Midnight (the pony) on Loneliness

Midnight on Loneliness

I have a pony with seperation anxiety. Generally speaking, Midnight is as comfortable a creature as ever walked the earth. Big round hooves, feathered with shiny black hair, a long tail almost touching the ground, and this time of year, a woolly coat to keep the wind and rain out. Midnight is interested mainly in grass, but when he's filled his belly, he likes nothing but to hang his big face over my shoulder and tease me about having two legs. He is playful and reliable, joining a game of football as my six-year-old runs around his legs. He has never in his six months of being part of our lives, lifted a hoof, or bitten or shown any signs of being anything other that deeply laid back. Except when Chalky, the donkey is out of sight. 

Then he freaks. Don't get me wrong, Midnight isn't ever mean, he just panics to his very core when he thinks he's been seperated from his herd. Then he can turn on a pin, out-manouevre a swift on a thermal. The very first time I took him for a ride, he decided that the War memorial in our village was not to be trusted. His legs metamorphosed to jelly beneath me. He spun 180degrees and ran home, fast. When he could hear Chalky braying he calmed right down and slowed to a trot. When he could see him he decided it was time to graze the roadside verges. I caught up with him then and untangled the reins from his legs. 

We sent him on loan to a girl who wanted to jump him, he churned the ground to mud twirling and whirling like a whisk in a mixing dish because we took his companion away in the trailer. He came home to be reunited with the mule. I have to admit that once or twice I seperated him from our donkey just to hear the thunder he made with his hooves as he galloped to the furthest point round our lake and back again. To see him run like Black Bess with Dick Turpin aboard; then he is simply magnificent. 

The donkey is very nice. There is no malice in the donkey. The donkey really has no axe to grind, no disagreements with anything, not even a thistle. He is much happier than Eyore, but just as self-effacing. In fact, if I could make the donkey, man, I would marry him. But I don't think its just the greatness of the donkey that makes Midnight so attached.

Generation of horses before him, whose genes echo in his,  have survived by keeping their suede shoulders brushing their comrades. Being alone for a horse is a risky business. In common with wood ants and termites, bonobos and mackerel, horses have found sticking with their own kind the best way to stay alive. And we humans are as social a species as any other. No wonder then that Midnight wants to stay close to Chalky and no wonder that as more of us set up home on our own, pathologies set in. 

In human culture, living alone is a risk factor  for diseases of the heart, the mind and the body. From alcoholism to alzeimers, malnutrition to myocardial infarction, one of the worse things you can do for your health is live on your own. Put simply,  

'lack of social relationships is a risk factor for death' 

 And we are currently experiencing a fragmentation of culture, an epidemic of loneliness like never before. Images and movies and websites and this blog and any amount of social networking can't substitute for someone holding your hand, or leaning on your shoulder.  When my little boy wandered up to an old lady in a cafe and asked her 'Are you on your own, don't you have anyone to look after you?' he struck at one of the central issues of our culture. Horses need horses (ponies need donkeys) monkeys need monkeys, chickens need other chickens and people need other people.

I do not push it. Unlike better horsewomen, I find imposing my will so decisively over Midnight's difficult. I would rather respect his desire to be with his equid friends and find ways of riding him out in company than force the issue and have an unhappy animal underneath me. Riding a horse with its cacophany of metal bits and riding whips and saddle already feels too much like human dominion over animal for my liking. I don't want to add the feeling of fear to the equation. I want him to like being with me and to like being ridden.

So for now we potter about the lanes with the donkey in tow, or ride out with friends, which he greatly enjoys. I do decide the directions we go in and generally, the speed. But he decides who we travel with and that is alright with me. 

Sasha x 

 

Shitten Sheep and Cloths of Heaven

Shitten Sheep and Cloths of Heaven

The lake is a light slate colour this morning, with ripples running west to east across the surface. I have been cutting sheep faeces from a Cotswold sheep fleece. This blog is an attempt to document my struggle against battery humanism. Against our imprisonment by modern culture. I love my laptop and my car which gives me freedom to climb up Snowdon on New Year's day and swim in White Sands beach the next. But they come with a price. One is the deep muscle ache cutting across my shoulders as I type. This blog will explore my attempts to challenge within my own life the pathologies of our culture. It will document my efforts to be happy without damaging the earth, to bring well-being and sustainability into the lives of my children and to reconnect with what it means truly, to be human. 

Weaving is a part of my plan. So when my neighbour offered me a massive builder's sac full of damp, rancid, to quote Chaucer, 'shitten', sheep's wool,  I accepted with delight. 

As I type a long-tailed tit is tap tapping on the wooden panels above my window. Perhaps they are looking for insects sleeping beneath? The old dog is pacing around asking for some need to be met, a simple matter of a walk, or a meal or some water. I will attend to her soon. Outside an orange movement grabs my attention, Through the telescope trained permanently on my garden and the nature reserve beyond, I see a bullfinch, resplendent with colour, munching the seeds of a budlea flower. I looked at the scrappy plant all year, thinking I really should cut it back. Now I have been redeemed. This bird is like the brightest bauble on the saddest old Christmas tree. The tree feeds it, gives it life, makes fly its flash feathers. Life renews.  

In my bath tub, lies the coat of a 3 year old ewe. She lives in my village in an apple orchard, with her children and mother eating grass and growing this coat. She is there still. I have the honour of owning her fleece, a gift from a neighbour with whom, in the past I have had some differences. I feel duty bound to create something of beauty for both human and sheep. My intention is to weave this wool on a peg loom into a thick, loose rug for the children's beds, or for by the fire. But for now, it is an ugly mat of filth. It will take some transforming. 

First, I cut the ragged poo infested sections of wool off with a pair of scissors. Then I lug the unwieldy mass into the house. Luckily the bathroom is right by the back door. In it goes into a pool of warm spring water. My house is one of only two left in our village that is still fed by water from the Spring. This means I can never over run the bath. One of the twin dramas of my domestic life has been eliminated. The pressure is low, so the water slowly fills a tank. When the tank is empty, the water stops flowing, long before it fills the tub. I never over run the bath. I still, regularly, burn pans on the stove! Immediately I drop in the fleece, the water turns mud brown. Simple as that.  Hereford mud, which has a pinky tone from the iron ore in its belly.

And that is where I left off to write this. I know, because I have done it once before to the fleece of her sister, that this wool will undergo a metamorphosis in the next hour. When I have finished I will be the owner of a warm, grey-blue, curly mass of the softest, sweetest wool man has ever woven. And when I have made it into a thing of beauty in my home, I will cherish it, like no shop-bought thing, however stunning or finely wrought. This rug will be the heaven's embriodered cloth, and I will lay it at the feet of loved ones, along with my dreams. But for now... back to the sh*t. 

Sasha x