Heartstrings : Bundling Up

Monday, October 29, 2012

Bundling Up

It's hard to believe that winter is already at our heels again. As a native Coloradoan I still haven't made peace with the season which seems to drag on for five or six months. I am one of those people who is always cold and prefers the thermostat set higher than most. I become a bit of a pansy about riding in the winter, but fleece breeches, Smartwool socks and winter Ariats do help to make the bite more bearable. Thank goodness that Dani's apartment is right alongside the lovely indoor arena and I'll hardly need to brave the elements to keep riding, but I do dread the darkened drives as the days grow short.

This past month was a bit of a wash as far as dressage progress goes, between soreness, sickness and travel. I do feel that things are smoothing out, and after an upcoming week-long work-related trip in Colorado ski country, I'll have some nice stretches of time off with the Thanksgiving holiday and hope to get back on track with my mare.

Notchee and Coro have settled in to pasture life in a way that fills me with joy. They enjoy being outside so much that they don't even come in for their grain every morning. When I visited them this weekend I had to walk to the far corner of their pasture until they both came walking cheerfully toward me with a brief but friendly greeting before wandering off again toward important obligations of their newly rich equine social life. It is nothing but sweetness for them and only the tiniest bit melancholy for me as they inhabit this true retirement phase.

Dani Moonstar has a new turnout pen and partner, an Arab mare named Spring Star who Dani appears to boss around mildly. She seemed very happy to see me after a week apart and we had a very successful ground work/lunging session last night. She is really super about her transitions on the lunge, and despite having more time off and a cool evening she was very calm and obedient. I'd like to give her a chance to find her balance in the canter before working it much under saddle, and I want to introduce some cavaletti to change things up.

All three are fuzzy, Dani's hind shoes have been pulled, Notchee and Coro are barefoot, and we are ready as can be. Thinking of my friends and their horses on the east coast today...Sandy looks frightful.

1 comment:

TerryOctober 30, 2012 at 11:02 AM
I dread these long winters too, but after a brief taste of winter, we are enjoying beautiful weather.
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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.