Eight Belles

[Izzy]

These days I am working on a novel. I have been for awhile now. I intended to write about the writer's process and the process of meditation coinciding. Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down The Bones, and a Zen Buddist practitioner, writes some humorous and inspirational insights about the two of these processes together that I am now gaining insight into myself. But, I just can't write about that today.

There is an aching in my heart about Eight Belles. I know that at some point I will be able to muster up the sense of injustice that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) feels that propels them to action, but I have to go through the breaking of my heart first.

I did not know Eight Belles personally. I never met her. I did, however, live my entire formative years in barns filled with horses, 102 acres of posted (no hunting) land for horses to run free, with me barefoot and on the bare back of one of them. The horse, the reins, and me.

I fed them sweet grain from round wooden feeders that I held with two arms,hugging it and watching them come to me to push their muzzles into the feeder. Their eyes, gentle and intelligent, took me in and mine them, as they ate in peace at that summer hour in the evening when the air just begins to cool, and the sun is lolls close to the horizon, and the emerald green grass beneath my calloused bare feet soothes and cools.

I loved to play games with the horses, just stand there in the midst of them and see which one would be most mischievous that day. A favorite game was for me to stand completely still while one sauntered up behind me and nuzzled his or her face against my back and gave me a good push. I'd turn around and say, "hey, you," while I rubbed and scratched under her or his mane, and another would come behind me and do the same. I was their human soccer ball.

In the winter I would muck their stalls (with help from the family), fill their water troughs, sometimes having to break a thin covering of ice with a galvanized bucket first, hay them, and then get ready to catch the school bus, but I had to see them before I left for the day.

They were bred (though my face turned red trying to watch at my age), birthed, the colts wet and covered in hay, wobbling to their knees and then to their hooves in seconds or minutes before searching for their mother's milk, and then learning graceful trots and full-out gallops as they grew alongside their mothers.

My father raced horses, bred them, bred them for other people, took in retired horses, and put them out to pasture to live out their days in freedom to run from one watering hole to another or run for the sake of running. He loved them as much as I did, if not more, though I hardly think that is possible. My father died 21 years ago, after a life of horses, so I write this for him and for me.

Legend has it that the horse gods sent the horse to humans because horses would break their hearts, give every thing they had in them, trying to do all they could for the human being.

Rest in peace, Eight Belles.

Izzy