I am reading Roger Housden's book Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living.
I offer you some tastes. Housden quotes the poet Theodore Roethke.
"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries,"
I read these words, and want to go down under the Redwood tree and picnic with the fairies living there.
What does vulnerability mean to you? What mysteries do you move among?
Housden discusses the pleasures of our senses.
He writes of the kiss, and how Salman Rushdie, who grew up in India, Knew the kiss as "a way of honoring the world of everyday objects that we rely on."
Salmon Rushdie:
I grew up kissing books and bread. In our house, whenever anyone dropped a book or let fall a chapati ... the fallen object was required not only to be picked up, but also kissed, by way of apology for the act of clumsy disrespect. Devout households in India often contained, and still contain, persons in the habit of kissing holy books. But we kissed everything. If I'd ever dropped the telephone directory I'd probably have kissed that too. Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of respect than that?
Housden continues:
"Wordsworth thought that Nature was a necessary second mother for the preadolescent child, and if that relationship was missing, the child's imagination would be stunted in some way in later life. Imagination, he would say, feeds on old tree roots, the smell of wet grass, the shimmer of corn in the sun."
I keep passing Mother's Day cards and feeling sad that I no longer have a mother on earth for which to buy one, and yet, as I read these words, I realize I can celebrate my second mother. I can offer gifts to Mother Nature today, the gifts of attention, care and love.
And maybe that is what the visceral love for a horse is, love for mother nature, the forms we touch.