Hello, and a little bit about Horses and Space

 There’s this mare.  She seems pretty awesome.  In fact, she seems like that once-in-a-lifetime, fall head-over-heels in love, absolutely drop-dead gorgeous My Friend Flicka/Black Stallion combination kind of horse.  I traveled from one coast of the country to the other to meet her two weeks ago, and I fully expected there to be a slow-motion wide-eyed introduction involving galloping, swelling orchestral music, and whinnying, a la the Disney movie Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.  She acknowledged my presence.  That was okay too.

I freely admit that I am obsessed with horses.  I cannot imagine being happy living without them.  There are many reasons that people (mostly women) give when asked why they love all things equine.  They are beautiful, majestic, kind.  They are honest in their emotions; they are magnificent in their movement.  As Linda Kohanov explains in The Tao of Equus, “[a] feeling of quiet ecstasy surrounds many female riders and their mounts, as if they’ve resurrected a lost part of themselves while galloping down the trail, as if all the centuries that men went to war on well-trained steeds seem trivial compared to a single moment of understanding between a teenage girl and her first bay mare.”

A horse will give everything it has to its partner.  Of course, so will a dog to its master.  A horse will leap in the air and run as fast as it can.  A dog will launch itself onto unsuspecting friends and sprint for pure joy.  But, the difference between dogs and horses is the difference between wrestling and dancing.

So many of our relationships are defined by competition and dominance.  Don’t get me wrong, I can win those competitions.  In fact, I enjoy and excel at those competitions.  But there is an extra dynamic to a dance, a give and a take that acknowledges and celebrates the existence of each individual without requiring an averred destination or delineation of directorship.

The reason is the horse eschews the concept of ownership.  A horse will never sit at its owner’s feet, waiting solely to obey their every command.  They exist for themselves, and in themselves.  Part of this existence is a true desire for limitless space, a world with no boundaries where the horizon is not an edge but a hazy future to be brought into focus.

When I was in undergrad in Colorado, I worked for a year at a hunter-jumper barn in exchange for a lease on one of the owner’s horses.  The mare was six years old, semi-trained in Western and English, and not afraid of anything.  We had very little instruction and no one to keep us in a ring, so we spent hours riding north into the hundreds of acres of rolling plains that extended behind the farm.  For most of the year, the short grass was a crunchy brownish-green, and the air smelled faintly of dust.  In the late spring, pungent flowers and horse sweat heralded the onset of summer.  Rabbits darted back and forth under clumps of sagebrush, and the land spread out around us until far in the distance it met with the sky.  Twenty miles to our west, the Rocky Mountains rose in an abrupt perpendicular.  The foothills came first in jagged rock outcroppings, and then the 14,000-foot purple peaks behind them, capped in snow even in July.

Me and the First Bay Mare, jumping (badly)

One late afternoon, the mare and I went out for a trail ride, both of us in high spirits.  Dark storm clouds had gathered over the mountains, and you could see lightning flashing seventy-five miles away.  When we reached the part of the trail where we usually cantered, both of us were chomping at the bit (pun intended).  We started off in a steady, ground-covering canter.  But then, as we went down a slight incline, I could feel her make a decision, and her feet changed in tempo.  Until this point, I had never galloped on a horse.  My first thought was Oh S$*t!  And I started to sit back and tell her to slow down.  But then…she wasn’t scared.  She wasn’t bucking.  She was running for the hell of it.

Galloping: the ultimate suspension

Between states of being.

Each hoof beat, faster

Each space between, longer

Slowing time and freezing breath

In an instant of silence

Lifting to flight; and

Melding to the vastness of rough dirt.

There is a dichotomy between waiting in breathless anticipation of paces

In increasingly vivace staccato, running toward a groundswell of some brilliant climax

And security in the knowledge

That the moment of pure exhilaration is already here.

So, I threw away the reins and ran with her.  And promised myself that one day…

*******

Excuse me, sorry about breaking into verse there.  I just can’t help myself sometimes.  Could have been worse; could have been Natasha Bedingfield lyrics.

Anyway, let’s talk about horses, and space, and freedom, and how much freaking fun is galloping. Because, after bumming rides off friends and random acquaintances through high school, undergrad, and grad school, I finally bought a horse!