Hands On

So, if my mind's not quite in the game, my body can still go there. Sloughing off the winter is close to being my favorite time of a horse-owning year. I dig in with my few simple tools and work at it until my shoulders burn. The horse loves it as much as I do, just differently. She loves the pressure of my raking through her coat over and over, leans into it, sighs. I love the feel of chasing a seam, like coal, finding the glitter gleam under lifeless shale.

 

The brittle strands sometimes levitate in the surrounding air - they cleave to my lips before long, line an eye. I pull and drag her contours, following her every small shift of position without thought. If only I could peel off my own shit like I can peel off what she's already cast away. But I don't think about things like that then, only notice sometimes the burning in my wrists, the sweat at my brow. It's satisfying, relieving, a little freeing.

Afterward, lingering at the doorway, she seems to smile. That can be enough. It can be enough for what it was. She looks beautiful.

Why Do I Ride?

That question, in general, was raised in an excellent piece, found here, Grey Horse Matters: The Horse Gene, the other day. It's a good question, but for me it follows secondary to what I see as the first question: Why Do I Horse?

Because the simple, tangible reality of time spent with horses feels like precisely that to me: Real. Depending on your circumstances, perceptions of the actual, the present, the "real" can be elusive. "It's relative," people used to say, where today they might say, "Whatever."

But that reality is hard won; it was for me. I was born overseas to parents lashed tight together with cords spun from bitterness, deception and fear. It was a strangling life for them, let alone their accidental children. Trapped in just what "is" as a child, reality isn't even a concept until the first major thing happens, good or bad, that throws you out of yourself and then back in in a single involuntary instant. In my case, I would have been better off staying in "is." Reality, when I recognized it, trapped me between myself and my parents in the inexhaustible chokehold that exists between predator and prey. I became responsible for managing my own safety, or knowing that, anyway, but never understanding it. It was an oppressive climate of uncertainty and vigilant self-consciousness, one in which I was always struggling to stay invisible, desperate not be caught out by the din of terror clamoring in my head. There, I learned myself as a reactive creature, not a person, not an identity, not a being separate and apart from the forces threatening it. Trapped between the assaults wrought by one parent and the cool, unseeing facade erected by the other, I was never free.

Until the first time I stood near a horse. I don't even remember her name. She was a crazy pinto mare, a filly, really, who'd been ridden too young by the six-foot-tall farm boy who owned her. His farm was one of three on the long blacktop road where our little bi-level ranch house had been built, oddly out of place, and quickly sold to my parents. I don't know why my parents moved to the country. For me, it just meant there would be no place to run, no one to turn to. But I could get away with walks in "nature." My father approved of what he called the "American pastoral setting," so unlike what he had experienced in wartime Poland, while my mother preferred her dogs above all else and gave little care to absent children.

My walks took me again and again to that pinto filly. I would stretch my hands through the paddock fence, feeding her long grass from the roadside. There never seemed to be any people around, and she was alone. One day I climbed the fence and slipped onto her back. I can still remember the warmth of the sun on her sides. She trotted easily under a low-hanging branch and scraped me off, then went back to snuffling among the weeds.

There had been animals before, for me. My mother was a dog breeder, and we'd once had a cat. When whelping boxes had to be cleaned, the litters of puppies were brought to me for safekeeping. I loved those times, loved how it was to be with creatures just as vulnerable as me, but it was different with the filly. She was bigger than me, stronger than me, taller than me. She was a whole separate being who could react to me as she pleased. For the first time in my life, I wanted someone to like me. That someone just happened to be a horse. I wanted her approval, and I worked really hard to get it.

I think that is it with me and horses. Somehow, their self-awareness drew me in when I was a child, and it keeps me with them today. It's not a consciousness that we can know, I don't think, but we can sense it, just as they can sense ours. A dog will see you, a cat will regard you, but a horse will look at you. That pinto filly looked at me when I couldn't even see myself, and then I did.

Things That Fall Out of the Sky

I put Dar into a place I could finally carry and keep him when I wrote about him on August 31st. That's also when I understood that I was ready to move on, eager to move on. The next day, this notice showed up in an email:

Lovely black Appendix Mare: 9 years old, 15.3hh, loads, clips, bathes, great on trails alone or with others, good on roadside riding, rides English or Western, loves to jump, dressage prospect but would need fine tuning in the ring, sound, sane, no vices, pet personality, up-to-date on shots, worming, farrier, negative Coggins 2010. Moving, must sell. Good home only.

I wasn't looking, not to say as much, anyway, but something in the advertisement moved me to call. Here she is going through a pre-purchase exam during yesterday's rainy morning.

A Kind of Freedom

The festival is over. We made our numbers amid wretched economic conditions and oppressive weather. Just three days after closing the park is nearly empty and the animals are reclaiming their places all over the site. Skunks come out to play after dark, chipmunks streak across the fairways all day long, and we keep a sharp lookout for unexpected arrivals because this is when people begin to dump unwanted pets at the foot of our long driveway.

Show seasons compress like a sponge clenched tight in a fist. With closing day, the grip relaxes and the sponge begins to open. Those of us who move our lives here for the summer look up, look around. Exhausted, we prepare to move on.

I felt that sense of compression strongly this year. It squeezed my decisions and reactions into odd, jerky moments, but often I was aware of little more than just the process of change happening within me. Sometimes I noticed my struggle over Dar. It felt like an event that was happening to me, but I had no time to really be present in it. It erupted from time to time, is all. But there was a process that culminated in my realizing there was no longer a real reason to look back. Somehow, I saw that Dar had moved from hope to memory; I was already looking somewhere else when I saw that I had left him behind. Looking at someone else.