Heartstrings : July 2012

Monday, July 30, 2012

Clinic for a Cause

On Saturday I attended a benefit clinic at my trainer's barn in Peyton. All of the proceeds went to Ruby Ranch Horse Rescue . There were three sessions: patterns, equine massage and obstacles. A lot of people were working with young and/or rescue horses so most was in hand, but there were a few that rode. I got to work with one of the adoptable horses, a 6-year-old QH mare named Luna who was seized from a neglectful situation and was kept in a pen made of pallets. She was just perfect for everything, but I had an advantage in that she's been with my trainer for a month so had already done a lot of it. She made me look good. Utterly calm and willing, such a sweet girl. She walked through a kiddy pool, over a moving platform, past pool noodles hanging from trees, and amused everyone at the "Bobbing for Apples" station by trying to overturn the whole bucket - smart mare! She is not under saddle yet but is going to make someone a wonderful partner. E. was sweet enough to go with me and take lots of pictures.

Meeting Luna

This ramp wobbled, like a horse teeter-totter!

How awesome is she?

Bobbing for apples...

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Two Decades

Today is my twenty year anniversary with Coro. He has been with me for nearly two-thirds of my life. We were apart for much of that; I am so grateful that my mother took such good care of him for me all those years, and that I am able to do the same for Notchee now.

We have become reacquainted over the past two years at Lost Canyon, and as he did then, he has inspired and broadened my equine dreams, allowed me to invite more possibility in mahogany and black. New beginnings, new colors - but I will always be partial to pewter and platinum.

Coro at 3 years old, 1992

Coro at 23 years old, 2012

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Bathed in Sunset

Last night Coro and I found ourselves in a shaft of rose and gold light coming through the arena door during a lovely bareback ride.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Introducing Dani!

Yesterday I brought home my new horse, Dandelion Wine (Dani). She is a five year old Half Andalusian with a good start and some basic dressage training. She got along instantly with my Arab mare, with whom she shares a birthday (just one day before Coro's) and settled right in to her new home. I spent the whole day at the barn just hanging out and getting all her stuff organized. An Independence Day to remember, for sure. Today we will do some ground work and maybe a short ride, tomorrow we have a dressage lesson! I already love her and am so excited for our future. Three is a good number.

Poetry Corner

Source
by Mark Doty

I'd been traveling all day, driving north
—smaller and smaller roads, clapboard houses
startled awake by the new green around them—

when I saw three horses in a fenced field
by the narrow highway's edge: white horses,

two uniformly snowy, the other speckled
as though he'd been rolling in flakes of rust.
They were of graduated sizes—small, medium,

large—and two stood to watch while the smallest
waded up to his knees in a shallow pond,

tossing his head and taking
—it seemed unmistakable—
delight in the cool water

around his hooves and ankles.
I kept on driving, I went into town

to visit the bookstores and the coffee bar
and looked at the new novels
and the volumes of poetry, but all the time

it was horses I was thinking of,
and when I drove back to find them,

the three companions left off
whatever it was they were playing at
and came nearer the wire fence—

I'd pulled over onto the grassy shoulder
of the highway—to see what I'd brought them.

Experience is an intact fruit,
core and flesh and rind of it; once cut open,
entered, it can't be the same, can it?

Though that is the dream of the poem:
as if we could look out

through that moment's blushed skin.
They wandered toward the fence.
The tallest turned toward me;

I was moved by the verticality of her face,
elongated reach from the tips of her ears

down to white eyelids and lashes,
the pink articulation
of nostrils, wind stirring the strands

of her mane a little to frame the gaze
in which she fixed me. She was the bold one;

the others stood at a slight distance
while she held me in her attention.
Put your tongue to the green-flecked peel

of it, reader, and taste it
from the inside: would you believe me
if I said that beneath them a clear channel

ran from the three horses to the place
they'd come from, the cool womb

of nothing, cave at the heart
of the world, deep and resilient and firmly set
at the core of things? Not emptiness,

not negation, but a generous, cold nothing:
the breathing space out of which new shoots

are propelled to the grazing mouths,
out of which the horses themselves are tendered
into the new light. The poem wants the impossible;

the poem wants a name for the kind nothing
at the core of time, out of which the foals

come tumbling: curled, fetal, dreaming,
and into which the old crumple, fetlock
and skull breaking like waves of foaming milk....

Cold, bracing nothing that mothers forth
mud and mint, hoof and clover, root hair

and horsehair and the accordion bones
of the rust-spotted little one unfolding itself
into the afternoon. You too: you flare

and fall back into the necessary
open space. What could be better than that?

It was the beginning of May,
the black earth nearly steaming,
and a scatter of petals decked the mud

like pearls, everything warm with setting out,
and you could see beneath their hooves
the path they'd traveled up, the horse road

on which they trot into the world, eager for pleasure
and sunlight, and down which they descend,

in good time, into the source of spring.