Gökotta is a Swedish word for waking up early just to hear the birds sing.
I wish I knew the word for waking up early and walking the paddocks at Stonecrest Farm with my son, mugs of coffee in our hands, breathing wairua (Maori: the essence of each other) nose to nose with the bloodhorses . . . understanding each other . . . all of us.
And I wish I knew the magic word that could make it never end.
I just love a horse barn . . . the smell, the soft sameness of colors blended by tails, the gentle conversation of animals and their people . . . each level inhabited by different creatures . . . the entire ecosystem of a horse barn.
with a word that means both hello and goodbye
this is the way the horses looked
at me and what their look
said to me as I left . . . full of emptiness
their love unfettered . . .and brave as the sky
~ Liana
We did it . . . the book is launched. If you want to know more leave me your contact info and I’ll share the link. I can’t tell you how good this feels.
I had to be awake by 4:30 am today, so everything cooperated uncongenially from bad dreams of the dog eating my good shoes to a storm taking out the power (also in the dream) to the half-hour-on-every-hour vigil of glancing at my phone alarm to make sure I hadn’t missed it. By 3:30 am, I gave up any notion of sleep. I did get to see the sunrise over the paddocks a few hours later and wished I could have been out there with my camera. Alas, photography is not on the docket today, so all I can offer is yesterday’s gaping grin from the fence where the yearlings teeth.
I love that he names the baby horses after poems. It is highly imaginative, but will “The Wanderings of Oisin” find his way to the run for the roses?
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
~ T.S. Eliot, from Little Gidding
Back at the horse farm this week…picking up the conversation with two-legged and four-legged alike.
The horses quiver…ventriloquists…throwing their voices over the grass and across the sky.
I listen with my skin and nostrils and eyes.
He told me about an old saying: no trainer ever commits suicide with an unraced two-year-old in his barn. I’d put it this way: when a horse breathes me in as I breathe it in, I think the years of my own life that have been taken are being given back.
…riding naked on the one trick pony of my heart
(iPhone photo, March ’13, of the mysterious runway horse)
…not the year of the Fragile Porcelain Mouse.
I even double-checked the Chinese calendar to make sure, dammit.
we’ll call this “peppermintality” because these briskly-spirited thoroughbreds begin to salivate at the site of anyone (who isn’t a trainer) approaching the paddock who might be (had better be) bringing them some candy.
Now that their racing days are over, treats are allowed. But whoa to the admirer who approaches without a mint (that would be me… I thought we were beyond that by now). 
A wet exhalation of disgust, a head bump and a tail flip are followed by a very intimidating display of thorn-breaking tooth-power.
Any conciliatory offerings of grass will be met by ripping a brand new Christmas scarf off the admirer’s neck (that would be mine).
the hour of soft light... 