Interesting, there's surprisingly been some talk on some horse blogs recently about socialism, facism, etc., specifically in reference to horse rescue and personal accountability and government helping stupid people who can't apparently make good decisions or help themselves, as if we're cattle or sheep who must be herded about by Bureaucrats Who Know Better, as if that's the answer to what ails us. (Oh yeah? watch this, and then follow the link over to the geniuses in Louisiana.) Talk of good big fat government making us accountable for our sorry feckless selves through taxation and fees and licenses and democratic socialism. Calls for more government. Pushbacks for less.

Talk of neoconservatives being facists.

Talk of liberals being facists.

Fingers pointing this way and that.

Good gods almighty.

Me, I tend to be more on the libertarian side of things politically, a constitutionalist, I'd say, but the more I spend my time thinking about politics the more I find myself a slave to the archons themselves. And I imagine them rolling around in glee because they've managed to lull me right back into the deep sleep, which is exactly where they'd like to see me spend my time. So I attempt to extricate myself.

What is freedom, I ask? (Occasionally, I find it on the back of a fast horse.) And I imagine those archon folk (No, I don't believe they exist in literal terms, I gave that bible-thumping-is-the-inspired-word-of-god approach up years ago, but it's fun to play with the idea anyway.) grimacing at my ability to ask this question. Just asking it makes me a little more so, I think. I know this--it really doesn't have anything to do with Smith and Wesson or Sam Colt.

I go back to my friends the gnostics again--

“The world-spirit in exile must go through the Inferno of matter and the Purgatory of morals to arrive at the spiritual Paradise.” G. Quispel. See The Gnostic World View.

Excerpta de Theodoto, defines this gnosis as the knowledge of "who we were, what we have become; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whither we hasten, whence we are redeemed; what is birth and what rebirth."

Learning is remembering, Plato said.

Maybe I'll have an answer by my next go-round. I certainly haven't achieved enlightenment in this one as far as I can tell. Those ridiculous new agers who brag about how they were Cleopatra or some other royal personage in their previous lives have no clue. Very few of us will be or have been kings or queens. This time around, I'm a free woman in the USA, albeit a USA slouching towards socialism and uber political correctness until some of us will be getting arrested for saying what we think. But the ugly side of the reincarnation idea is that you don't necessarily get born back into the same environment twice, I suppose. What's to keep me from coming back as a Muslim woman in Iran the next go-round where I'm stripped of every shred of my humanity except whatever I'd manage to salvage from deep inside of me, whatever part manages against all odds to remember? Could I wind up like this? Plunk me down over there now, and I'd bet good money on it, just for being about as opinionated as any one of the mares down in my barn.

Who's to say?

I've just watched Pan's Labyrinth. A beautiful fairy tale for adults. This is the story of Sophia fallen and redeemed. The hymn of the pearl complete with (warning: spoiler!) ruby red robe of glory at the end. I found it to be an exquisite story about immortality and going home.

About what real freedom is.

Long ago in the Underground Realm…where there are no lies or pain, there lived a Princess who dreamt of the human world. She dreamt of blue skies, the soft breeze and sunshine… One day, eluding her keepers, the Princess escaped. Once outside, the brightness blinded her and erased her memory… She forgot who she was and where she came from. Her body suffered cold, sickness and pain. Eventually, she died. Her father, the King, always knew that the Princess would return, perhaps in another body, in another place, at another time. And he would wait for her, until he drew his last breath, until the world stopped turning…

And it is said that the Princess went back to her father’s kingdom. And that she reigned with justice and a kind heart for many centuries. And that she was loved by all her subjects… And, like most of us, she left behind small traces of her time on earth. Visible only to those who know where to look…

…a long, long time ago in a grey, sad country…There was a magic rose that made whoever plucked it immortal. But no one would dare go near it because its thorns were full of mortal poison. So amongst the men tales of pain and death were told in hushed voices. But there was no talk of eternal life… because men fear pain more than they want immortality. So every day the rose wilted unable to bequeath his gift to anyone. Alone and forgotten at the top of that mountain. Forgotten until the end of time…

I don't know much. But I know this. It's a labyrinth with twists and turns.

And there's no Utopia here in this flawed materia. (And it's frankly immaterial to me whether you agree with that or not. Your path is your own.) Nor will there be, as far as I can make out.

Posted by Kimberly at June 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

In light of the Supreme Court Heller decision, I agree wholeheartedly with Megan McArcle's Guns are a feminist issue. (Hat tip to Anne. Read how her handgun saved her life here--The Time I Used My Gun in Self-Defense.)

My handgun enables me to go hiking or riding in the wilderness without always having to be escorted by Jack Bauer, as much as I do enjoy that. It enables me, a middle-aged mother of two who's a far cry from Xena, to protect my children too. I remember the Take Back the Night marches in college, where we young women walked arm in arm across campus with candles, trying to re-assert our rights as women to move about in the world without fear of being raped or murdered. I believe I narrowly escaped both during college. A man came tried to come in on me in the shower (He was halfway through the open window, pulling aside the shower curtain in what was closer to a real-life Psycho moment than I care to remember) in the boarding house where I was living. Having to run, dripping wet and naked, for help, is not something I hope I ever have to do again.

A girl friend of mine was not so lucky. The next year when she was walking home from her waitressing job at 10PM at night, you know, she was trying to pay her own way through college, she was brutally gang raped. They took all of her clothes. She had to stand in the street until someone finally stopped to help her. They never caught those bastards who left her nearly dead and robbed of every shred of human dignity.

Needless to say, Sam Colt is a friend of mine.

So is my Glock.

Posted by Kimberly at June 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

I leave long-legged Miss Pinon, our quarter horse, with the farrier for fifteen minutes to get the kids sent off on their play date with the mom who's been kind enough to drive all the way out here to take them to the movies in Santa Fe with her son. They are rural people too. We all share the driving to give the kids some summer social life.

When I return, Pinon is bleeding from her mouth, her delicate head raised in alarm, white rimmed eyes settling on me from their frantic searching. The farrier points to her cut lower lip. She snorts, and I see the blood on her teeth. She now has on an old rope halter, which is stained red, and his assistant is holding her by the short end of a broken lead rope, the other half is hanging from the fence post, telling the whole story.

I take her by the halter, and her alarm level decreases by 75%.

She sat back on the rope, I hear him saying through the anger pounding in my ears. I'm trying to stop it so I can get this poor mare settled down. I let her do it so she'd learn a lesson. Then she plunged into the fence post. She's kind of short on brains, isn't she? He's wielding one of the farrier tools in his hand.

Pecos born and bred, I hear the assistant muttering. Is she wild or what? he is questioning me dumbly, with all the blank-eyed stupidity of a brute.

A simple brute with thick hands and a thicker sensibility.

Pinon takes after the name my little boy gave her. In some ways she is a hard brown nut. There's a hard round encapsulated place inside of the mare and if it gets touched, it will explode. But you can feel it when it begins to happen inside of the horse. At least some of us can. Those of us who are not cowboying neanderthals. And the solution is simple--breathe deeply, then exhale, repeat, and the miracle is that you feel what has begun to spiral up in the mare like a funnel cloud just as suddenly de-escalate. Good air in. Demons out. The bad stuff comes out on the exhale. I don't know why it works. But it does. Before the horse ever gets where she's apparently just been provoked by these dimwitted ogres.

There's never never blood. Never any hurting. Not at my place.

I don't know if the horse is Pecos born and bred. It doesn't matter where she came from. With everything she knows--her surprising repertoire of easy gaits, her boundless energy and athleticism, her generosity under saddle, the ability to almost canter in place in moments of breathtaking collection, her trail smarts, power steering, her loving and devoted attitude that flourishes under the smallest amoun of kindness--I suspect the horse started out in a good place. Someone else loved this mare once too, and then she fell upon hard times like a lot of them do. The tell-tale scar running across one knee is somehow a part of Pinon's story.

Sometimes a hard brown nut gets thrown into the machinery, seizing the engine up.

I am tempted to run the brutes off on the spot. Or sick heeler dog Lila Jane on them. Yeah, that'd show them. But I let them finish. And after they drive off, I promise the mare, never again.

I will never leave you.

Posted by Kimberly at June 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5)

"You have to pass three tests before the full moon shines in the sky. We have to make sure that your spirit is intact and not become mortal." Pan's Labyrinth.

I discover the tree swing above Winsor Creek. The smooth wooden disc knotted onto the long rope suspended from the branch of a breathlessly tall Ponderosa pine is an artifact from another time.

And place.

I search down the grassy slope towards the kids and their house guest. They're in the midst of something like Round 10 of the boat races down the swirling waters of the frigid creek, over which I have officiated approximately five. The water craft being rotted pieces of pine they've bashed against river rock into the desired streamlined shape. The boats have names like Speeder and Silver Racer. Their sails are aspen leaves.

I am tempted to call down to them. To tell them about my find. But something makes me hesitate. A momentary selfishness, I guess. Having this wonder all to myself. I clasp the rope in both hands, struggle up onto the disc, and push off with both feet. Momentarily suspended over the wild raspberry bushes and horse grass. The thunder pounds its chest in the distance. I swing back and forth, heart pounding nearly as loudly, from the embrace of the mountainside out over the cool valley. I clasp the rope with both hands and get dizzy with spinning, pushing against the lemon-smelling bark of the god knows how ancient tree. Suspended for a moment in time.

I think about a tire swing in Missouri when I was in gradeschool. About a burlap bag fill with sand and suspended from an oak tree. In a checkered dress one afternon after Sunday School, I clung to scratchy burlap for dear life while the other kids pushed. A rope with an old board dangling from a beam in our barn in Ohio. The red one with a real cupola and a wind vane. The stone floor delicousy solid and cool against our bare feet. Swallows darted down from the hay lofts on either side. The plywood contraption my neighbors built when we were in the sixth grade. Today, it would no doubt be hailed as a death trap. Helmets and body armor would be involved, if the do-gooders didn't chop it down first. I sure as hell wouldn't let my kids play on such a thing.

But then I am calling to them and their friend up the mountainside. Yelling until the surprise echoes in the cold mist that's such a relief from the heat wave far below at the 7,000 feet above sea level where we live. And here they come. Because what I have to say is apparently contagious.

We spend all afternoon swinging.

Until it is absolutely imperative that we return back to the low country.

Posted by Kimberly at June 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Clinging to my guns out of bitterness, eh? The only way they'd get mine is by prying it from my cold, dead fingers. A viewpoint shared by many of my fellow red-blooded Americans here in the Real West, in the Real America some Chablis sipping arugula eaters have chosen to disregard.

I don't agree with several of the man's ideas, but we must always remain vigilant in defense of our freedoms--

Today’s decision is a landmark victory for Second Amendment freedom in the United States. For this first time in the history of our Republic, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was and is an individual right as intended by our Founding Fathers. I applaud this decision as well as the overturning of the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns and limitations on the ability to use firearms for self-defense.

“Unlike Senator Obama, who refused to join me in signing a bipartisan amicus brief, I was pleased to express my support and call for the ruling issued today. Today’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller makes clear that other municipalities like Chicago that have banned handguns have infringed on the constitutional rights of Americans. Unlike the elitist view that believes Americans cling to guns out of bitterness, today’s ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right — sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly.

This ruling does not mark the end of our struggle against those who seek to limit the rights of law-abiding citizens. We must always remain vigilant in defense of our freedoms. But today, the Supreme Court ended forever the specious argument that the Second Amendment did not confer an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Posted by Kimberly at June 26, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

I share Anne's dislike of snakes.

Our heeler dog, Red Dawg, got into it with a rattlesnake recently. We didn't see the snake, but it was crystal clear what happened. The red heeler's head swelled up to twice its size. I could see two neat fang marks on her nose, as she came to me apparently right after the fact, whimpering, her muzzle marked with two neat little beads of blood.

We've been through this before, with Dennis' very old and very sweet dobermans (rest their souls). So I've already freaked out over rattlesnakes biting dogs. It's fair to say that I've had some practice in this department, thank you very much. Both dobermans got snake bit, and upon discovering from the vet that dogs of their size (80 pounds) would require two doses of rattlesnake anti-venom at $300 a pop, for a grand total of $1,200, we took his good advice and gave them each a Benadryl. And it worked just fine.

So I gave Red Dawg Benadryl, and in two days, after looking like a popover from the neck up, she recovered quite nicely. I suspect it has something to do with her zaftig condition.

A dachshund or a little terrier (or the apparently very expensive Portuguese Water Dog brought over once by the parents of Cole's friends without forewarning and without a collar and leash and whom Lila Jane and Red Dawg tag teamed without mercy and the first-time dog owners from NYC got put out at me and even god himself couldn't have helped us if a friendly, dog-loving draft horse had even looked in that pedigreed prince's direction) wouldn't have fared as well.

I'm not sure Red Dawg is quite bright enough to not repeat this adventure.

I've had enough experiences with rattlers now, that I know they really don't want to bite me. But they will to protect themselves. If one's on the property, he gets shot or guillotined with the business end of a shovel, and while no one around here enjoys doing that, we can't risk having a kid get bitten.

While rattlers scare me, I am rather partial to bull snakes. In fact, my neighbor who works at the animal shelter has them come in sometimes, and she said she'll bring them to me. They are very efficient rodent controllers.

Now my crafty old heeler Matilda. She knew what to do with rattlers. I don't suspect she would have given any slack to the Portguese Water Dog either.

Posted by Kimberly at June 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

I’m pulling the weeds from around the fruit trees in the orchard, because they’re ugly, and because I’m making room for my red clover to grow. For the bees.

Five horses are lined up along the fence line, hoping for a handout. But horses won’t eat weeds, unless they’re starved, that is, and mine are a far cry from thin, believe me. I manage to pull up a few handfuls of volunteer timothy grass, which is gobbled with copious amounts of greed from my outstretched hands. I have to dispense the sweet green stuff judiciously, or there will be an altercation among mares and the one Percheron gelding who doesn’t hesitate to muscle his way through feed.

Voles have murdered at least five of my precious trees, not in the orchard, thank goodness, not yet, anyway, but from the initial two dozen we planted. Chewed up the roots of the trees we’ve tended like babies to get them growing out of this dry red earth. And I’m pissed. Beyond all imagining. If those varmints didn’t live underground, only to come up for air once in a blue moon like furry poltergeists—right there in the furthermost corner of my eye, and, no, I’m not imagining it—I would get my husband’s shotgun, and they’d be … well … history.

A dirt devil whirls across the bare pasture, almost like a living thing. I imagine rattling bones. The Day of the Dead Man in his horse-drawn cart. It blows the few stray blades of grass just out of the horses’ reach. Poor things amble after it towards the fence line.

I worry that the wind will blow the bees away. Or off course. How will they find their way home? I’m wondering. There are supersedure cells in the Carniolan hive. Which means the hive has lost its queen, or she is ill and dying, or I’m not sure what else. I’m still learning. But I do know that the round, white chamber built of wax on top of the usual hexagonal cells means that a new queen is being made ready. The intensity of the Carniolan bees’ buzzing increases when I peer into the frames, which are heavy with brood, pollen, honey. Make ready for the queen, they are saying. In the evenings, my head is bent over the bee tomes, trying to decode the mystery.

I wipe the grit from my mouth, wrestle a wooly weed from the ground. It’s all dirt and weeds, I’m thinking. Dirt and weeds. The words fly around my head like the tornado that just missed us two weeks ago.

I know I am prone to this type of thing. Depression, that is.

I’ve managed to escape the full-blown variety for many many years now. No more Prozac for me. No. Sirree. Bob. No matter how many generations of my family might have had problems with their serotonin.

It’s just that sometimes it sneaks up on me, kind of like weeds poking their ugly faces up through the sand—that one time I reached the end of my rope. How long will I go back to that particular point of reference, I wonder? With each weed I toss to the wind, I consider the pills I held in my hand the one night I teetered precariously on the edge of the very end of things, certain that I couldn’t live one more day. The burden of my first marriage had become too much for me. I’d been strong enough to bear it, and my youth and strength had kept me there as long as it had, along with a good dose of fear of the fire and brimstone variety, and trying to be a good godly woman, whatever the hell that means now. And then suddenly I was this broken thing, all chewed up at the roots, blown so far off course I was lost in the weeds. Tangled up in the barbed wire like a tumbleweed.

Post Traumatic Stress, the doctors called it, when I made the decision to check myself in, instead of murdering myself.

The thought of that single moment still terrifies me, as I consider my old friend Caprichosa considering me over the fence, swishing her tail, ears pricked forward, muzzle flecked with gray. A gift from my ex, the Andalusian horse was how one very small man tried to assuage his own very large guilt for the assaults to my body and my soul, both so thin I very nearly disappeared.

The white horse is shaking her head at me. Because she would like some more timothy grass. Because she always knows.

They let me paint that week in the hospital.

I painted horses.

Reams of them.

The art therapist let me hang my horses on the walls. A herd of horses galloped across the blue concrete blocks while my new also clinically depressed friends, many of whom had known true horror, ooohed and aaaaahed, very possibly increasing the uptake of their own serotonin. This is a small town. I used to see those men and women in the grocery store or at the Wal-Mart, although we pretended not to know one another when we did, passing each other surreptitiously in the aisles with our dark and secret pasts. Our shared week in the psych ward. But not any more. A lot of years have passed.

I brush the dirt from my jeans. Make my way to the next tree in the row. Bend down, grasp the thorny stem of some unidentifiable growth that’s sneering at me and give it a yank, but I only wind up stripping the stem of its fleshy leaves, landing with a thud on my ass. A forager bee buzzes past me against the wind that's kicking up again, against all odds in what must be to her a thousand mile flight home, although to me it's only a hundred feet to the snug white hives, and in her gossamer wings I see the future that's right now. The one I couldn’t possibly have foreseen in the midddle of that pitch black night.

My life here on a pretty little ranch. The one with horses and bees and trees and cattle dogs. And, yes, voracious tree eating voles. And a man who loves me and Jessie and Cole—my precious babies who were, back then, the sole reason I decided to keep on living, the ones who held me in the open palms of their hands, here in the land of the living, no matter how thorny the brambles were or how the weeds choked me nearly to death.

And it occurs to me, as yet another dirt devil is whipping up his big stuff just on the other side of the fence, which sends Caprichosa careening off in a flash of hooves, that despite ten years of dirt, a drought that would have had Pharaoh quaking and letting every single one of them go, a wee little man didn’t manage to kill me after all.

Sprawled beneath a tree, with the wind tearing about me, I'm feeling every bit of it— the convergence of the bitter and the sweet, the deepest darkness and the brightest light, the worker bee clinging wildly to a wildflower.

Making ready for the birth of royalty.

Posted by Kimberly at June 6, 2008 | Permalink

The Transylvanian Horseman writes about a new innovation in rider safety.

Whoa, Nelly, talk about a mood buster. My Percheron horse Toby would head for the hills in the event this thing ever went off. My steely appaloosa might stomp it into the ground, me included.

Posted by Kimberly at June 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

We take the kids to nearby Villanueva yesterday.

Picture a crumbling adobe village with verdant green fields sloping down to a frigid running river in the middle of the high desert. Water doesn't smell better anywhere else than here. It's so good you can almost taste it. Sweet water telegraphing its signal from your nostrils to the tip of your tongue right down to your toes.

We had funnel clouds out this way earlier this week, and hail, and nary a basement or storm cellar in sight. This has me contemplating the solid-looking stone tunnels beneath the train tracks. Dated back to the late 1800s, in the back of my mind, I hold them as the place we could hedge our bets against that force of nature.

The Pecos is swollen with the winter runoff from the mountain lakes and streams high in the Pecos mountains where we'll be riding our horses later this summer.

The kids and I wade in freezing cold water up to our thighs along the shore. As the brown water swirls around me, I remember riding my buckskin quarterhorse bareback to the neighbor's creek in Ohio when I was growing up, bucket in one hand, reins in the other, ocasionally with my little sister on the back, and plunging into the water for a bath we all enjoyed.

The cottonwood trees bend their heads down over us, whispering and murmuring. Brushing aside the willow branches and the rushes spilling over into the rushing water, as my kids round the curve ahead of me, I am struck by an old Sunday School story I haven't thought of in years--

Moses' mother fashioning a basket of reeds into a tiny boat and floating the baby downstream to save his life from those who wanted to kill the first born. I can still see the picture of her in my Sunday School lesson book, remember the anguish on her lovely, sunlit face, as, with outstretched hands, she sets the tiny vessel afloat and bids her child adieu.

He floats right past me in a boat bobbing like a cork in the current, swirling in the eddies, so I have a fleeting glimpse of pink, pudgy outstretched fingers and toes, can hear a little one crying. And then he disappears just like that--sluicing way down the canyon where shadows deepen, maybe being carried to the Rio Grande, all the way to Mexico.

I catch sight of my kids again, their legs carry them faster and farther than mine. Cole is splashing his sister with the recently melted snow, and she is laughing.

I'm glad there are no gators in the Pecos.

Posted by Kimberly at June 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)