I’ve just landed home from the great state of Washington today. I lived northeast of Seattle for a year in 2005-2006 and fell in love with everything about it; the weather, the people, the scenery, the energy; and it always refreshes me when I visit. I’m full again of words, ideas, thoughts, hopes, questions, and a huge smile slapped across my face…
Circular, that is time. We live in a world dominated by linear functions, our calendar reads left to right, start to finish. There is little left of the cycles we once relied upon as a species to guide our functions from day to day, week to week, month to month, season to season, year to year. Instead we rely upon days, minutes, hours… seconds, to remind us of the time we have lost or wasted, or perhaps the time we have saved. But in that reliance, we’ve forgotten to be in the moment. We are always living for the last or the next moment, and we have relinquished any savoring of the here and now.
In working with our horses, it seems a never-ending goal to ride a light horse and constantly be light with our application of the aids. Lightness, however, has taken on the role of a relative meaning. It has a different image in the mind of each user, it is seen as something solid, tangible, an object that we can hold onto and either have or not have.
