Apr2
Category Archives: improvisation life
Mar31
the wild and the tame
My friend Michele sent me this picture of the Mustang Nelson lounging in his hay. Happy horse.
At the end of our time together this week I stood facing him, my hands softly stroking both sides of his shoulders. Minutes passed, and I could feel his head coming to rest on my shoulder, his breathing relaxation. Those moments felt holy, like a healing. I am so blessed.
Most people that I speak to are unaware of the ongoing brutal culling of the fragile herds of wild Mustangs that still run free in Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado and other parts of the West. The ongoing program of planned extermination of wild horses is well under way in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management in service of the cattle industry. The helicopter drivers are paid per horse trapped, so there is no particular intelligence guiding the way in which the horses are chosen. Many of the horses end up being shipped to Mexico for slaughter for the European meat market. Slaughter is NEVER humane, and horse slaughter in Mexico is an unregulated, unimaginable horror.
As a ten-year old stallion, Nelson would have met that fate were it not for the generosity of Equine Advocates, a sanctuary in upstate New York.
If you have not signed the petition that I have up to the right of this post, please take the time to do so. The plight of the few remaining wild Mustangs in depends upon our voices. Not the voices of hysteria, but the steady voice of right action, of compassion and respect for all beings. As Klaus Hempfing says, the horses are always innocent. We must speak for them.
I am incredibly blessed to work with Nelson. He is the anchor for many of my posts and has taught me many lessons about connecting being with horses to the rest of my life. I do not believe that sanctuary or ownership by a human is a solution for all the wild horses, just as zoos are not solutions for all the endangered elephants. We need the wild. We need to feel ourselves in relationship not just to what is tame, but to the wildness within and around us. The horses do just that. As poet James Wright says,
Yet the earth contains
The horse as a remembrancer of wild
Arenas we avoid.
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Mar30
shadow, light
do you know
that shadows lurk
in the light?
can you feel your way
through the shadows
to the light?
When I was very, very young, I had a children’s book about a farm and a character called Uncle Bunny Bunny. I don’t remember the title or the story. But I remember the illustration on one page. It was looking up into the fall colors of a tree and the artist had captured beautifully, to my child’s imagination, the specific way that the light comes through the layers of leaves, shadowing and lighting each in its own unique way. Time and again I would go to that page and look at the tree, savoring the light and the shadow. It felt deeply familiar, physical, delicious.
Today I saw these iris as I was having breakfast and saw the way the shadow and light were coming through the fresh leaves. It is that way for me today – feeling my way through the shadows into the light.
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Mar29
buddha horse
I am not sure if he was meditating, but when I downloaded my pictures, there was this photograph of Nelson with his eye closed. Over the months that I have known him, Nelson has become a pretty equanimous horse. He takes things more in stride and I will often see him reading me – reading my movement, parsing what I am asking before responding.
My body has become more readable as well. I can feel it as I get out of the car and assemble my equipment (gloves, fanny pack with treats, brushes, sometimes a halter). Settling, breathing, feeling the rhythm and smoothness of my gestures. I don’t have a particular agenda or plan. Usually we review the things that we know (grooming, hoof lifting and picking practicing our movement cues. Then, depending on how he feels to me (steady, nervous, curious, disinterested), we move into something new.
I recently heard about a competition called the Extreme Mustang Makeover. Contestants have 90 days to gentle and train a wild Mustang. To me that sounds like a lot of pressure on both horse and human. It also sounds like doing things in human time, not horse time.
For me, the joy of Nelson is in taking my time and in building trust, friendship and understanding in slow, comprehensible steps. One of the greatest gifts that horses can teach us is learning to be in horse time, which is not goal oriented or clock and schedule driven. And, as Klaus Hempfling says, letting the horse come to me, not the other way around.