Category Archives: horses, dogs & more

Jan14

the herd

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I went to see Nelson, and toward the end of our time together, my friend came down to say hello.  As she and I stood outside his paddock, he hung out with us, nuzzling the fence, poking his nose through – participating in our conversation.

Nelson is a lonely stallion.  He does not get to hang out with a herd.  In captivity, we usually isolate stallions because they can hurt each other.  We don’t want them to work out their territorial, sexual stuff on our watch.  So for the time being, we humans are his herd.

I have been thinking about why I am so much more comfortable with an equine herd or a dog pack than I am with most human herds.  Maybe it is because I feel so clearly the lack of agenda or concealed intent with the horses and dogs.  Maybe it is that as a dancer, movement and touch are my first language, and that is where the horses live.  Language is not weaponized, and the communication feels more honest.

It is not always simple.  I sometimes have to spend a lot of time parsing what my Andalusian gelding Amadeo is saying.  He is a flighty boy, and like some humans, his language (a hoof, his teeth) sometimes fly out before he has really thought things through.  Nelson is more straightforward, more willing to tell it like it is.

I am also thinking about what is essential to me in a day.  What I come up with first is four legs and a soft nose.

What about you?

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Jan10

what they teach

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“The greatest language is that without words. Communicating with a single touch that which delivers the energy of a message is always understood, a vibration of the vocal chords to gestures of the body. The forgotten wisdom in this primitive relationship we share with animals is so important. We tend to take advantage of our ability to communicate verbally with each other and often ramble on aimlessly without purpose and thought in our words. “It’s okay to be quiet” I often hear myself say while others addictively babble on. I seek refuge in the company of my teacher, the spirit of the horse who quiets my mind down, for I have learned to communicate calmly with love and attentiveness.”   Ariana Waite

 

These words were written by a young woman who volunteers at Blue Star Equiculture, a loving sanctuary for retired or rescued carriage horses in Palmer, MA.

Today when I was with Nelson, I opened the gate to his catch pen so that we could continue our movement conversation in the big six-acre field where he lives.  He started to leave, and then I raised one hand, really just a shadow of a gesture, and he curved his path around and came back to me.

Then he did something surprising.  Without my asking, he walked into the big round pen that is in his field.  He stood there quietly while I untied and then closed the gate.  Understand that Nelson does not like any kind of confinement. I then began to signal him to move around me and then come back to me – a continuation of last week’s dance.  Today, my hand signal was subtle: a kind of light, curving whisper of a movement, which, brilliant decoder of movement that he is, he read perfectly.

We did a sequence of moving away, changing direction, coming back to me, moving away a number of times, each time, I could feel the dance between his body and my hands and body become more like a quiet, elegant, listening tai chi.

I remembered Anat Baniel’s words:  “More force is the definition of less differentiation.”  And Linda Tellington-Jones urging us to feel more by making our touch lighter, slower, more subtle.

And here is Nelson, telling me, “Yes, that is right.  Less is more. I understand you perfectly.  When I don’t, I will show you.”  And indeed that is true.  When I am unclear, he mirrors that.  When I am nervous, he mirrors that.  When I breathe, slow down and feel, so does he.

Who mirrors you so perfectly?

Jan7

war horse

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I went to see the film War Horse last night.  In a blog following the horse slaughter debacle, I had expressed a hope that millions would see the movie and be moved to act on behalf of the horse.  Sadly, I don’t think this movie will do it.

I had seen the play several months ago. There is something infinitely more moving about the relationship of horse to human in the theatrical production.  Not just the relationships between the human actors and the horses, but also the breathing animation of human bodies inside the horses, creating each of the subtle equine articulations of these marvelous puppets.  The horses feel more fully there because of the intricate, detailed attention to how they move, breath, respond.

And the play does more to engage us in the horror of this war that took the lives of 8 million horses and 35 million humans.

The horses in the film are beautiful, no question.  But there is something stomach turning about seeing a real horse run though “no man’s land” becoming hideously entangled in barbed wire. Here I would have to agree with Kat Murphy:

Maybe the puppets used in the Broadway play eloquently expressed the horror of beautiful, dumb beasts brutally done to death, even more expendable than the millions of young men wasted in WWI. And perhaps a puppet Joey racing across no-man’s-land, mad with terror, to fall tangled in barbed wire worked as shattering metaphor for the nightmare of war. But movies can be cruelly literal; it’s living horseflesh we see beaten, maimed, dying in Spielberg’s endless outtake from “All Quiet on the Western Front.” There’s no masking the smell of slaughterhouse.

But hey, in the very next scene after Joey’s gut-wrenching steeplechase, enemy soldiers join forces to cut him out of the barbed wire, cracking wise and milking the moment, as hushed as church, for every drop of schmaltz — served up on Joey’s bloody back. Trust corn to take away the sting. That corn, followed by a prolonged, self-indulgent descent into bathos, turns the suffering of an animal into a cinematic lie (the exact opposite of the sanctification of the battered donkey in Robert Bresson‘s “Au hasard, Balthazar“). That lie feels like the callousness of a child, unable to grasp what pain and death mean to other living things.

 The difference for me is between feeling manipulated versus awed and moved.

Jan5

Nelson’s dance

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This morning when I was grooming Nelson, he rested his head on my shoulder and I could feel his soft breath on my cheek.  We stood like that for almost a minute in the cold January sun.

I have been working with Nelson on going away and coming back.  On being able to respond to hand signals to ask him to walk around me in a circle, change directions and then come back to me, turning toward me.

This may sound like no big deal, but it is.  He is saying “OK, I feel safe to come back to you.”  What I especially appreciate is that he is calm throughout.  Even when I asked him to move off more briskly (not on this clip), he was still not anxious.   How I can tell is that he settles immediately on a subtle hand signal.  He is more interested in reading my movement than getting upset. (I was not able to be so clear with my signals because of holding the camera.)

This is a yoga:  opening to more movement, more awareness, more attunement – one breath, one day at a time.  Laying down a path of trust and communication, in what feels like little improvisational dance phrases.

Did I mention that I love this horse?