Fun Among the Flakes

Sorry, I had to continue the alliteration.

Snow day - no school! First order of business for freed student: make a snowman.

Then we went for a walk and encountered some neighbors.

The horses were energized by the snow, swiping at each other and moving restlessly. Bridget and Rose enjoyed rolling.

Shaking off the snow

Bridget came over to play with me. Here is she is distracted by something in the distance after taking off my glove.

She insistently handed me her forelegs. Several times, she turned around and backed into me - not asking to be scratched, but telling me to pick up her back legs. Now, Bridget has a way of backing up to Rose and then cheekily firing off a couple of play kicks. So when she backs up to me in a playful mood, it makes me a little anxious. I know her intent is not to kick, as she raises her hindleg forward and holds it underneath her. But there is so much energy in this which I can't interpret, that I often ask her to move away. It's not clear that she actually likes having her hind leg picked up. Nevertheless, it seems that this is what she is asking me to do.

As I've said before, I wish I could run with her. But I can never feel the energy just right. In body surfing, if you're a fraction too late or too early, you don't catch the wave, and your ride peters out immediately. I feel that with Bridget I'm never quite just catching the moment. Plus, I don't think she's really into the idea either.

I took George out to graze yesterday. He's been very distant lately. I think he's rather bored. You can see in the photos of Rose and Bridget rolling that he is looking on in a benevolent, but slightly remote, way.

I think they could all use a change of scenery and that perhaps Bridget is grasping at straws to entertain herself. She is an optimist and likes to make the best of things. Whereas I fear George has gotten a little discouraged and feels neglected and doesn't quite know what to do about it.  Hmm. I don't know.

Later on, it snowed a lot more.

The horses became quite frenetic. I put hay out in a sheltered corner on the other side of the barn. They came over to look but refused to stay there. Maybe there were strange windy noises in that spot. They calmed down for dinnertime. Now it's dark, so who knows what they're up to.

I think it's fair to say that we're officially snowed in at this point. Tomorrow no doubt we'll be ploughed out. Hay is scheduled to be delivered on Saturday, but I don't think the truck will be able to get up to the barn. Oh dear. I may have to go and buy a few bales at a time until this clears up.

Never mind! Hoping for another snow day tomorrow!

Quote

A good quote leapt out at me while I was browsing in Barnes & Noble recently. It's from a little book by Germaine Greer in the Barnes & Noble "Brief Insight" series. Although I'd probably disagree with her about loads of things, I believe Germaine Greer is one of the smartest people around today.

Her book, which is a "brief insight" into Shakespeare, is an excellent book from any standpoint. But I particularly liked this quote, which I thought expressed what some of us have been trying to say about the insights gained from our horses.

It may not be possible to extract a nugget of thought, which we usually think of as a series of interrelated propositions, but part of the reason for that is that Shakespeare knew, as we have forgotten, that feeling is as intellectual as thinking. His is, as Eliot would argue, an intact nondissociative sensibility. (p. 180)

So there you have it - what I'm learning from my horses is an "intact nondissociative sensibility," which although feeling-based, rather than thinking-based, is nonetheless intellectual.

Merriam Webster defines "intellect" as "the capacity for knowledge." I think Greer is right to distinguish between a process of thinking which involves moving from one related proposition to another and the process, equally rational, of grasping the totality of an experience.

When Greer uses the word "feeling," I don't think she means "emotion" but something more like "sensing." When I think of sensing, it seems obvious that this is a bona fide way of perceiving truth - I can sense that it is cold, for example. It may, in fact, be the only way of perceiving the truth.

Ina May Gaskin, in her classic book Spiritual Midwifery, talks about the newborn infant's "original face." Mothers, on meeting their babies for the first time, have an instant, intuitive grasp of the personality of the child. I experienced this myself with each of my children - I received immediate, valuable, accurate, and detailed information about them in a manner which could not be described. The information was somehow sensed (although not by one of the five physical senses) and was, as Greer describes, "intact" and "nondissociative". Once I had the information in hand, I could put it into words, but the process of acquiring it was ineffable.

Post-Enlightenment, we seem to have gotten into a confused mindset whereby we believe that truth is accessible by developing propositions which theorize the nature of truth, based on hypotheses we have formed on the basis of other propositions based on previous hypotheses.

Logical thought, which pretends to serve the search for truth, runs amok and spews out meaningless propositions whose only claim to truth is that they are connected to other propositions. I believe the doctrine of the evolution of species is one such excrescence. Another is the belief that horses are robotic, soulless entities. In the quest for Reality, reality is not consulted.

As G.K. Chesterton wrote, "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." (Orthodoxy, Ch. 2)

p.s. We have snow today.

Chloe enjoys her breakfast.

White Christmas

On Christmas morning, it's a good idea to feed the horses wearing your anorak and wellies over your pyjamas and bathrobe.

There was a kindly son-in-law in residence, who volunteered to help carry water buckets and fetch hay from the barn, making the chores go quickly and companionably. Snow fell in the morning, and stayed long enough to give us a festive view from the window in honor of the day.