Today the new Horse Dancing blog goes live. I am excited, happy to have this way of sharing reflections on life in the body and how it is shaped by a life with horses. Websites are great, but they feel a little archival – a document of what went before. These pages feel fresh, just birthed, caught falling, like rain into cupped hands, like the mist rising off the mountain. Enjoy!
Yesterday I read an article in the New York Times about decision making and how our endless cascade of choices basically overwhelms our limited bandwidth, wreaking havoc with our emotional and physical selves. The way I experience it is as a surfeit of essentially meaningless choices (Coffee or tea? Pants or shorts? Write the blog or go for a walk? etc. etc. etc.) It feels like dithering. Another symptom of an unquiet mind. Time to breathe and get quiet. (Meditate or walk? Breathe or stretch? . . . oops, there I go again).
Horses don’t dither. They are not overwhelmed by their choices. Hay or grass? This place or that? Doze or graze? Lick the salt or wait until later? They just move in a smooth flow from one thing to the next. I imagine that to be vastly refreshing, more immediate, sensual and delicious. I notice that when I am at the barn, in the presence of the horses, the choices dissolve. I fall into horse time – expanded, open-ended, present.
I read Jon Katz’s remarkable book Rose in a Storm last winter in the midst of a big Northeaster. I was hooked. I suddenly needed to know what Rose was up to. Fortunately, I discovered Jon’s excellent blog, Bedlam Farm Journal, and have been feasting on a steady diet of Jon’s daily reflections on life at Bedlam Farm since. Following their adoption of the donkey Simon, I had the opportunity to interview Jon and his wife Maria for my book, Horse Dancing. Jon is the real deal. Maria is too. I feel as if a part of me is nestled in a corner of their farm, relishing the animals, the light on the morning glories in his wonderful photos, the sound of Simon’s morning brays. See you there!
I have had this quotation from Alice Walker floating around on my computer forever. time to share it.
“Hearts are there to be broken, and I say that because that seems to be just part of what happens with hearts. I mean, mine has been broken so many times that I have lost count. But it just seems to be broken open more and more and more, and it just gets bigger. In fact, I was saying to my therapist not long ago, “You know, my heart by now feels like it has just sort of dropped open, you know, like how a big suitcase falls open. It feels like that.” Instead of that feeling of having a thorn through your heart, that feeling [Buddhist teacher] Pema Chodron talks about in tonglen meditation, you have a sense of openness, as if the wind could blow through it. And that’s the way I’m used to my heart feeling. The feeling of the heart being so open that the wind blows through it.”
Alice Walker, Shambhala Sun, January 1997