, what time they log on, what posts generate response and activity, and that the more pictures of pretty horses, the better.

More importantly I’m also learning how the rescue operates; the gargantuan commitment it requires; the financial challenges; how horses and owners are matched up for the benefit of both; how the huge animals can be felled overnight by tiny microbes; and how people rally around the support of an animal sometimes more readily than they will for fellow humans. (That’s probably the topic of another blog someday, or a research project for my son, the future shrink.)

Winston Churchill said, “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.”

So perhaps, in the act of rescuing, we are in fact, rescued.