08/05/2022
This morning, I had an hour before my next client and I ran down to the field thinking the red mare and I could go on a quick ride. I had visions of us crossing the big meadow and cantering up the rise and looking at the view. I haven’t ridden for days, because I’ve been doing all the stuff with the children, and I could feel already that great powerful thoroughbred under me and the sense of coming home that she gives me when I sit in the saddle.
The sun was shining and you may imagine how much joy this dream ride was giving me in my imagination.
Then I rounded the corner to the field and saw Florence, flat out on her side, with the red mare watching over her.
The red mare was in her own Place of Peace but Flo was in a whole other zone altogether. She had gone to somewhere in the universe which doesn’t even have a name yet. (And you know I have names for everything.)
All thoughts of riding were instantly forgotten. I could not interrupt this.
So I lay down too.
Normally, I chat to my horses all the time. I murmur and croon; I tell them stories; I make jokes. (They very kindly pretend to find them funny.) But in this whole other Place with No Name, silence was called for. It fell naturally, dropping from the bright sky.
I lay on my front, as children do in the summertime, and gazed at Florence’s velvet nose. Her lower lip drooped and everything about her was soft and real and in the moment.
She made big breathing sounds, so I made big breathing sounds.
She sighed, and so I sighed.
I didn’t touch her.
I always want to touch my horses. I love rubbing them and stroking them and scratching them. But that tiny distance between us was a precious thing and I did not want to disturb it. It was the glimpse across the species barrier and it needed nothing palpable or physical. It rested on its own, perfect in itself.
In the stillness, the happiness danced in me like a living thing.
I am a writer, so the writing voice in my head said, ‘You must write this down. You must tell them about this.’
But the life part, perhaps the soul part, said, ‘No, you’re all right. You can just feel this. You can stay in this. There will be words later. Stay, and be at one with the world.’
So I stayed. I could write it later. (I am writing it later, now, trying to recollect every streaming, dreaming moment.)
The happiness was so intense that at one point it almost made me frightened. And then I had a moment of guilt. There is a voice in my head which says I’m not allowed to feel this happy, because there are people in the world who are miserable and desolate. There are people who don’t have horses, who can’t lie in a field in the middle of the day, who have so many wounds and scars that they might never know this undilute joy.
I had to have a little conversation with myself about this. You are allowed, I told myself. You won’t save the world by refusing yourself happiness.
And, said the kind, humane, grown-up voice in my head, you had a few wounds and scars of your own. You paid your dues. You have grieved your lost ones. You have stood at gravesides and wept. You had years without a home.
(My mum and I spent some of my youthful years living like vagabonds, out of a suitcase. Mum, typically, managed to find us pretty swanky digs. The spare rooms and borrowed houses were in Little Venice, looking over the canal, and tucked away behind Hyde Park, so I would wake at dawn to the clip clop of the Household Cavalry, out for exercise. But even so, these were not our homes. I was always on my best behaviour, terrified of saying the wrong thing or breaking something or getting us chucked out in the street.)
But here’s the thing. Even if I had not had those griefs, I am still allowed to be happy. In fact, I have a duty to be happy, in that field, because the mares love it. The joy is a part of my contract with them. They feel it; they sense the pure energy of delight pouring out of me. The loveliness of inhabiting that beautiful moment in time touches them and makes them feel calm and safe.
This conversation in my mazy mind only takes about two minutes. I’m practised now, at finding the non-useful voices and talking them down off the ceiling. I sink back into the heavenly sense of being and Flo sighs some more and the red mare wibbles her lower lip above us, and all is well.
I write moments like this down because I am a writer, at my heart, and there is a part of me that believes nothing is quite real until it is scratched upon the page.
I write these moments down because I don’t want to forget them. When I am old and grey and full of sleep, as Yeats once said, I want to take down this book and slowly read.
And I write the moments because I want to give them to you.
I want to take you to the magic field with me; I want you to feel the love. Then the moment is not just a moment of pure being: it has meaning. It exists for a reason. You may smile, or nod your head, or sigh your own little sigh, just like Florence did. And we are connected, across oceans, and we are not alone.
