Alexandra’s Horses.

We’ve just spent the afternoon with Alexandra’s six gypsy cob horses, all mares and un-ridden. They’re like free range spending their days in their field eating grass and doing what takes their fancy; one chocolate brown, the others brown or black and white, with long uncut mains and tails. They’re friendly and gentle; but then how to say the rest? Imagine you have forgotten thoughts, how to have them. Imagine the mechanisms of thought and all the talk and anxieties and perplexities that stem from them have become lost to you. You become in the hands of something deeper, a virile un-muted responsiveness, the essence of being. This is what the horses have and will share should you wish to. But it’s not easy to lose thought, it permeates the flawed godliness of our human existence, it brings primal uneasiness, a vacuum so eager to be filled. Yet should you with some effort of will maintain this vacuous-ness you will find yourself being with the horses, being with being. This is how they are and they will teach you. The effect is sublime. Not the crass ‘sublime’ of something being really, really nice but the sublime of transcendence into a purer state of being. Think back to the time some mutated gene lost our hair, left us bald victims of heat and cold, striving to stay alive by problem solving. It set our compass a million years ago that has stayed and grown into this thoughtful awful complexity. But the horses taught me our previous state, being with being, hunter with pray, player with play.