Anna Blake It’s yelling, “Hey, look at me!” and knowing that your underwear is on your head.
What will your horse remember the next time you load?
Stillness bounded by movement, offered without demand.
Independent, connected,
Cradled as close as skin,
but set free.At peace in the eye of the hurricane.
Look, it’s a selfie of me mucking last week. I like to get an early start in the summer. Over six hundred blog posts about this horse/life, and no one ever asks me for fashion tips. I wonder why?
I wasn’t always this sophisticated. I remember when I was maybe fifteen; it was morning and I was standing out waiting for the school bus. I glanced to scrutinize my outfit. I didn’t dress a whole lot better back then, but I certainly worried about it a lot more. That was when I saw them–maybe ten or eleven dark brown hairs that I’d missed while shaving. They were on the inside of my ankle, like a furry cuff. Like a Friesian fetlock.
The magic happens when a printed word takes flight, and carries us along.
Move together in silence, an inaudible song. A wordless place, deep and shadowy and still. They wait for us to find them there. They always have…
_
Do you remember the first time you wanted to be right? It might predate memory or even language. Being good is immediately quantified after birth; we’re tested before we even leave the hospital. It’s our first “percentile.”
The mingling of moist breath,
the warm embrace of a curve,
the uncomplicated wholenessthat we covet. And the guilt
we earn when we destroy the
beauty we can’t rise up to meet.
I overheard some riders complaining like old campaigners. Asking a horse for bend sounded like the Hundred Years‘ War. They weren’t mean, just grumbling that it was hard to make the horse do what they wanted. Their voices heavy with dread, I had a feeling that their horses probably weren’t wild about them either.
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