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I have always had a deep love of animals and the natural world. My fondest memories of childhood are of the hours and hours I would spend outdoors and the joy I received from each of my pets - and believe me, I was never without one... or two or three. Dogs have always been a part of my life. And there were the ever-present gerbils, hermit crabs, rabbits, cats, etc. I didn’t grow up on a farm, but my parents often thought I was attempting to turn our home into one. I loved riding and being around horses, though I never had the privilege of owning one, and whenever I had the opportunity to meet a cow or goat or other farm animal up close, I'd take it.
My adult years have also never been without animals to share my life. And they have also never been without time spent in the peace and beauty of nature, even though many years of my working life found me in jobs that had little to do with either. And that was always difficult for me and left me longing for more fulfilling work days, something I had more passion about getting up to do every morning.
At a famiy gathering, my former husband once very seriously proclaimed that “Life is work.” That proclamation, for all of the times I made fun of it (because I am a person who by nature much prefers play over work), really is true in a different sense than someone like me first hears it, and it has a lot to do with Paso Ligero and what it is for me. Tom’s statement was not meant to convey that life is tough, hard work and we all have to slog through it day by day. Though many of us end up doing just that. But nor did he really mean to imply that life is only made up of the hours that too many of us spend trudging through our days at the office in a job we too often wish we could quit. What I think he meant, and what I blieve, is that the thing that can really define a person’s life is the work that we choose to do because it is something about which we have great passion. And as such, we live it. We don’t just work at it.
So, during our married life, as Tom and I grew in our work experiences, continued education, and finally our own information technology-based businesses which were Tom's passion, I was finally able to realize the dream of working with my passion – animals and the earth. With an educational background in pre-veterinary medicine and conservation biology, I conceived Paso Ligero to be a place where I can breed and raise some of the most wonderful livestock animals I believe the world has to offer, yielding a product that is luxurious and beautiful from those animals, and doing it all in a way that does not harm and hopefully enhances our natural environment - treading lightly.
While Tom and I have gone our separate ways to pursue our very different passions in life, I thank him for the support and help he gave me in starting Paso Ligero. I now get to live my passion every day and look foward to every new path that will lead me down in my journey.
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