Saturday, May 26, 2007
Location: The Hay Lease, Piikani Reservation, Alberta

Being out here, I have absolutely no desire to engage with the technology of my laptop. A place like this pulls you home into yourself. It allows you to honestly leave the outside world and find that connection to who you are. It pushes you into that place of being. It gives you a tremendous amount of space to just breathe.

And listen.

I’ve been really bouncing around the past little while, eager to get moving, but still waiting on some meetings/interviews. There’s no doubt about it now, I’ve found another home here at the foot of the southern Rockies, this place where the flatlands have come to meet the mountains.

I forget what I was going to write about.

Today I spent the whole day walking. Walking to get closer to the large herds of wild horses that speckle the enormous landscape. I walk, I think, I walk, I listen, I walk, I breath, I walk.

It’s pretty amazing to come up on a herd of a hundred or so horses. They stand in the grass grazing, sentinels resting a little further out from the herd. They are the first to see/smell you. They watch me as I stop. I try to relax and I try not to want from them. I think they sense my eagerness and my desire to capture them on film. Please… just stand.

As I slowly set up my camera and tripod, the large sentinels come galloping at me for a closer look, circling me to arrive downwind, stopping to stand, breathing. Questioning me: who are you?

After a few moments they retreat back to the herd, at which time the rest of the herd thunders away into the distance. I’m left alone in the grass.

I walk.

It’s not always like this. Sometimes when the light and air are just right, they relax. Sometimes they let you get fairly close to them. Sometimes they feel unthreatened and curious, the entire herd circling you closely until they come to rest and eat nearby. I’ve found much depends on the size of the herd. The larger the herd, the more likely they are to be spooked by a human presence.

Man, I love horses. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a herd of a hundred or so horses gallop around you. As they circle, the ground rumbles, the air vibrates, and your heart is still. I feel the medicine from these animals. I feel we lost so much when we left the horse for the automobile. We lost a relationship, we lost a connection, we lost independence, we lost medicine, and in these, we began to lose ourselves.

peace,
d