Riding bareback, I feel my muscle, bone, and sinew drape over either side of her strong back as she settles into a walk. The mare is all business, covering more ground at this gait than most of my horses can at a trot. She swings forward, loose and free, head bobbing. I breathe in, filling my lungs and my belly, making my seat deep, soft. My hands, shoulders, torso, pelvis, sits bones, thighs, all of me, going forward with her. I no longer have two legs, but four.

I rub her shoulder, branded with the Navajo Bar N (─N). Run my hand along her spotted hindquarters scrawled with letters and numbers that are a mystery to me. Think of the woman I saw at the run-down gas station out by I-25 this afternoon.

Squeezed into a pair of faded jeans, the fifty-something woman is flirting with the man at the pump in front of her, coyly asking his name, tittering like a high school girl, showing him the colorful tattoos all over the visible parts of her body. Holding the gas nozzle, I try not to stare over the top of my car at the beautiful images emblazoned across her arms, neck, back, chest. Because in her faded, too-much-makeup, slightly coarse and worn out way, she looks like the kind of woman who’d just as soon beat the crap out of me as look at me. But then again, I could be wrong. Looks can be deceiving. And if she cops the attitude, “Hey, what are YOU looking at? ─BITCH”, she might call me, because I suppose to her I look like the soccer mom with an SUV─I’ll tell her the truth, that I was just admiring her pretty tattoos. Perhaps that would make her happy. She looks long overdue. The man she just met pulls at the back of her two-sizes-too-small tank top to peer at what’s underneath─whatever’s scrawled down her spine.

Maybe a map, I think. But to where?

To wit: We are as divorced from the wilderness inside as from the one outside. Creek Running North.

Late last summer. We are returning down the mountain from a hard morning’s ride up to Lake Catherine. It didn’t look quite this far on the trail map. We pass a towering pine with bear claw scratches cleaved into the bark, weeping sap. My husband points it out. “That bear’s marking his territory,” he says. With ten miles to go yet to the Pecos river valley, I am unhappy at the prospect of being devoured.

Teyla stops. Sniffs the air. Whinnies. Gets her bearings. The five other horses we left behind at the barn whinny back. Their guttural GPS signals waft towards us through the air.

The long claw marks on the pine tree pinpoint the bear’s place on the map, a form of geography, with the clear message─This is where I am. This is me. Part of the wild blue inner.

I urge my horse forward. She and I are fatter than Dennis and his little Arabian mare. Surely any bear will eat us first. I keep my eyes open.

The sun is almost down, shadows changing from blue to black. This is what comprises some of my inner geography─ The tall sweet grass of the mesa. The frigid blue green water of Lake Catherine. Teyla’s polka dots. The spring on Hermit’s Peak. A suburb in Ohio. Sometimes black and moonless nights. And this evening two rows of bear claw scratches from last summer mark my territory. My wild blue inner.

I tip my pelvis, lift the reins, open my hip flexors, make my thighs long, reach back and down with my heels─stringing myself like a bow, inhaling the cool evening air. Teyla leaps into a canter, eager to be back with her stablemates. No longer a mere two-legged creature, I close my eyes, savoring the feel of the departure.

The appaloosa horse’s ugly brands may tell the story of where she’s been and some of what may have happened to her, but they don’t necessarily reflect what’s scrawled on the inside─on the tablets of her heart and mind. Mine don’t either. Galloping bareback on the sandy track, both of us breathing hard, I get the feeling that Teyla’s wild blue inner is miles and miles of waving grass where you can run forever and not get tired. For a moment, she takes me there with her.

And it occurs to me that the woman with the tattoos, flirting with the stranger at the gas pump this afternoon, has simply tattooed some of her own wild beauty all over her body, trying to get her bearings. Although I doubt the designs in ink and flesh do her justice.

Flickr photos by: shadowplay