🚂 The Little Engine That Could 🚂

Dear Taylor,

Sometimes the world literally shakes us…

Fires blaze…Hurricanes tear through the land…The ground beneath us shifts in ways no one could have predicted…And yet…something steady keeps pulsing underneath it all…

A kind of stubborn, soul-deep hope…

That’s exactly what Lisa, a traveler passing through Asheville, discovered when she stumbled across our own Marc DiFrancia…

What began as a chance encounter unfolded into a conversation about resilience…possibility…and the deeper work of refusing to quit…

“You’ll never walk properly again.”

At 22 Marc sustained a back injury that severely affected his ability to walk…Over time the condition worsened…By 42 he was told he would never walk properly again and would need to rely on a wheelchair for anything more than short movements…

For years he carried that prognosis like a sentence…The “you can’t” voices got louder…You can’t recover…You can’t make a good life for yourself…You can’t live free of addiction…

But at 42 Marc didn’t just start over…He chose to ignore everything he’d been told for twenty years and create his own reality…A reality where he got healthy…broke free of addiction…stepped out of codependency…and lived pain free for the first time in decades…He took control of his life and started living from his inner guidance…

Now at 59 he’s running a horse sanctuary with goats and dogs…riding horses…and watching lives—human and animal alike—transform every single day…

As Marc shared with Lisa in the video…“I have horses…How do I have horses? I was an addict…But anything is possible when you know what you want and you refuse to quit on getting it…”

Lisa and Marc spoke not only about his personal journey…but also about Asheville itself…How Hurricane Helene and the storms that followed reshaped the land…creating thousands of landslides and leaving deep scars behind…

And yet…amidst all that instability, Lisa found a man with horses…laughter…and an unshakable commitment to life…

In the video, Marc reminds us there’s always more to life than what the current structure dictates…If we stay open…and keep noticing the ways forward…we can beat the odds…

This isn’t just a feel-good story…It’s a blueprint for what’s possible when we commit to the deeper “yes” in our hearts…even when everything around us says otherwise…

Watch the full video here.

And join us in pushing out our resources and spreading them around for more collective wellbeing:

🚂 Make a donation

🚂 Share Lisa’s video with someone who needs hope today

🚂 Put on a collaborative event together with our horses

🚂 Reply to this email with volunteer work interest

We hope you're having a lovely summer and look forward to hearing from you!

Warmly,

Taylor Coburn

Sanctuary Awareness and Advocacy

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