Handsome
Whoa… Check out Wild Media’s exquisite photostream over at Flickr. I think her photos are breathtaking.
Don’t look at your form, however ugly or beautiful. Look at love and at the aim of your quest. ... O you whose lips are parched, keep looking for water. Those parched lips are proof that eventually you will reach the source.~ Rumi.
Molly over at HolaMole (In Sonora, Mexico) wrote me earlier about her beloved appaloosa horse “Handsome,” who she said in reality wasn’t handsome at all, but after being called by this name for years, began to believe that he actually was. Wonderful story about a special woman and a special horse. In a recent post, she also writes : Another valuable lesson I'm learning is that Mexicans as a generalization do not judge people on their looks, but more on their hearts. Somehow the folks I have met are so much better at looking into your soul and deciding if they want to be friendly with you or not.
I dreamed last night that I was not an almost-45-year-old woman, but in my early twenties again. I was wearing the little black, off-the-shoulder, Audrey-Hepburn-type dress that my mother designed and made for me. With a hemline just a few inches above the knee, the V-necked bodice wrapped around my then-tiny waist and ended with a simple flourish of a bow. Oh, it was pretty. And so was I. Fresh like the rain. My lips were smooth and red as a rose petal. In the dream, I was listening to a jazz pianist in a round room full of windows from floor to ceiling, my elbows propped on his glistening Steinway.
This morning I am frowning into the bathroom mirror at the wrinkles etched around my eyes, my mouth, across my forehead. Rough-hewn into my face by ten years of hell in an abusive first marriage that, most of the time, blessedly, I simply don’t think about.
God, I hate them.
I search the face of the woman in the mirror. Certainly it was someone else who put up with all of that, I think. Or did it happen in one of those strange alternate realities like you see on a SciFi Channel TV show? Perhaps another dimension? The Twilight Zone.
I remember thinking that he was handsome then.
My hazel eyes stare back at me. They are brighter than the rest of me. Like gems.
The inside does not always match the outside, I think. Pretty is as pretty does, didn't someone sometime say? (Very possibly my mother, the woman from Oklahoma ...)
Several years ago, my (before I gave her to my daughter) Andalusian mare Caprichosa cracked the coronary band (kind of like your nail cuticle) of one of her hind hooves. We never found out exactly how it came about, but the horse squealed piteously from the top of the pasture, unable to move, calling us to her. From the injured place the hoof split into an ugly, jagged crack that threatened not to heal and to only get worse as the hoof grew. I remember looking at it, thinking of the delicate anatomy of the horse’s hoof, all-too-painfully aware of the soft quick inside, where bone can separate from the wall, leading to ... well, I couldn’t think about it then.
I cleaned the mare’s hoof with iodine, wrapped it with a disposable diaper and duct tape, dosed her with butte, then called the veterinarian. Fought the panic rising in my throat because Caprichosa, my beautiful white mare —the one gift that the not-so-handsome-after-all first husband gave to me during that time, that lifetime ago that happened on some distant planet—is the irrevocable, indelible agent of change in this woman’s life. My talisman. You see, she helped me to save myself. He gave her to me, and I left pretty quick after that.
My husband of almost six years now, my wonderful man, my Dennis—the horse and wife whisperer—told me we’d do whatever it took to get the mare back to rights.
It took a specialty farrier to literally sew the two pieces of the cracked hoof back together with surgical wire. (I nearly passed out during that procedure.) Special shoeings thereafter. A lot of money that we scraped up from somewhere. And a year of pasture rest for the hoof to heal. Caprichosa still has a ridge running down the front of that hoof. She always will.
The mare and I have both been cut to the quick. But. I guess. You can be quick. Or you can be dead. And we are both very much alive.
When we ride in the mountains, Cap’s hoof holds up in the high and wild and fiercely beautiful places of lightning and hail and stone and thunder. And so do I. Like the bright, white mare of the Celts, she has carried me to places that I didn’t even know existed. Or ever would. Or could.
I guess wrinkles are not so bad. I'm going to try to make peace with them.
The inside does not always match the outside.
Related Links:
Horse Scent
Eagle, Andalusian, and La Llorona
We are wilderness
