Caring Into the Void

The world is the world. I follow as much of it as I can. Because I was born in England, the concept of journeying to foreign shores was real to me. We arrived in America for the duration, but even as a child I never stopped looking back and looking out, to countries beyond my reach. Grown now, I follow stories of other places from the smallness of my own because the world is still the whole world to me. Within it, there is the horse as touchstone, as a common symbol that helps me feel connected even when I never will be. There's more power in that small commonality than I can find in We Are The World or Imagine.

Here's a Palestinian boy riding in beautiful balance alongside Israel's West Bank barrier. Lives still have to be lived.

Here, mounted policewomen patrol Stockholm astride big, beautiful warmbloods after the recent bombing.

I see horses present and useful in places affected by the consequences of seeming irreparable human conflict.

And then they're not. The New York Times published a heartbreaking article today, Hardships of a Nation Push Horses Out to Die. The piece, written by John F. Burns, describes what is happening to horses in Ireland as the country fights to prevent total economic collapse. It may be better not to know when there's nothing I can do, but I can't help dreaming of an airlift to pick these horses off the former landfill where they now wander. This is Ireland: horses run in the blood, they run deep as history.