Everything can change with a walk, or it will change, it was going to change, but it took a walk to make it happen.
There are no words to describe the humidity this morning, the weight of it hanging through the air, pressing through the sunlight. I felt it when I walked outside to put the dogs in the car and I decided that today would be an excellent day to take the riders on trail rides. The different between the heat in the riding ring and the temperature by the river can almost be measured by weight, ten degrees difference maybe fifteen, but it feels as if a heavy pressure had been lifted from our bodies. The horses walk differently, the riders talk more as we enter the cool shadows of the woods. After two years of drought, the 2010 spring has drenched us and started to correct the water tables, and the difference is seen in the thick underbrush, all the newly sprouted greenery that needs to be cut back so the horses can make their way through the paths.
I love the lush thickness of the woods, and I think the horses do too, the way their ears droop and their mouths are constantly reaching for grass and branches. Every week the girls at the barn come back with some treasure: tadpoles, flowers, sighting of baby snapping turtles and snakes.
I’d lost the past four months of my life as I set out with a student this morning into the woods behind the barn. I’d missed the blooming of the jasmine on my porch, a sight I’d marked my springs by for many years. I’d missed the bright green of the new leaves and I’d missed the way the daylight shifts into the growing season, slanting light across the landscape. I’d seen it all happen, of course, but I couldn’t find any joy in meet to greet spring properly, to acknowledge it.
Spring had happened to me like a sudden visitor, but this morning, eyeing the brambles growing along the path, I vowed to not miss the blackberries. Like all our trail rides, my fondest memories are of picking blackberries with students, walking beside their horses as they point out the choicest berries for me to pick. The horses like picking blackberries because it gives them long moments to stop with their hooves in the cool grass and take a nap.
But this morning, I walked beside Ayla and led a student into the woods, I was assaulted by memories of other summers and I’d be lying if I said those memories made me happy. I thought of better times and less grief and I remembered every angle, every photograph, I’d taken with my camera: the bend into the summer ring, now overtaken with weeds, the beaver pond where I’d waded for hours one July 4th, the company I’d once had with me on these walks. I remembered when the world at the barn hadn’t been different, changed. My student was quiet this morning and the green heat of the woods lulled us into another sort of silence, the quiet of reflection. The pony walked beside me and her hoof beats plodded in an offset rhythm to my own. We were together, me the pony and the student, but we were separate; each locked into our own worlds.
And then a dragonfly crossed our path.
We were following the sounds of the river and had just crossed over from the clearing, back into the woods. The dragonfly hovered in front of us, floating along with us, just beyond our reach.
“Why are they called dragonflies?” my student asked. She’d hardly said a word since we left the barn, but her tone was different, bolder, when she inquired about the dragonfly. The sound dragged me out of my thoughts.
“I don’t know,” I said, and realized I had to do better with an answer. “Their color, maybe?”
The dragonfly had long left us and we were nearing the bend that would lead us back up the hill to the barn. I continued without thinking, “Did you see how it was iridescent blue? All the dragons that we read about in stories are frightening and strange, but they’re also very beautiful with their colorful scales, if we look closely. Dragons change everything they touched, destroying things, burning things, but they always seem to serve a purpose with their frightening beauty. Without dragons, there wouldn’t be heroes and the stories would go nowhere.”
Everything I said was completely made up at the spur of the moment, but I couldn’t get the image of the dragonfly out of my head as I continued teaching and eventually closed up the barn for the evening. And I realized that everything I said was true. I thought about my old barn, how huge swarms of dragonflies used to hover above the ring as I taught. I wondered what the symbol of the dragonfly meant throughout history, how it got its name.
According to the internet (and we all know that Google is the seat of all knowledge), the meaning of the dragonfly changes from culture to culture, but I loved the description I found on this site:
The main symbolisms of the dragonfly are renewal, positive force and the power of life in general. Dragonflies can also be a symbol of the sense of self that comes with maturity. Also, as a creature of the wind, the dragonfly frequently represents change. And as a dragonfly lives a short life, it knows it must live its life to the fullest with the short time it has – which is a lesson for all of us.
There has been so much death and change and grief in my life these past four months – all these meanings speak to me, where I am now, finding comfort in the horses and the woods. Information comes to us just when we need it.
And the dragonfly is often paired with horses in folklore. Legend has it that an Emperor of Japan named the country “Akitsushima” (literally Isle of the Dragonfly) after he was bitten by a horse fly which was in turn eaten by a dragonfly. Lithuanian, Romanian and Dutch folklore create an image of a creature that was once a horse, or one that is known for biting horses – though the dragonfly cannot bite and its use in controlling true pests like mosquitoes is without compare.
Like change itself, the dragonfly has been viewed with hope and mistrust. But as I emerged the woods today with the dragonfly present in my thoughts, something in me shifted and I looked out over the paddocks and the rings and the barn and I knew that Bramblewood is a unique community filled with some of the most creative people I have ever met. We cannot stop change and time and inevitability, but we can certainly change the way we approach these things.
With the dragonfly as our symbol, join me was we expand this barn into a place of learning and safety, not just for the horses, but for all of us. Horses allow us to be present, and the more they demand of us in the now, the more we can see ourselves, our situations, for what they truly are. Horses teach us, through their strength, that we are often more capable than we give ourselves credit for. Sometimes these lessons come to us as we walk beside the horses in the woods, sometimes we learn things over a jump, but more often these lessons come to us slowly – the more we forget about ourselves and listen instead to what the horse needs.
I have not, however, found any significant meaning for all the ticks in the woods. Goodness, they’re out in great number this year.
We have two unique workshops scheduled for July. Both of these four-hour sessions are structured for riders and non-horsey people. The first will be a journaling workshop taught by me where we use the presence of horses to explore the themes of grief and loss. The following will be led by Ramie Nunally, a visual artist and lifelong horsewoman from Tennessee. In this workshop participants will be using both traditional and non-traditional media to construct an amazing piece of visual art chronicling their experience with horses and their time at Bramblewood. I hope to see some of you at these sessions!
Now go enjoy the spring before we all wilt.
Bramblewood Stables 