Today’s advent calendar opens its little window onto a dull Scottish landscape. The sky is all low cloud and the trees are starkly bare and the grass can hardly muster up the courage to be green.
But there, in the middle, is a shining streak of red.
It is the red mare. (Of course it is.) She and I are on our way to do some work, out in the big meadow. I am going to invite her to fly faster.
The red mare and I are very invested in the ways of slowness. We like pootling and bimbling along at our old lady pace. I am still stuffed up with cold, but I decide that - sod it - we are going to dance.
She is not remotely impressed with this plan. (She is often far from impressed by my puny human plans.) She consents, with Maggie-Smith-in-Downton resignation, to do her most ostentatiously slow trot. I eye her carefully. Is this really what she’s got today, or would she secretly like to go faster?
I throw some energy into the mix. It takes a minute or two, but suddenly she is off.
‘There it is!’ I cry in triumph.
‘There it damn well is,’ she says.
And she finds her line and she finds her stride and up and down the slope we go (this is all on a long rope) and through the rough places and we are dancing and I am laughing out loud.
Then she drops her belly to the ground and pushes herself into a serious gallop. She doesn’t do this too often, these days, and I watch her go in awe. She may be twenty-one and she may once have been the Slowest Racehorse in Britain, but she can still put on the after-burners.
I stop dancing now and centre myself, so I can act as a steady anchor as she scoots around me. I keep watching her carefully. Then she decides to mix it up a bit and sticks her tail in the air and does that prancing, elevated trot which owes something to the Spanish Riding School of Vienna. I do more awed watching. She’s got everything today and I can only stand and admire.
She throws in a couple of leaps and twists, just because.
Then I begin to bring her back to me. She’s had her wildness. That wildness lives in her, however much Place of Peace we do, and I think it’s important to invite her to let it out, every so often. I love her to remember it, to feel the power of her magnificent body, to hear the ancestral voices, calling to her. But there is always a time when I want her to come back, down to the good Scottish earth. I want her to let her nervous system settle and to retrieve her poise. So I slowly start to reel the rope in, foot by foot, to invite her in, with my body and my spirit, until she is bending round me in a collected trot. All the fire has gone out of her and she is calm again. We are connected again.
Then we walk home together, side by side, in step, and we spend fifteen minutes at the gate, resting in harmony, whilst I tell her tales of her own might and brilliance.
I sometimes want to try to explain to someone - anyone - what it feels like when I am with this horse. That work we did was work. It was important - for her mind, for any hidden energy trapped inside her, for her strong body. But I don’t go out thinking: we’ll do this gait and that transition and these turns and work on those muscles. I see what she’s got for me and I let her fly and I operate all the time off pure instinct, off deep intuition. It’s what the great old horsemen called ‘feel.’ You are working off a feel.
To do this, I have to tune into her entirely. I have to let go of human world, with all its frets and demands, all its To Do lists and strict timetables, all its rationality and purpose, and step into horse world, where the mystery lives. I have to be there for here, as a sturdy, reliable presence, but I have to be her, too, as much as I ever can from this side of the species barrier. I have to watch for her signs and respond instantly to her moves and tie myself to her needs.
She takes me deep into the animal world, when we are doing this. I think of her most distant forbears, the tiny dawn horses, who ventured out of the woods and onto the plains, millions of years ago. I think of the nature of the prey animal. I have to think in gut feeling, because that’s how animals do it, rather than staying in my intellectual mind, which thinks in sentences and concepts.
I connect too to the natural world, so I feel the rain on my face and my feet stepping across the springing turf and the cool air on my cheeks. I am deep in the moment, and then in the next moment. And in the one after that.
I go into the flow state, that mental place where everything that matters is happening right now, where I am stretching myself to keep up with the dancing, prancing creature in front of me, where I am remembering everything I ever knew without seeming to remember it at all. (It’s hard to describe. I get it sometimes when I am writing. It’s as if another force takes over, as if I am inhabited by something more powerful than I am, and all the moves make sense and all the words make sense and there is no strain.)
And then, all the time, there is a humming sense of joy. There is so much sheer pleasure in watching her beauty and connecting to her brave heart and being able to guide her. There is intense pleasure in knowing her so well and admiring her so much. (She is a remarkable person and I still don’t quite know what I did to deserve her in my life.) There’s all the love, of course, which is shooting out of my fingertips. And then there’s the gratitude, building in me like a hot air balloon, because I have this place and I have this moment and I have this horse.
Have I come close? Almost certainly not. Whenever I try to put the feeling into words, the dear old English language, which I love and cherish, can’t quite reach the giddy heights. I can charge into hyperbole and throw adjectives all around the place like confetti and bring in all the big guns, but I never quite reach what I am trying to express. When I am with her, I am taken a little out of the world, onto another plane, and we dwell there together, in a place where prose cannot quite reach.
That’s why I feel so lucky. And I definitely need new words for luck.