I haven’t seen Nelson for over a month.  Today, I got to spend some delicious time with him.  When I got out of the car and called to him, his ears went up and he stood at the fence, waiting.  It felt like no time had passed – that we had seen each other just yesterday.  We mostly hung out in his stall, away from the flies and out of the sun.

I got to thinking about time, and wondering about how Nelson experiences time.  I thought about Jon Katz’s book Rose in a Storm, and how he describes Rose as seeing her world in maps.  I wonder if time is also a map and if for Nelson, when I am not there, I am just not in his time map.  Is there is a piece missing, or if when i do appear, then maybe the map – both space and time – has an overlay of me for an hour or so.

I have written a lot about horse time, but usually what I mean that they are not clock watching, or ticking off the minutes until the next thing happens.  It is more seamless, I suspect, more like an inner canopy of sky-spaciousness.  I wonder about experiencing time-space as vast and unmeasured.

I have had glimpses of that in meditation, but I imagine that the animal experience is even more unfettered than that.

What do you think (feel)?