As the Sun Rises

West Virginia : My healing place, and the birthplace of a new self.

Colors Unedited: Soft Pink Light in the Blue Ridge Mountains
Arts & Crafts Shed. Foggy Morning in Bartow, WV.
Summer 2010

She falls in love a lot, but rarely with people. Right now she’s focused on his muscular chestnut neck and he’s focused on the ground, using hairy lips to analyze the stalks of weeds and to precisely select chlorophyll-filled victims. She likes his company. She likes that he has spirit and can be unpredictable. She wants to be more like him. 

            To reaffirm their differences, he usually does not let her touch him when they are in the pasture.

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The pasture has several thick meadows, a shaded tree grove with rocky terrain, a stream that gushes relief even on the hottest days, and a slope that has eroded into a mudslide due to the hoofed traffic. Part of this, including the water flow, lies in a bowl shaped valley, which fills with cricket chirps and thick fog every evening as the air temperature sharpens. Like a call to service by brass church bells, the local barred owl coolly acknowledges the thickening of the milky screens and the stillness of night settling in. As the golden glow of the farm lights are swathed in earth’s chilly silks, everything in the valley becomes physically lost.

Horses and forest animals don’t mind the mist. They peacefully accept that they cannot navigate and that there’s nowhere that they crucially need to be. They surrender a measure of control, sensing that they are safe in the blanket of the fog.

            Sometimes, when the sun is low, she brings her guitar to the pasture. Her visits are irregular because she’s preoccupied with work and people, but the meadow waits for her. Sometimes she’s barefoot, undaunted by the potential health hazards of connecting with the land. There are many horses in the pasture, some with gentler temperaments and better builds, but she always sits by him.

          

Top: My campers on an August trail ride.
Bottom: Larry, the horse that is the subject of this piece, and myself . 7am