09/11/2024
Gorgeously written as always. I'm somewhat enviously at how easily 'the red mare' can put down into words what is felt in the heart. I hope that even the coldest could be melted just a little reading this.
The Red Mare
I lately read a sad plaint from a women who sees many, many horses. (It is her job.) She’d witnessed a patient mare being pulled and prodded down a yard and you could just tell that it was the last straw for this particular human heart. She ended with a cry to echo down the ages. ‘Be nice to your ponies,’ she wrote.
I thought: it didn’t start out like that. With the poking and the prodding, I mean. And all the things the kind-hearted woman listed and rejected. The ‘Give him a smack,’ and the ‘Don’t let her get away with it’ and the ‘Show him who’s boss.’
I know it didn’t start out like that because I meet tiny children every day with my horses and we always stop to say hello. I go through a little call-and-response. ‘Hello!’ I say, as we approach, and I see the eyes like saucers and sometimes the mouth opening in amazed awe. (A horse! A whole big horse! In real life!)
‘Do you like horses?’ I say. ‘Would you like to say hello? What’s your name? Would you like to stroke her? She’s very gentle. She loves children.’
And Jeanie or Rose or Frazer or George will reach up the gentlest of gentlest hands and just touch the red mare on the nose, with the lightest, fairy-like, fingertip benediction. There is always a hovering moment, before their tiny fingers reach her muzzle. Sometimes she will bend her head, so they can reach. And I hold my breath and the world holds its breath and then the connection is made and it’s like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and all creatures are one and it’s a sacred moment.
There is not even a hint of wanting to smack and boss and prod and poke and kick and yank in these children. It wouldn’t cross their minds.
So, I suppose that means that someone has to teach it to them.
They learn, somehow, somewhere, that it’s how you get on in life.
Or something.
I think of my little Tern. (Who is actually rather tall, but who has an elfin, magical aspect about her which makes me refer to her as little.) I think of her walking back from the stubble field yesterday, where she’d had a run and a snort and a gallop. She’d been in high energy and high adrenaline and she actually is rather big then, all 570 kilos of her, and when we were done I called her in, and she looked round the eight acres, all the way up the hill, and then she looked right at me and she dropped her head and she walked straight up to me and put her nose in the halter as if to say, ‘I’m ready to go home.’
That connection and consent hits me right in the soul. She had all the choices. She was wild and loose. She could run anywhere. She chose me.
And she walked home by my side, as light as air, as soft as silk. She’d been charging about, her hooves stamping on the earth so that it shook. And now she was like a feather, drifting to the ground.
I kept telling her how much I loved her. I was like those little children. It just pours out of me. I won’t dam it.
The idea of showing her who is boss would not make any sense. It would be like showing her what a penguin was, or talking to her about post-modernism. Totally pointless and not relevant and in fact odd.
And I suddenly think - I am so, so lucky. Because even though I grew up in the old school and I’ve learned a new horsemanship in my middle age and people did talk about kicking on when I was growing up, my mum and dad never, ever spoke the words of dominance or disdain. We were not allowed to smack our ponies or get cross with them in any way. Looking back, I see that my parents had a profound respect for the horse.
I never got taught to show anyone who was boss.
That is mad luck.
My mum and dad were born in the 1930s. They could not have processed an emotion if their life depended on it. They both - particularly my father - had unspeakable tragedies. They were doing the best they could with the information they had. But they never, not for a single second, showed me that smacking or poking or prodding or shouting was a way to behave.
And so, nearly a hundred years after my parents came into the world, Tern and I walk home, side by side, singing songs of love.
That really is the circle of life. That is a lovely, lovely thing.
