Tag: horse

A Glowing Soul

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with prayers for the family of a ten year old Whidbey Island girl who died this week while out in the field with her beloved horses –of natural causes and no signs of trauma

photo by Brandon Dieleman
photo by Brandon Dieleman

…riding gave her more than a body. It released a gay and hardy soul. She was the happiest thing in the world. And she was happy because she was enlarging her horizon. 
…A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of sunlight upon her coffin as her nervous, energetic little body sank to its last sleep. But the soul of her, the glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn.
~William Allen White from his famous eulogy for his daughter “Mary White” in 1921 written four days after she died in a riding accident

This is a week of very public sorrow for so many, though, not unlike any week, there are those who grieve in their own private agony of loss.

Any child dying is too young too soon.  It defies our limited ability to understand or explain.

May we, as did William White over 90 years ago, search for the eloquence in telling the story of that one young life — how her soul lit the world for a brief shining moment and now continues to flame beyond our reach.

Good Enough

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photo by Lea Gibson
photo by Lea Gibson

“and there was once, oh wonderful,
a new horse in the pasture,
a tall, slim being–a neighbor was keeping her there–
and she put her face against my face,
put her muzzle, her nostrils, soft as violets,
against my mouth and my nose, and breathed me,
to see who I was,
a long quiet minute–minutes–
then she stamped her feet and whisked tail
and danced deliciously into the grass away, and came back.
She was saying, so plainly, that I was good, or good enough.”
~Mary Oliver from “The Poet Goes to Indiana”

Our farm has had many muzzles over the years–

Pink noses,
gray noses,
nondescript not-sure-what-color noses,
noses that have white stripes, diamonds,  triangles,
or absolutely no marks at all.

Hot breath that exudes warm grassy fragrance
better than any pricey perfume,
lips softer than the most elegant velvet.

Noses that reach out in greeting,
blow,
sniff,
nuzzle,
caress,
push,
search,

to smudge faces and
shower snot.

Because we’re just good enough
to warrant
such a baptism.

Summer Afternoon at BriarCroft

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Tony running in the lower field

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
― Henry James

fish pond
Front yard light and shadow under the walnut tree
the swing set my dad made when I was little, now perched on our farm

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
~John Lubbock

haybarn
2012 Hay Storage

It will not always be summer; build barns.
~Hesiod

tree house in the walnut tree

front porch
Jose, who owns the front porch
Old buddies Dylan Thomas and Bobbie
Samwise Gamgee at 18 weeks
Thistle making more thistle
Gravenstein windfalls
a few of a million blackberries on the farm
silver plum tree

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.
~ Harper Lee in Too Kill a Mockingbird


‘Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
Thomas More

poplar row

in the filbert grove

Baldwin apple tree

Bartlett pear tree
heavy cone crop

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby

milking barn window
from the field
old milk barn
barn lane

Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
~William Shakespeare

hydrangea

BriarCroft in Winter