Horse Magic
"My love of horses goes back as far as I can remember." - Afaa Weaver
The Gift of the Magic of Horses
Afaa Weaver
馬 the horse (ma)
My love of horses goes back as far as I can remember anything. I was three years old when I got my first cowboy boots. My cousin Bia and I had our picture taken just as we were walking away from the Christmas tree, boots in hand. My cousins across the way had a mechanical horse, one of those where it moved when you rocked in the saddle. It had tiny wheels. I imagine them as tiny because I imagine everything is tiny when you are three years old, everything except real horses. They were huge. Even ponies were big. In the streets and alleys of Baltimore, men sold top soil, vegetables, and fruit from wagons pulled by ponies who seemed extremely obedient. Of course, I thought all horses were more or less obedient.
I believed many things when I was a child.
I was a child of the fifties. Hopalong Cassidy, Zorro, Roy Rogers, Flicka, Tonto and the Lone Ranger, National Velvet, and many more were the films and television shows where I saw horses I dreamed of riding while growing up in segregated Baltimore. When I was twelve years old, a miracle began to unfold that continues to unfold and reveal mysteries to me. Along with the movies and television shows about horses there came a man from China playing the role of a bodyguard. It was Bruce Lee playing Kato, the Green Hornet’s driver and bodyguard. The twin engines of my growth appeared first as the regimen for proving myself in the myths and trials of black urban manhood, horses and kungfu.
My uncle bought a sixteen acre horse farm outside Baltimore, across the county from the old Jesuit seminary in Woodstock. There I learned to ride, and I owned a horse for a year or so. It was an Appaloosa filly my uncle gave to me. His breed of choice was the Arabian. He was my favorite uncle, and I was a favorite of his in many ways. My cousins and I played at studying karate when we weren't learning to ride and care for horses, when we were digging holes for fence posts with hand-powered post hole diggers, the kind that can wear the soul and break the back. Life in the sixties was like the constant work of the manual post hole digger, building fences that were more than fences. They were the lines in the cartography of our souls as we were discovering ourselves.
The weekends and summers I spent on my uncle’s farm saved me from some of the dangerous choices life in Baltimore presented. The world of horses took me away from the confines of the city and showed me the larger world, a larger world that looked at my own with troubled feelings and even hatred, a hatred born in fear and guilt, the kind of hatred that even filled my neighborhood in the hearts of skins like mine. I rode horses, and I rode the world of horses as if it were Pegasus.
When Dr. King was killed, I was sixteen years old. Baltimore exploded, and that fall I went off to the University of Maryland, one of the youngest people on campus, and one of the very few black folk. My poetry came out of me in the tumultuous energy of adolescence, and I left the university to return to Baltimore to be a factory worker like my father, and to be the poet I felt intuitively inside me. My world collapsed when I was twenty-one. I had a major episode of PTSD. When I fell, the broken bits of me were like a puzzle. In the puzzle there was Tai Chi, the Tao Te Ching, and horses. Raised as a Baptist, I had to look for a larger vision of God when my life fell apart, a vision that would allow me to live in the space of my contradictions in life. I found it when I began a lifelong journey to the East, a journey to my own heart and soul, and to my origin, one that continues.
I rode a horse many times in my imagination. In my early training in Tai Chi I practiced the horse riding stance. Sometimes when I walked I felt the gait and stance I had internalized from watching cowboys. I spent fifteen years working in factories and writing, and in that world we men often walked and talked like cowboys. It is an American common denominator for masculinity, although most of us do not the world of real work a cowboy actually does, the real work and the dangers.
Chinese culture helped me rise amidst the contradictions of life, and it still does, but the root of that resistance and urge to grow against the odds was cultivated when I rode out to my uncle’s farm, sometimes in the back of his pickup truck, when I picked up a brush to groom a horse, feeling the muscled contours of a body that seemed as if it knew as much about flying as I did when I left my my body at night to ride the clouds and disappear into the stars, to fly away to the home inside me.
I live near horses now, and the woman with whom I have known more real joy than ever is the woman I will be with as long as we live, and we will live here in the hills with horses.
January 17, 2017
Afaa Weaver
馬 the horse (ma)
My love of horses goes back as far as I can remember anything. I was three years old when I got my first cowboy boots. My cousin Bia and I had our picture taken just as we were walking away from the Christmas tree, boots in hand. My cousins across the way had a mechanical horse, one of those where it moved when you rocked in the saddle. It had tiny wheels. I imagine them as tiny because I imagine everything is tiny when you are three years old, everything except real horses. They were huge. Even ponies were big. In the streets and alleys of Baltimore, men sold top soil, vegetables, and fruit from wagons pulled by ponies who seemed extremely obedient. Of course, I thought all horses were more or less obedient.
I believed many things when I was a child.
I was a child of the fifties. Hopalong Cassidy, Zorro, Roy Rogers, Flicka, Tonto and the Lone Ranger, National Velvet, and many more were the films and television shows where I saw horses I dreamed of riding while growing up in segregated Baltimore. When I was twelve years old, a miracle began to unfold that continues to unfold and reveal mysteries to me. Along with the movies and television shows about horses there came a man from China playing the role of a bodyguard. It was Bruce Lee playing Kato, the Green Hornet’s driver and bodyguard. The twin engines of my growth appeared first as the regimen for proving myself in the myths and trials of black urban manhood, horses and kungfu.
My uncle bought a sixteen acre horse farm outside Baltimore, across the county from the old Jesuit seminary in Woodstock. There I learned to ride, and I owned a horse for a year or so. It was an Appaloosa filly my uncle gave to me. His breed of choice was the Arabian. He was my favorite uncle, and I was a favorite of his in many ways. My cousins and I played at studying karate when we weren't learning to ride and care for horses, when we were digging holes for fence posts with hand-powered post hole diggers, the kind that can wear the soul and break the back. Life in the sixties was like the constant work of the manual post hole digger, building fences that were more than fences. They were the lines in the cartography of our souls as we were discovering ourselves.
The weekends and summers I spent on my uncle’s farm saved me from some of the dangerous choices life in Baltimore presented. The world of horses took me away from the confines of the city and showed me the larger world, a larger world that looked at my own with troubled feelings and even hatred, a hatred born in fear and guilt, the kind of hatred that even filled my neighborhood in the hearts of skins like mine. I rode horses, and I rode the world of horses as if it were Pegasus.
When Dr. King was killed, I was sixteen years old. Baltimore exploded, and that fall I went off to the University of Maryland, one of the youngest people on campus, and one of the very few black folk. My poetry came out of me in the tumultuous energy of adolescence, and I left the university to return to Baltimore to be a factory worker like my father, and to be the poet I felt intuitively inside me. My world collapsed when I was twenty-one. I had a major episode of PTSD. When I fell, the broken bits of me were like a puzzle. In the puzzle there was Tai Chi, the Tao Te Ching, and horses. Raised as a Baptist, I had to look for a larger vision of God when my life fell apart, a vision that would allow me to live in the space of my contradictions in life. I found it when I began a lifelong journey to the East, a journey to my own heart and soul, and to my origin, one that continues.
I rode a horse many times in my imagination. In my early training in Tai Chi I practiced the horse riding stance. Sometimes when I walked I felt the gait and stance I had internalized from watching cowboys. I spent fifteen years working in factories and writing, and in that world we men often walked and talked like cowboys. It is an American common denominator for masculinity, although most of us do not the world of real work a cowboy actually does, the real work and the dangers.
Chinese culture helped me rise amidst the contradictions of life, and it still does, but the root of that resistance and urge to grow against the odds was cultivated when I rode out to my uncle’s farm, sometimes in the back of his pickup truck, when I picked up a brush to groom a horse, feeling the muscled contours of a body that seemed as if it knew as much about flying as I did when I left my my body at night to ride the clouds and disappear into the stars, to fly away to the home inside me.
I live near horses now, and the woman with whom I have known more real joy than ever is the woman I will be with as long as we live, and we will live here in the hills with horses.
January 17, 2017
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Brown Stallion
When I met you in the canyon, you were caught in a dust storm, kicked up by the rest of your herd, Hooves and fetlocks bucking while wild horses charged against the wind. I was one of them, running boulders like barrels, Jumping over fallen timber when I fell onto you, Your sleek coat the color of rocks in cool water And when darkness fell, in the milk white reflection of the moon in your eyes, I found safety. All around us, the mayhem of our sisters and brothers Pried at us, withers and quarters but we were transfixed eye on eye, muzzle on muzzle, our necks interlocking like vines. Even the coarse hairs of our manes entwined. That was the moment, the first moment, when our fugitive fear fled and there was calm. Then gunshots whistled through the canyon, reviving our fears, I reared back, caught you in the face- some say I kicked your eyes, blinded you that night. You galloped away, zig-zagging in the moonlight, farther and farther into the canyon while I stood dazed, baffled, stunned. Now I seek you. I will never stop. I will never stop looking until I find you. I will find you, Brown stallion. Countryman. Mate. 
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The Attention of Horses
Some experts think emotional neglect is the worst form of abuse though compared to being burned with an iron or beaten with a belt, there's little comparison. Invisible wounds may hurt more. That's why it's not hard to understand why a little girl who was only five became a wild child when she stole ten dollars off her father's bureau, his precious drinking money. He was an alcoholic, see, and showered her with attention when he took her to his tavern and bought her Shirley Temples. There was a price to pay in all this but that's the subject of another tale. She saw the money one day after school and slipped it into her pocket, her palms moist with anticipation, sweating with excitement at the thought of what she was about to do. Because if she had learned anything about attention, it was that good or bad, it was all better than being invisible and not seen at all and she didn't care if she was about to do turned her into a thief or not, stealing from the man she loved the most. She pocketed the money and beat a trail to the barn next door, a good quarter mile away, through the fields of sweet timothy and tall grass. She told the owner of the stable that she wanted to ride a horse in the field, just sit on his back and take in the sunshine and absorb the undivided connection with another being, neither taking or giving but sharing something close to oneness, maybe love, though at her age, she didn't know what to call it. She just knew what she wanted and the old Italian stable manager seemed to know it too because he found a horse for her who would attend to her dreams, a gentle old roan named Apple and he led them out into the fields of sunshine and there they stayed, the little child, safe on the back of the mare who grazed quietly and swooshed her tail from side to side. This was the fifth lesson she learned about attention and that was paying attention to oneself, whatever the cost, because it was worth it, that fifteen minutes or maybe an hour. Then her father came steaming down the road to the barn and she heard the shouts and she watched him fume his way out to the field and pull her off the horse. She felt his hand on her bottom and the order to go home to her room with no supper and she ran like the wind, this wild child, leaping over rocks and ditches, jumping the fence that separated her home from the farm next door and going straight to her room because, in truth, she wasn't a bad little girl and the empty space of love she lived in was not her fault or her parents or anyone's for that matter. This was the final lesson in attention that she learned and is still learning - that the only person who can give you the most attention is yourself, unless you're lucky enough to own a horse. And she slammed the door to her room and flopped herself on her bed and remembered the Apple - the feel of the leather saddle beneath her, the smell of the mare's coat, the coarse white mane between her fingers and the round strong shoulders she petted and petted and petted. Eventually the little girl fell asleep and she dreamt of the horse. And the Wild Child was soothed within herself, recalling the connection, which most experts agree is the way to healing. |
