Horse Interrupted

(From the archives)

I finally followed up with an old heart’s desire before becoming a birder, a business woman, a wife, a homemaker, and a responsible, over-tax-paying NJ citizen. The same world I aspired to when I was only months old and a perpetual car screamer unless my frustrated parents and siblings could find and point out one of the old Texaco gasoline station signs of the flying red horse. As long as I could see that scarlet horse with outspread wings soaring over the limits of its little white world, I was transfixed into silence, as if I had accidentally arrived on this planet as a half horse/half human soul, and only being at home on my own two legs if I was near the other four.
During my younger years, I rode many horses and owned two, briefly, finally giving it up when I had to take on three jobs to make ends meet. Barn politics were also ruining the simple reasons horses gave me for getting up in the morning. I needed a break. Little did I know it would become almost permanent.
But while the physical connections were interrupted, the spiritual remained. A single animal grazing quietly in a field turns my head. A casual rider clopping by as I stroll through a county fair catches my breath. So, inspired by such blogs as Grey Horse Matters and Teachings of the Horse, and after a long, on-going period of self reflection involving some desperate personal circumstances, I decided to return in whatever measure I can to what I have never stopped loving~that flying red horse in my soul. I want to return to riding, not for shows anymore with all the expense and tension and internal struggles, but to the spicey scent of pine shavings and clean leather, the sound of a stall door rumbling open, the click of a cross tie being snapped into place, the soft nickering of an honest animal acknowledging my arrival, swirling horsehair all over my barn jacket and dirt under my fingernails. It’s not just the riding; it’s the entire World of Horse and horse people, the language, the camaraderie of a warm barn, the simple satisfaction that you are a fellow animal and have a place in this old world, that you belong to a higher power destined to be in your heart long before you were ever born.
You know what they say: Do what you love.