She wants to throw you…
I had a dream when I was too young to remember. I was riding a wild horse with nothing whatsoever to hold onto. There was no saddle. There was no bridle. There was only me and the horse…and my will to stay on.
“Life is a rodeo, we are the bull and we’re the rider. She wants to throw you and keep you inside her.”
My friend Dave suggested that I see the Coen Brothers’ movie Inside Llewyn Davis about a struggling singer-songwriter back in the sixties. I think he thought I would see myself, which I did. Llewyn was a bull-rider too.
“I stand up and I fall down, and roll on the floor. I reach for the ceilin’ but I can’t find the door to my dreams. I rise in the mornin’ and I run in the night. I’m wishin’ at windmills with all of my might, but I can’t…find you.”
Llewyn finally quit and walked away. The bull was especially mean to him…or was it? What if the bull knows what we’ve got and what we can take? I do happen to know the bull has gotten bigger, meaner and tougher…or have we just grown a little softer? I don’t know to be perfectly honest with you…and I don’t really care.
Did you know that the bull can actually look up and see the quit in your eyes? And what do you think she does at that point? I’ll tell you exactly what…it gives her an adrenalin surge as she bucks it up ‘cause she knows she’s about to marry your face to the ground! So we can drag up, or we can take an extra wrap and set our spurs to let her know…
We’ve got our song to sing!
Standupnsing 
“spoiler alert!” BTW.. he really doesn’t walk away from his music, just from the daily grind of it. Maybe we are not softer, maybe we are more aware. And just maybe instead of fighting head on, we get smarter. The oak tree breaks in the hurricane while the Willow will bend with it and not break. Find a better way.
“Find a better way”…ok, so what I interpret from what comes to me in this song is that the bull is a metaphor for life. It is life that bucks us up and down, from here to there and all around. The point is to “stay on”, no?
Not everything has to be a fight to the death. Yes, we want to stay on, but stay on with less anxiety. There are martial artists that work with Judo techniques that focus the other side to use it own weight instead of us using our force. We are able to defeat what is coming against us by allowing the other side to bring itself down.
Its not giving up, it’s just not letting it get the best of us.