Back Thinking In the Back Country
...sparing my soul
I still might run in silence
Tears of joy might stain my face
And the summer sun might burn me 'til I'm blind
But not to where I cannot see
You walking on the backroads
By the rivers flowing gentle on my mind
- Gentle On My Mind | John Hartford
I come from a family of back-thinkers. We can get stuck.
“If only I hadn’t...”
Getting stuck in the if only mantra seems like a precious waste of time. It’s a hard one.
Then there’s the deep thoughts about how life is or could have been.
Thinking is a part of our soul. It’s a window into our desires, our hopes and our fears.
But then life is actually playing out right before us. Every day granted is an official deed to work on our life. Our life. Not other people’s lives.
Three years ago, in May of 2020, I was radically changed. I didn’t know just how much I would or could change. To be honest, sometimes it scares me.
Gutted. Life wasn’t worth living. Then I awoke and began to make my way through the mire.
It began with a panicked phone call the early morning of September 8th 2020. My dad had fallen in a parking lot a week prior, and had a fresh 33 stitches in his hand. The neighbors were banging on my parent’s door and windows as a Stage 2 fire evacuation alert for their small town was announced and my elderly parents were sound asleep. The neighbors were trying to wake them up to prepare to get out. We had just traveled there to see them, in August, for the first time since the pandemic began in March of 2020. Dad had lost a lot of weight and something was off. I had long scheduled an invasive benign melanoma, near my eye, to be removed for the morning of September 8th. My immediate thought was to run to my parents. The healthcare system was so upside-down with limited appointments for anything that my husband said I had to follow through and that all would be okay.
My dad told me to go too. We headed out the door. I figured my blood pressure would be so high the doctor would cancel. Heart thumping out of my chest, the first thing I asked for was a sedative. I begged. Nope. Okay, that’s not me anyways.
The sound of my neck being cut by a surgeon and the smell of new flesh burning to seal the large hole on the side of my forehead was an awakening like none before. French-Canadian disco thumping in my ears, almost two hours awake, while wondering if my parents, their neighbors, were fleeing the out of control Santiam Fire. It had been raging for almost three weeks and was looking like it would merge with another fire. We had gone through The Grand Prix fire in 2003 and I couldn’t stop shaking.
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” — Mary Oliver
I still love. I love. Please make this stop. Turn the music off. I need to get out of here and call my parents. Warm liquid washing over my face. Over and over. Please let me out of here. A voice saying, “everything looks good.” She was holding my hand the entire two hours. A kind nurse.
This was the beginning of my healthy back thinking. Taking me to the beautiful places I had been before. Watery eyes, images of burned down cities among blackened forests. Start over.
A part of my soul became deeply interested in horses. I had always loved and admired horses from afar, visiting rescues, photographing other people’s horses. I was slowly finding myself longing to be near them.
There is a lot of good going on in our nation, I’m positive, yet there is so much bad. So much unnecessary suffering. There is evil and soullessness on a level I have come to believe is nothing new, yet in a world of instant satisfaction and obscene hunger the most beautiful of God’s creations are continuing to suffer.
I know no less than six friends who took off during the pandemic, running blindly into homesteading.
For some, soul-saving is like the sound of a gun near a horse. Run.
We can borrow beauty in the chaos and while others run to it in the wild… it doesn’t mean it won’t come with hard work, loss and grief. What it does mean, is it will “mean.” There is the possibility it will leave behind what strips us of our soul.
So, like many, who have been broken, I, like a horse, lost some of my own natural wild spirit in the mayhem of 2020.
My trust level suffered greatly. I’m uncertain if I can ever have that child-like ability again. My rebel nature, however, is stronger than ever.
I imagine a world where respect, awe and reverence for the largest and the smallest among us could lead to a soul-filled land.
Collectively, we do not live in this beauty. If only we knew the suffering, maiming, experimentation, use of… the ugly stench of death and decay surrounding the innocent.
Hanging out with rescue horses, barn kittens and children last week, I looked around and wondered. What if we just began here?
No human, with a soul, is capable of what I and so many are seeing take place in the country today. It only seems to get darker for children and animals.
Federal action in recent years has blocked the slaughter of horses on US soil, yet there still remains the kill buyers. It’s almost too much to take in so I’ll let you do that.
I question the entire Amish community, let alone horse breeders, that callously, without looking back, dump overworked, starved and injured horses to the auction arena, eventually the kill buyer. Grown men, with a languishing form of soulless lowly cowboy personalities, laugh, spit, kick and taunt God’s gift to man. Minis, babies, mothers, hard workers. Putting to shame the entire horse-lover’s community, who time and time again, come to the rescue, only to have the rescue costs higher and higher from the soulless kill buyer.
There are other jobs to do in this life. No one needs horse meat. I’m convinced.
Of course, “not all Amish” are cruel to their animals, and since they hold a reputation of being Christian pacifists it’s an irony to know that many treat their horses like over-used cars. Inanimate. Soulless. Amish are also notorious for their appalling puppy mill businesses and hold a huge stake of the market in the U.S.. If just one person could understand the cruelty and deceit behind their adorable puppy purchase.
Of what high moral value does a Christian teach their child by treating living, breathing animals like the lowest form of life?
This is the animal version of prostitution and pimps.
I am convinced there is a more humble way of making a living.
Worse, children all over the world are sold into this soul-destroying arena by their parents. It’s not new. Just easier with our lack of laws and specialized police detectives. They are sold into darkness. We met a woman, a few weeks ago, who’s father lives in Tijuana. He tells her that every single day he watches out his window as mother’s walk their little children to grown men waiting in cars. Disposed of like trash. Trashed childhood.
There are other ways to live. I’m convinced. Yet it’s probably cyclical.
“Horse slaughter is the practice of slaughtering horses to produce meat for consumption. Humans have long consumed horse meat; the oldest known cave art, the 30,000-year-old paintings in France's Chauvet Cave, depict horses with other wild animals hunted by humans.[1] Equine domestication is believed to have begun to raise horses for human consumption.[2][3] The practice has become controversial in some parts of the world due to several concerns: whether horses are (or can be) managed humanely in industrial slaughter; whether horses not raised for consumption yield safe meat, and whether it is appropriate to consume what some view as a companion animal.” (source: Wiki)
When I stand near a horse, I instantly feel a sense of awe and respect. The best of me comes out.
I see overpaid grownups, soulless in their attempts to cause social wars, doing nothing good and tangible for humanity and the underpaid doing all the hard labor that we so often use without gratitude.
I choose anything that leaves me loving or helping people and God’s creatures.
What always surprises my heart on the backroads, is that despite how gutted, how twisted our souls can become, we can return. Plant again. There is always something more. God is never done with us.
I decided at 39 years old to become a photographer. I did. 23 years later I’m deciding to learn about horses. I don’t know much. There are many industries and avenues concerning horses. For instance, there is much not to like about the Horse Racing industry. I’ve enjoyed watching horse racing, however, like with many things, there is a history that is seeped in big money and back-end cruelty. There is also nothing to like about the Premarin Industry. We can consider natural, God given remedies. My body is beaten and bruised inside from arthritis and a few good accidents, but that’s not going to stop my interest. I have no idea the capacity of my adventure. I am binging HorseTV. I dream of owning my own horse someday. For every passion there are many directions. It will play out.
Like being around rescue dogs, all I know is that there is a great lesson to be learned from being with unwanted or abandoned animals. It feels safe. Odd to say when you’re standing with a huge and inherently wild creature, or one that has been abused.
Brokenness tucked away… trained. Wild spirit underneath.
It’s where it all began in the back-breaking back-country, out on the plains, where horses ran free.
I want to run free. Tears of joy might stain my face.
“But to be what I am, to live what I was meant to live, to want to sound like no one else, to yield the blossoms dictated to my heart: this is what I want - and this surely cannot be arrogance. (Letters on Life)” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
If you watch "All Creatures Great & Small" as we do, you can get the sense of how the man who wrote it wants to teach us about animals. Just as in this quote by him...
“If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.”
— James Herriot
Great read & wonderful to experience that love with you at the farm ❤🐎🐱
Hi Bill,
Wrote you back on the recent "Sunday Amen." Would love to get your email 🥰. It's been a doozy of a last three years for sure. The fire, the surgery were only an awakening to a lot of underlying grief. But that's how life is. We wake up. Your story is CRAZY!!!! and I would have been like Nancy! then... oh boy!!!!! 🙃🙏🏻