The Four Riders from Nir Nadler & Chaja Hertog on Vimeo.
My friend, the filmmaker, Alla Kovgan, sent me this video. There are things that I like a great deal about it, but oddly, the horses feel as if they are missing. Nevertheless, I felt it worth a share.
I am interested: what do you see? What do you feel?
Yesterday on my drive to see Nelson the Mustang, I found myself checking for trouble. Scanning my mental horizons to see what trouble was lurking. I noticed that it felt like checking to make sure it was all still there, my little piles of trouble. “Isn’t that interesting,” I thought. My trouble piles are the things that I have a habit of worrying about. Money, health, safety, money, my daughters, the world, money.
Nelson is a stallion, and he poops in big “stud piles” around his field. They are his way of delineating territory, and he goes around and sniffs them from time to time to see if they need refreshing. I realized that my trouble piles are like that: I go and sniff them from time to time to see if they need refreshing. “Have I been worrying about this thing lately? Does it need a fresh worry?”
What I see is that I am habitually pointing myself at what I don’t want instead of looking around for the things that I can appreciate, the things that are nourishing and playful. I know this old habit, but thought I had pretty much cleaned it out. As it turns out it has just gotten a little more elusive, a little harder to detect.
The key was that as I was driving, I was feeling a little edgy, a little anxious, instead of welcoming the astonishing sunny beauty of the day and the gorgeous upstate New York scenery I was traveling through. Once I felt the feeling, then I started looking for things to enjoy. Simple things, easy things. Distracting myself from the trouble piles. Like looking for the shafts of sunlight, instead of the dark shadows.
If all you did was just look for things to appreciate you would live a joyous, spectacular life. If there was nothing else that you ever came to understand other than just look for things to appreciate, it’s the only tool you would ever need to predominantly hook you up with who you really are. That’s all you’d need. — Abraham
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This is Jules snoozing in the sun yesterday. Jules is a BIG greyhound with a BIG intimidating bark. He has a sweetness and a gentleness about him that is extraordinary, but he is fiercely protective. We love that about him. No one is going to hear him and want to approach.
I have been writing a lot about the landscape of the body and the way that our bodies partake of and reflect the earth. About learning to enter the landscape of our own bodies, to become cartographers of our own terrain.
I had to lie very flat and quiet to take this picture, and was so focused on not startling Jules that I did not even see the crest of Indian Mountain behind the curve of his ribs or the bristles of winter’s grass in the foreground and his whiskers behind. I think that as I become a better photographer, I will see more of those things, but for now, I like the happy accidents.
This is Cho, our Spanish Galgo. The Galgo is a sight hound from the Andalucian region of Spain, used by the gypsies for hunting. What I just learned from Wikipedia is that the name comes from the Gauls, a tribe of Celts who inhabited the Iberian peninsula from 400-600 BC. I am told that they have some Saluki in their background as well.
They look like greyhounds, but really that is just a ruse. They are a different kind of dog entirely. We have had eight greyhounds over the years, and two Galgos. The Galgo is built for distance running, which we found out when we first brought our ten-year old Galga, Gordita, to Lucy Vincent Beach on Martha’s Vineyard. We thought the cliffs would keep her on the beach, and watched in alarm as she scaled the cliffs as if they were flat.
Actually, it was Maria Wulf who inspired this post with her blog about watching her dog Frieda run free, and how she became this wild being. (Read it, it’s a wonderful piece.) As I read it I thought, “Ah, yes, I know that.”
Cho is a fence climber. I took this picture because this is how Cho looks just before he goes over the fence. He scrambles over it and is off. Once over, he is truly gone. Cho is now 17-years old, but to see him run is a miracle. He is a blond ribbon of speed flying across our meadows, across the street, and up into the farm across the way. He does not hear us, he does not see us. He is hunting. Unfortunately, he is sometimes hunting Mamacita, with whom he is obsessed, and at other times a skunk that lives under the barn. Mamacita has marked up his nose several times, which he does not find discouraging. And the skunk – well never mind.
One night last spring, Cho went over and out. He tore across the road and into the farm. We called and called. We could hear him, feel that he was very close, but it was as if he had become the ghost dog, the mad dog. Finally, after about an hour, he came in and threw up a clump of grass the size of a large raccoon.
We got Cho when he was 9-years old. He had been returned to Greyhound Friends by someone who had adopted him and then not been able to manage him. He is indeed a piece of work. We think that this is because he spent the first 8 years of his life as a street dog, or a gypsy dog, which is pretty much the same thing.
This morning at 6 am he went over and stood in the middle of the field barking loudly at something very specific and very invisible, even to my binoculars. Then he came in and jumped on the bed for a snooze. So there you have it: the wild and the tame in no particular order.