Iron Horse.

A tale of trains, a railroad bridge, a temple of columns underneath that bridge, and a treasure unearthed on the bank of the small river traversed by that bridge...

Spent a recent afternoon with my son, exploring a debris-strewn stretch of river in search of frogs and turtles. We came to a small railroad bridge and followed the well-worn path from the tracks down to a secluded spot underneath the bridge, loud with graffiti and littered with shards of broken glass.

I looked across the river, at a solid-looking expanse of green duckweed from which several massive concrete columns rose to support the train bridge overhead. The series of arches and doorways formed by the columns and the long paths of light between them suggested an ancient temple. The effect was enhanced by beautiful and intriguing surface designs drawn and painted on the columns, 

more like hieroglyphics than graffiti.

I stood there and took this all in, transported by the unexpected sacredness of the place, and then took a couple pictures. Something at my feet caught my eye - something burnished and embedded in the compacted soil at the river's edge. I bent to pick up whatever was beckoning here, it was metal - copper I guessed from the warm tone - more or less round and very flat with a tiny eye-shaped hole on its edge. Delighted at the thought of stringing and wearing this small treasure (I am such a jewelry person!), I inspected it more closely. Though perfectly smooth, the surface of both sides bore shadowy images -what were they?

Then it hit me - this was a penny. 

It had been put on the track above, run over by a train and flattened. But it had escaped. As I ran this narrative in my head, I stopped and looked up and sure enough there was blue sky with drifting clouds alternating with track. So, my treasure had fallen through the spaces and languished here on the riverbank for how long? Years? Decades? The patina was aged-looking... and now I could just make out the slightly distorted profile of Lincoln on one side and the series of upright columns (echoing what I was looking at here in front of me) of the Lincoln Memorial on the other side. 

Later, at home with my treasure, I resisted the impulse to embellish it - I am a jewelry artisan, after all -and simply added a silver jump ring and a dark patina-ed ball chain. 

I slipped it over my head, thinking: LUCKY.

Hair.

Hair is powerfully symbolic. 


Humans spend a lot of time on hair. Our hair - its length, style, and color, or our lack of hair - is a highly visible message to the world about how we see our self and how we wish to be perceived. 


Hair is both highly personal and very public. Folklore attributes hair with a variety of magical powers, even Biblical stories relate this ancient belief - remember the tragic story of Samson and Delilah? 


Horses are among the very few animals who have hair that is much like our own hair, and perhaps that is one reason many of us feel so connected to horses. We see a bit of ourselves in them, hair framing their faces much as our hair does...


As an artisan jeweler working in the realm of horses, I work with a fair amount of horse hair, both in custom work and in work of my own inspiration. I have washed, sorted, braided, and even hand-dyed horse hair. I make necklaces and bracelets with lengths of braids, and I make tassels and other ornamental objects with tufts of unbraided hair. Most of this work is memorial in nature, adornments designed to honor the memory of horses who have left this world. Occasionally I have the pleasure to make something with hair from a horse who is still here, and even better I have had the lovely opportunity to make something with hair from a horse (or a mule, I'm delighted to add) who is around and who I know personally.


There is a history of sentimental and memorial adornments made with human hair, too. Examples exist in museum collections of nineteenth and early twentieth century gentlemen's watch fobs, embellished with lovingly woven locks of hair, presumably as a symbol of love and betrothal. Lockets were often filled with wisps of hair from a lover far away to keep them close, or from a baby or child as a memento of a life lost or at least of a childhood gone by.


Hair comes to mind for other reasons, too. In these days of rampant cancers, most of us know someone who has endured chemo or radiation-induced hair loss. It seems a distressingly common thing. One can hardly go out to a large public place without noting women wearing scarfs or other sorts of head coverings over obviously bare heads. Some do it with panache, others are clearly self-conscious. Wigs are even harder to wear convincingly, so bolder souls throw all pretense to the wind and opt for an outrageous color or style. And some venture out with their bald heads for all to see, challenging themselves and everyone else to respond honestly and authentically. A bald head can not be ignored. It will not go quietly away to let us pretend cancer isn't ripping apart the fabric of many, many lives. 


Once again, hair, and the lack of it, is highly symbolic. It can be the symbol of hope and recovery, when hair grows back after successful treatment... or its loss can be one of a series of heart-breaking losses that precede the final loss - of a life.


I have mentioned my dear friend who is living with advanced breast cancer. She is on my mind as I think about hair because she recently endured full-head radiation that has left her with no hair. She was told it won't grow back. Which, damn it, is really a moot point: she has also been told her time is short. In a fit of sorrow and regret, I think maybe I should have made something beautiful with some of her hair before it was gone... something to remember her by. Then I smile a little and think of all the ways she has been a dear friend, all the ways she has filled me with her kindness, compassion, humor and creativity. And I know that hair is not the thing I will carry in my heart in memory of her when she leaves this world. 


Hair is very symbolic, but the symbol is not the thing...

Grounded

To feel the earth, solid beneath your feet, and to feel secure that you can stand up to or run away from whatever comes at you, 


To draw power, sustenance, healing and energy from the storehouse of organic animal and plant material, alive or once-alive, and minerals transformed by time, in the form of grasses and grains that grow on this deep layer of history and biology. 


To feel the rhythmic vibrations of approaching land animals or the shudders of moving storms through the bottoms of your feet. 


To be a Horse must be an amazing thing.

Paint. Horse.

Paint Horse. Painting horse. Paint a horse. A painting horse. Oh my.


It sort of started one May 1st, my horse TigerLily's birthday. A couple of years ago I baked a special horsey cake for her - the recipe was from the author of 'Misty of Chincoteague' and I figured any cake good enough for Misty was good enough for TigerLily. The ingredients were supposedly a horse's dream come true: oats, carrots, molasses and apples. 


My son still guffaws at the memory of TigerLily daintily plucking the diminutive cake from my loving hand, and then bobbing her head several times like an iguana doing the primal territorial display before spitting it out directly at me in disgust. The barn dog, Fergie, did a remarkably well-timed fly-by and made off with it. (She came back and asked for more, bless her little omnivorous heart. You can always count on a dog to eat nearly anything). 


Anyway, since baking birthday cakes wasn't going to happen again, I resorted to other methods of celebrating. Being an artist, decorating my horse seemed like a good idea - it was the pink and orange livestock marking paint that wasn't. The dear forgiving man who owns the ranch down the road where TigerLily boards almost had a heart attack when he saw her, thinking that she was grievously wounded. I promised to only use non-gorey colors after that. 


TigerLily is a black and white Tobiano marked horse. What most people call a "paint", so painting designs on a paint horse has some extra linguistic appeal. I have also painted pictures of her.

(Funny thing - whenever I paint her, TigerLily is some shade of blue). 


And then there are paintings by horses. Often this is a rather gimmicky ordeal, with a handler coaxing a painting-like performance from a dutiful but baffled horse. And just as often the results are a predictable blend of mechanical smears and smudges of unfortunate colors using mediocre raw materials... 

Then there is Cheryl Ward and her painting horses. Holy smokes. 


I came across her website (http://paintinghorse.com) and I am completely smitten with her "collaborative interspecies" approach to painting in partnership with horses, and I am dazzled by their results, which truly are art. 

I am so inspired: Paint. Horse. And Human. 

(Stay tuned...)

Beast of Burden, Part 2

Donkeys are the archetypal beast of burden. All around the world they are seen as pack animals put on the earth to carry stuff around for humans... and, in spite of their collective reputation for stubbornness they have carried burdens since long before Mary rode one to Bethlehem, and they continue to do so in countless towns and villages, in the rustic countryside and the mountains. 

The little donkey pictured here, that I hand sewed of wool felt, yarn and embroidery thread, is a different kind of donkey made to carry a different kind of burden.

A dear friend, the one I have mentioned previously, has been traveling the hard road of breast cancer for a couple of years now, and the path has become increasingly difficult as the cancer finds ways to disguise itself, invading various parts of my friend's body and eluding eradication. Her burdens increase by the day. And her burdens will, her doctors say, become unbearably heavy unbearably soon... 

This little donkey was created as a humble gift to symbolize the help that a friend can provide: the act of sharing a burden, through words and actions, and through a willingness to accompany a friend along a too-short, too-hard road. 

   

Beast of Burden

A view of my horse from across  the back of her friend, a sweet mule... 


This picture I took, on my horse's birthday (and shortly after a long weekend at the Minnesota Horse Expo), made me stop and think about all the ways we humans interact with the equines in our lives, how many things we ask them to be and do, and how grateful I am to have a horse in my life. 


I don't really like to admit how much I depend on my horse to be my muse, my confidante and even my shrink. When I am feeling burdened by indecision, anger or sorrow, or when I am grieving or searching for the "why" of something, it is often my horse's company I seek. 


Sounds crazy, yet I know horse people understand. Do horses have a special understanding of the complexities of human suffering? I don't know. Sometimes they seem to be good mirrors, reflecting back to us the powerful emotions we are projecting, and sometimes they seem patient, non-judgmental listeners to our unspoken hopes and fears...


To my horse:


"Here I am again, at your gate (damaged creature that I am) seeking a holy communion older than written history. Here I am, calling your name, your honest eyes see right through me. Yet still you come, willingly, from your temple of hay to greet me as though I was the only thing in the world you wanted. You breathe me in, and in return my senses are flooded with the fragrances of last summer's green grass and sun-warmed fur. Words escape me, and you lower your head and take my lead in the ancient horse-human dance that stops time, if just for a while.


You carry me on your wide, goddess-shaped back, and you carry my secret sorrows, too. For a little while I am rocked into a wordless bliss in the leather cradle of our old western saddle. But that vulture, Time, circles back around, casting a sorrow-shaped shadow, and the spell is broken: human and horse must part at the gate. The escaped words return and I ineptly express my gratitude, human-style. I leave, carrying my burdens with me as I go. Yet somehow I feel lighter, strengthened by our time together... 
who, indeed, is the "beast of burden"?  

A Second Spring

The heart of our woods, formerly an idyllic tree-lined hollow, is now something like a lunar landscape due to a small forest fire. But a recent ramble revealed a translucent pale green fern frond, rising from the blackened forest floor, unfolding in a slightly unusual pattern... perhaps the heat of the fire disrupted the pre-programmed spiral form? 

No matter, it was such a welcome sight. The first herald of the year's second spring for us. A symbol of life pushing back against destruction. Of rebirth and renewal. Or maybe it's not really all that simple, not that "black and white"as the phrase goes? Maybe life and growth partner with death and destruction, the black and the green, in collusion... "in cahoots" as the old folks say with a wink. In cahoots. 

I ponder the upcoming 2010 Earth Day as I walk. Recalling the devastation of the earthquake in Haiti last January, and the primeval power of volcanoes at work in Iceland this week. I consider that Earth Day isn't just planting trees, hanging laundry out on the line and recycling. Clearly, the uncontrolled and barely-understood forces of nature on this earth are relentlessly at work in the world, creating and destroying, giving and taking away. Not exactly the gentle Mother. The grand and the minute spirals of life and death, always spinning, from the sub atomic to the galactic. Same laws, different scales. How do you fit a whole planet into a day? And do you just ignore the scary parts? I am thinking that if Earth Day were an ancient holiday, there'd have been plenty of sacrifices made.

I wonder about the fern's altered form. 

(And I bet horses don't worry about this sort of stuff, except possibly the part about green stuff growing).