Maggie2

Maggie Atkins shares her story of growing up in a lower middle class family in Baltimore. Her parents taught her how not to be through their drinking, anger, and judgment. Despite this, she has fond memories of her father teaching her to water ski. She also talks about her love for nature and her tomboyish childhood. As she grew older, she pursued a career in business and was grateful for the opportunities she had in the U.S. She also talks about her love for music and her happiest moments, including discovering horses and embracing silliness. She values her Cherokee heritage and sees it as part of her spiritual journey. She believes in the importance of intuition and being in touch with one's true self. Our special guest today is Maggie Atkins, and Maggie has an interesting and very informative story that she's going to share with us all today. So welcome to the podcast, and Maggie, firstly can I get you to tell me when you were born and where you were born? Of course you can. I'm delighted to be here, by the way. I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and I was one of what they call a war baby. I was born in 1943. My father was a crane operator in a steel mill, and as much as he wanted to fight, go to war, felt it was his duty, he had to stay back and help make steel for weapons, all kinds of things. My mom was a school teacher, so we were a lower middle class family. I don't remember much about my childhood. I know that all of us have good and pleasant and unpleasant, and to be honest, I love my parents. But if I had to say in two or three sentences what they taught me, it would be they taught me how not to be. There was a lot of drinking, there was a lot of anger, there was a lot of judgment, and I love them, and I don't regret a moment of it now, because it all made me who I am. But I think because of that, I don't have very early childhood memories. I remember my father, who would be drunk at the time, of course, having the speedboat on the river and me water skiing behind, and he'd go faster and faster and faster. And my mother was terrified, and at one point he said, you have big feet, we're going to get rid of the ski, put your feet up like we're almost straight in the air. And by golly, he went fast enough that for a little bit I skied on my feet, and then I went flying through the air, and crashed in the water. And so he taught me to be an adventurer, but he had to be drunk to do it, and fortunately I don't. Yeah, getting rid of the skis and going on the bare feet is quite a challenge, aren't you, getting rid of the skis? I don't know how many seconds it lasted, but it was interesting, and it was an adventure, and it did make me fly through the air. Tell me about growing up where you were in America. Well, we lived in a little house in a neighborhood, and my father was very connected to Mother Earth, and I think I really got that from him. I had Cherokee heritage, Native American heritage on his side, and I've always loved Mother Earth, rivers and hills and forests and the animals and all that. So he really wanted to either have a farm or live at the river, and my mother was terrified of both. So I grew up at the river, so some of my favorite things, and I was a real tomboy, were my little rowboat, 12-foot rowboat, swimming, water skiing, rowing the boat. And in those days, there wasn't fear like there is today. I'd wake up before them on a Saturday morning, I'd get in my little boat, I'd row out to the middle, almost the middle of the river, put the anchor over and dive over all by myself. And I think of that now, and people would be horrified, but it was fun, you know? And so I was quite a tomboy. I really enjoyed those parts of my childhood. Parents are creative for you, isn't it? That's right. Well, my mother, I think, was afraid of just about everything. And when I said she taught me how not to be, I was a real rebel. And so even if I was afraid, I refused to look afraid, and I'd do things anyway. And I guess that served me at the time, but I'm sure glad I don't have to be that way anymore. Tell me about your teenage years, your first job, what sort of music you liked. Well, my parents split when I was 11, and my mother had a real heavy-duty, we'll call it heavy-duty, mantra, if you will. She really taught me that I had to be able to take care of myself, because the man would leave because of her experiences in her own life. So I did that. I went to business college, then I went to college, and I was very interested in a career. I'm not a very good academic. Theory is fine, but I want to see results. I want to see how the reality is in real life. I want to see people's lives get better, not just, if you will, talk about it or theorize. So I'm very much a hands-on, doing-it kind of person. And thank heavens I found meditation, and that's kind of balanced that a whole lot. I always knew I was going to be in business, and I think, I'm skipping past teenage years into early adulthood, more like early 20s. I am so grateful to that country. I wouldn't want to be there now. I love my Australia. Back, forth, sideways, every way. To be born in that time in the U.S. and to be, quote, a white woman, Cherokee heritage, but it doesn't show. I had more opportunities in business than I think any place else in the world. And I'm very grateful. I was one of the first managers at a major company and all kinds of things like that. And I'm not saying that from ego or cocky. It's just that the opportunities when we applied ourselves were so good. And because of my rebelliousness and because of my childhood, I wasn't afraid to speak my truth or speak up. And I think that really served me in a diplomatic way, you know, not in an angry way like in my childhood. So I'm very grateful to the U.S. and I'm very grateful for having been a businesswoman as well as an earth woman, as well as I love to drink. I was never an alcoholic like my father, but I love parties and all of that. So lots of different components as we all have. Let me just go back to your teenage years or as a young woman. What's your favorite music, the sorts of songs you like? Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Gentleman Prefer Blondes, Ba Ba Baby, never mind, we won't sing it. Anyway, rock and roll. I was a little young. I mean, Elvis wasn't even around. The Beatles weren't even around when I was a young teenager. But I love the musical theatre and I would get those great big 33 record albums. Is that what they're called? I can't even remember. And I would dress up in high heels and stumble around and wrap all kinds of lovely fabrics around myself as an early teenager and sing all these sexy, sassy songs, you know. And so that's the kind of music. There wasn't music in the house. I did not grow up in a happy house. Like I cannot ever remember my parents kissing. I don't remember sitting down to a dinner together. And none of that is said with angst. It's just interesting to me. Those are all things I really value now. Tell me about some of your most happiest moments. Some of my happiest moments. I think, well, one of them would be discovering horses. My father always loved horses. But I was 32 and newly divorced before I actually gave myself a horse. And then my 12-year-old neighbor, who has a little Morgan, she was my trainer. She had had horses since she was five or six. And I didn't know enough. So being in Mother Nature, horses, being with friends, really beginning to trust other people and being with friends. And I love playing cards. I love silliness. We are so serious. And I'll come back to now. About five years ago, when I kind of started to cease working so much, I decided to learn to play bridge. And as good a game as it is, and there are some very good people, it was just too serious for me. And at this point in our lives, Dennis, really, I'm 79. Don't I deserve to have some fun? Do I really have to do things I don't want to do anymore? Sometimes, yes. I have to balance my checkbook. I have to be, you know, certain things, of course. Really, when it comes to choosing what to do when we have choices, why wouldn't I choose silliness? A little bit of lightheartedness in this crazy world. So that's really important to me. Oh, I've met lots of famous people. I had a friend tell me one time that one of the things that made me so dangerous is I didn't know the difference between myself and somebody famous. I just treated them like they were anybody. Well, people who were famous within certain genres, if you will, Lynn Andrews, who wrote a lot of books about shamanic journeying, Medicine Woman, Coyote Woman, Jaguar Woman, and so on. Big stuff when I was in my 40s. She wanted me to go to work for her. And Stephen and Andrea Levine, they work with death and dying, and lots and lots and lots of books out. And I went to their workshops quite often. And one time Stephen came up to me before the workshop and said, she's back. And I said, Stephen, when you do your inner work, you're a different person and you hear different things every time. He was like, good on you. So I never met Oprah. I probably haven't met people that a lot of people who might listen to this might know. But I don't see much difference between myself and someone famous. I don't particularly hold back. I agree. No, I agree. We're all people. Yes. We all bleed. We all have emotional interactions. We all cry. So we're all people, I suppose, famous, infamous, infamous at this point. Infamous, yeah. You talked earlier on about your cultural history, your, sorry, you talked earlier on about your cultural history, your dad being, did I understand, Cherokee? He was part Cherokee and I'm part Cherokee, yeah. So tell me a little bit about that side of your culture. What sort of things have you done to, or to, I know that's a troubling word, what sort of things have you done to understand and be part and get a better understanding of that culture? And is that sort of linked to your meditation, the emotional freedom techniques, the work that you do? It's all linked to, I think, being a more spiritual person. We absolutely need our minds. We need our minds, of course. One of my heroes, Deepak Chopra, who's written many, many books, meditation teacher, doctor, came from India. And he has said, as Albert Einstein did, I would love to have met him, that the mind is supposed to be our slave and our intuition, our gut feeling, our knowing, our heart, knowing our path, our master. And we have made the slave the master, thinking, and we have forgotten who we are. And I think that's really a strong statement and I think it's true for many of us. So my Cherokee heritage, I knew about it because people told me about it. But rather than it having influenced me, like I wasn't trained in anything Cherokee as a child, I just always, I don't know if it comes from that or something else, love Mother Nature, love the animals, just loved all that. So that's one of the things that horse riding was for me, connection to Mother Nature. So I have been to the Cherokee Museum in Tennessee, I have been to some of the villages, I have been up in those mountains. I actually went to the top of a mountain in the Smoky Mountains, where my ancestors were, and found a place where the water came up and the stream went down the mountain in both directions. I've never seen anything like that before in my life. It just came up and went down in two different directions. So that was pretty amazing. I have studied some, you know, I have books like Coyote Healing, taking Western medicine and adding spirit to it, taking medicine and adding what someone's cultural beliefs and who they are to it and working within that framework with the medicine. Those things are just amazing to me, and those things complete a picture that we don't see a lot of today. So you're sitting in America, and one day you decide, Australia. I might go and visit, but tell me the story about coming to Australia. I always wanted to come to Australia, and when I was working, I didn't have the time because I wanted to come for three or four months. I knew it was as big as the U.S., and I wanted to really come and feel Australia, not just go to the cities, blah, blah. And so when I was working, I didn't have time, and during the times I took off, I didn't have the money. So I've worked just about my whole life, and during part of that time, I actually sold real estate in California. And the way I got to that, I worked for big corporations for a good part of my life, and I got tired of the politics, and I got tired of committees, and I looked for a business where I could be my own boss, actually the client's your boss, you're not your own boss, where I could be my own boss, more or less, and where when I did well, no company could come in and divide my territory up in two because I was making more money than my boss, because I had seen those kinds of things in sales, in corporation. So I was looking for a business that I could make my own, make decisions, be my own boss, all that. And by golly, I was shocked because I hadn't thought much of real estate in my life. A lot of people don't, they hear lousy stories about con people and so on. I realized that real estate was one of those places, and it became a joy to help people find their homes. So I ended up managing an office in California of 20-some people, doing all the sales training and all that kind of thing, and I really enjoyed it. But then I got tired of that, again, politics, and I started a company called Horse Properties Unlimited. I had always wanted to ride off my horses and my truck and my trailer, and I got to do that. I'd take horse people out to show them property on my horses. And so that was really joyful, and that was really fun. So corporations gave me a big basis for then branching out and really having my own business. I was always interested in being a better person, in being kinder, in less anger, in helping people, and from real estate – well, I was in real estate. I heard about Stephen and Andrea Levine, Death and Dying, started going to their workshops. And I actually ended up quitting real estate and working for them for three or four years. I ran their business. So then I found out I was good at running other people's businesses, because I had a good background in all that. So I did that for a while, and I looked for spiritually-based people who had a good message and did not have any idea how to run a business, and I'd run their businesses for them with integrity. And so I did that. And then I found Emotional Freedom Techniques in 1998, and I went to that. But you asked me what brought me to Australia, so hold on a second. I'm going to say a two-legged, because right before that I had three cats, a dog, two horses and a burro. So I was surrounded by four-leggeds. And a man I'd known in California moved to Australia, and he had a special skill and was invited to move here. And so I ended up joining him, and so we planned to have a life together forever. And it was. It lasted two years. Oh gosh, that was a terrible thing to say. And we are friends. We changed each other's lives. I've had people say to me, oh, I'm so sorry it didn't work out. And I say, sometimes you come together forever, and sometimes you come together to change each other's lives and to make each other better people if we can look within the little details to see the bigger picture. And that's what happened with he and I. And we still talk now. I just sent him an email this morning. And we're both very glad we're not together. So there you go. He got me to Australia. What do I have not to be grateful for? So that was 1995. I came over here, and yeah, it was like November 1995. Wonderful. So you've mentioned a couple of times about horses and your connection. And I've had a few experiences with horses myself. Not very pleasant. Normally they take off on me, and I end up falling on my shoulder and not be able to move for a week. But on a serious note, the connection between a horse and a human is a very special one. Would you like to maybe talk about that for a little bit? Sure. I love my dogs. I love my cats. When you are on a horse, you're trusting it with your life. And it makes it very different. I have been on a horse late, got lost on a trail, cliffed down one side 100 feet. He has to jump up about a four-foot thing on rocks, and he's got shoes on, metal, so he could slip. And I just put the reins down and said, I'm in your hands. Lord, I'm in your hands. Lord, I'm in your hands. His name was Gray Wolf. And he just reared back and got up there, and we got home safe. So when you trust another being with your life, it's just a very amazing thing. And they are so intuitive. Here are these powerful beings that can race across a plane, that have so much power, they can pull up whatever, a plow, a plane, who knows. And yet, if their intestines twist, if they get colic, they can die. Bingo. So they are so fragile, and they are so powerful. And my joke about horses used to be, at least they turn their backs on you to kick you. Humans don't do that. You don't see it coming with humans. And horses also put their ears back, and you can't tell that with a human. So yes, my connection with animals is very strong, and horses are so intuitive. I would say the horses you were on knew that you were either a little bit afraid, or that you didn't quite love them very much, and so they may have taken advantage. So their intuitiveness just... And it's so amazing to get on a horse that you've ridden for a while, and know before the horse does it, that he's going to jig sideways, or be afraid of something, or go into a trot, or stop, or... You just know it. There's a line that says, thinking is the enemy of a horse rider. Instinct is. So again, we get out of the mind, and into that body where we feel. And so that's part of horse riding for me too. Yes. Thank you for sharing that. Now, what... So you arrived in Australia in 1995, in Sydney I imagine? Yes, Frenchess Forest. Yes. And what brought you to the Port Macquarie area? Well, Bob and I ended up moving up to the central coast, close to the entrance, Chitaway Point, with a little river in the backyard, I bought a rowboat. And I lived in Washington, D.C. when I was in my 20s, and I loved the city in those days. Parties, and noise, and too many people, and all that. And now I go in the opposite direction. So, I was actually in South Australia, and I was teaching EFT all over, and I flew up to Cuffs Harbour to teach from South Australia, and this woman had just come back from a health retreat up above Kempsey. And so, she was so full of it, and I went, I'm going. So I called a friend, said, let's go. She said, fine, within two weeks we are at the health retreat. And what you did is you landed in Port Macquarie and spent the night, and then they came and picked you up in a van, and it was about a four-hour drive up in the boonies way up above Kempsey. And on the way back, after I'd been in retreat for a week, I was going slow enough, I went, I think I like this place. So a couple weeks later, I said, okay, if I can go for a week under $1,000, I'm going to go to Port Macquarie and check it out. So the airfare, the car rental, and the little place that I rented came to $990. So up I came, and I spent a week looking around. Got back to South Australia, called the mover who had moved me from wherever I was in South Australia to the other place I lived in South Australia. And I called the mover, and he said, we are going up to Brisbane with a load. We can add another big truck for your stuff. It'll be half price. Within another week, it was all gone. So I feel so blessed I can make decisions like that. I was working on the phone with clients, and I was going all over the place doing workshops. So I could be anywhere where there was decent communication. So that's what brought me to Port. It would be 2009. I love Port Macquarie. I'll tell you, the only regret I have in my life is that I got out of the housing market too long. And when I wanted to get back in it, which was about 10 years ago, I was already 69. They would not. I had great down payment, no debt, great credit. I could not get a loan anywhere, ageism, or that I was a woman, or who knows what combination. And so I am a very reluctant tenant, I will tell you that, because I love home. And I have just so many times gone out, put all the notices on the bulletin boards, and looked for places in the country. And it's very, very difficult to find places in the country. I've lived in Annanvale, in Lorne, in Kendall, in lots of places in the country. Very hard to find. You mentioned a couple of times during our conversation about having a boat and rivers. And so, clearly there's a connection, not only with horses that you have, but also a connection with the water. Just tell me a little bit more about that. Well, I'll tell you what my little regimen is now. I wake up every morning and I do Wim Hof breathing exercises. Partially because of COVID, and partially because I had pneumonia five years ago, and I want healthy lungs. So I do breathing exercises every morning. Then I meditate for 20 minutes. I've already fed the cat, by the way, or she wouldn't let me get away with any of that. Then I throw clothes on and I go to the river. I live in North Haven now. I go over to the Dunbogan side and I sit on a bench right beside where the boat shed is. I don't know why that's my favorite part of river, but I get to watch the boats at their moorings. I get to see how the water moves around them. There are all kinds of fish there. I buy bread for the fish and feed them just about every morning. Then when I do my walk, I'm in trees, in shade, looking up at beautiful trees right by the edge of the water. You don't find that in many places where I've been before. And I just unfold into it. People talk about being in the now, being present. When I'm on a horse, when I'm walking at that river, I don't have problems. I come back home and the phone rings and this happens and you look at the news. It's a whole different thing. But I have my mornings now. By golly, I deserve them and I love them. The water is very important. I love to swim. I go to Pilot Beach usually to swim because it's nice and soft and gentle. This podcast is part of a series of podcasts we're doing interviewing senior citizens, people like you and I, and sharing their stories. And you've shared a lot of your life and your stories and the importance of health. You mentioned you're 79 years of age. What advice would you give firstly to your younger self and what advice would you give to people in our age group that maybe don't have the outlets like you or I may have in terms of walking or writing or whatever it may be. So I'd be interested in your thoughts there. Okay. First of all, my younger self. And I've done a lot of writing around that. And basically it's keep going, trust yourself. And one of my main spiritual teachers, Stephen Levine, he used to say test everything in the crucibles of your own heart. Don't believe what anyone else says, including me, which always made me laugh. And so I do that as much as possible. There are times, of course, we have to do other things, responsibilities, and there are times we don't have choice. But there are lots of times we do. So I would tell, I tell my younger self to test everything in the crucibles of my own heart and don't spend as much time doing what other people think is right for me. To find my own path. Gently. As gently as possible, but to really kind of insist on that. And people in my own age group, I wanted to tell you about something. And you're right, a lot of people don't have access to horses or the river. When I really started to wind down my business, 75, before COVID, four years ago, I lost my identity. My identity for so long had been in the people I helped, feeling like I was a helper, really wanting to make a difference, you know, to the world, all of that. And so I found myself without much of an identity and it made me sloppy and fat and weak. And the worse you feel about yourself, the less you're going to move. And the less you move, the more you're probably going to eat. And the more you eat, you know what I'm saying. Anyway, so I found myself in that place. And one day, I just, I think I was walking at the river, and I was like, what is wrong with me? And this voice in my head said, you don't have anything to look forward to. I went, oh my God, I don't look forward to my life. I mean, how many people have that one? So I went home and I wrote down everything I used to love. Now I knew I couldn't do some of it again. Horseback riding was in there, dancing was in there, swimming, water skiing, playing cards with friends, all kinds of things. And I looked at it and I thought, I've got to do something that makes me so happy. And I chose horse riding, partially because of where I live, and I was so weak, I didn't know that I could ride very well. But it was an amazing process for me, and it was very important. And one of the things that was so important to pick up a lost love, I call it reclaiming a lost love, is I had to make it okay that I couldn't do it the way I used to do it. So I think so many times people our age, if you will, are stopped because we compare ourselves to that younger person who might have put a galloping horse in a stream or done this or that or whatever, a little more reckless. And so I had to really make peace, first of all, that whatever I chose, it was going to be different. I loved to dance. At the time, I couldn't dance through a song, and now I can. But if I couldn't move, if I was in a wheelchair and I used to love to dance, I think I'd wave my arms. And if I couldn't wave my arms, I think I'd try to mouth the words or listen to music or just kind of, you know, move to the beat a little bit if I could. But something that makes us happy, something that we can hold on to, look forward to. So for me, I chose horse. And I finally found a woman who'd let me on a horse. And she interviewed me. So I went up to her farm and I said, look, I'm fat and old and weak. I can't do anything about my age, but I can the fat and the weak. And I just got to get back on the horse. So I took her chocolate and the horse's carrots, and she put me up on a lovely, wonderful horse named Tiger. Now, when you have a gun on a horse, when you have an exercise, you don't like to start from the ground like I used to and swing your leg up. So she had this block and it had three tiers. The first one was maybe six to eight inches, the next one and the next one. Well, I got on the top block, which was even with the sat, with the stirrup, and I got on the horse. Barely. I was weak. And I had my lesson and she was so smart. She said, just do whatever you want. And I just walked him. And it was so wonderful. A horse's movement is so good for your back. If you can relax in the saddle, which you may have never been able to do, Dennis. You can relax in the saddle. There's something about that movement that just is so good. And I just fell in love with all of it. So I rode him every week for almost a couple of years. And I was very fortunate because with COVID, you don't need people around. You go, you get the horse, you saddle it, you do the hooves, you get on the horse. She's way across the arena, 30, 40 feet away. You're outside, there's a breeze. There's all kinds of open space. So I got to ride the whole time that COVID was happening. And in about six or eight months, I was doing other exercises. I used to say I took pity on the horse. I dropped 15 kilos. I put two back, which is fine. Between one and two for the last year or two, a year or so. And it really taught me something. So the reason I wanted to do this podcast is to say to people, if you can recover a lost love, reclaim it. Even if you can't do it the way you used to, you know, if you can't dance, maybe you can move your head. Maybe you can listen to music. If you can't swim, maybe you can go to the community pool and lay on your back and float. I don't know what it is. But whether it's listening to music or whatever, if you can. And lots of times we've had such serious lives, we don't even know what we want anymore. I had to go home and sit down and really think and to write down things I used to love. Now, what's that say about our world? So that's really why I wanted to do the podcast, to encourage people, no matter what age or what they have going on, what sorts of limitations. And I felt very blessed that I had the money to ride a horse every week that wasn't mine because she charged me every week. So I feel very, very blessed at this point in time. And I'm now looking for a new horse to ride. Anybody out there that has horses? This contact is on the podcast. So Maggie, thank you very much for sharing your stories with us today. It's been a joy to listen to the important things in your life, ranging from horse riding, the importance of meditation, the reclaiming a lost love in its various forms, and this podcast is part of the Council's Senior Citizens Week celebrations that will be taking place on the 4th of February. And I thank you very much for being part of the podcast, sharing your stories, and sharing your journey from Maryland in the United States to Port Macquarie in Australia. So thank you for being part of the podcast. It's been delightful, and I'm surprised that some of the things that came up, and I'm delighted with them. So thank you, Dennis. Thanks very much, Maggie. There we go. 40 minutes. I wasn't sure if some...