The Stable of Stable
‘On white horses let me ride away, To my world of dreams so far away, Let me run’
On White Horses, Written and Composed by Michael Carr and Ben Nisbet
I arrived back at the ‘House of Mum and Dad’ in January 2010. It wasn’t the Surrey house I grew up in, nor where either of my favourite four-leggeds wooed me, but it was less than a mile from the place I first came into contact with Horses (and ponies): Hampton Court*.
And although my two love affairs were with chestnuts, since we have flown back to my earliest childhood, we must start with the greys.
Barely more than a toddler, only semi-conscious of parental conversing as I lay on the back seat of a Black Ford Popular as we travelled up to Moffat in Scotland for family holidays, a question shone the black of the night air.
‘Shall we go up to ‘The Grey Mare’s Tail’?’
I learned many years later it was a waterfall. Water – the unique male parenting Sea Horse. Air – Winged Pegasus and lungta (wind horse) of Tibetan Buddhism. Fire – I write this during the Chinese Year of the Fire Horse. Earth – Marengo, Napoleon’s Arabian Warhorse and Gibraltar, Philip Astley’s beloved horse who helped found what is now called the circus.
It's unsurprising this most elemental of creatures has produced the largest stable of stories here.
Can you smell the warmth of dung, hay and leather? And perhaps hear a low snicker of welcome? We enter a place in which all emotions are welcome. Today, research and touching Horse therapy also confirms that deception is spotted, old hidden hurts revealed and equine responses offered in ways that heal…
Horse energy makes for a very ‘stable’, powerful and yet liberating environment.
Unsurprising. Horse: rhymes with force, course and Norse. If Blackbird opens a gateway, Horse opens pathways to other worlds, earthly, mythical and metaphorical. Our connection goes back over three millennia, mine as soon as I could read.
The Little White Horse innocently, fleetingly, became a literary member of my Milk Family and arrives by moonlight and by sea. A glimpse in the distance through ancient woodland, always promising freedom. You can find him too, in the leaves of a little blue bound hardback (or today's paperback version).
It inspired my childhood dreams and even now is my go-to book when I’m ill: ‘The Little White Horse’ by Elizabeth Goudge. I was enchanted from the very first page ‘… under the white moon I saw him, The Little White Horse.’ But just as evocative were the huge white sea horses rolling in with the dawn and crashing the story to its dramatic climax.
Like most baby boomers I was glued to ‘The White Horses**’, set in what was then Yugoslavia to watch the strange foreign-tongued Julia and – to me - manly and sexy Uncle Dimitri, interacting with the famous white Lipizzanas. And approaching puberty, along came ‘Follyfoot**’ where the animals were always more understanding than the humans…
I sensed there was something mystical about the word and creature ‘mare’.
For when we come to female Horses and we speak of a ‘mare’ the sound echoes with the French ‘mere’ (mother), and mer (sea). So, having reached the stable of mum and dad, let us now be led on by what is termed a ‘lead mare’ – the one the lead stallion quietly looks to for reassurance.
Meet my first love, and lead mare, Octava…
*Note: I learned to ride out of the Royal Mews Hampton Court in Bushy Park as a ‘Horse Ranger’. The organisation was the marvellous brain-child of ‘Mr Gordon’. It gave (and still gives) children who couldn’t afford to take riding lessons. Once a fortnight we enjoyed a half-hour lesson, in the intervening week we learned to muck out, clean tack and did ‘drill’ (it ran along military lines). I loved its structure and it was there I had my first pre-teenage crush on one of its officers, ‘Doreen’!
**For the younger reader, these were two early 1970's TV popular series - you can find episodes on YouTube which both boys and girls. They oozed sensuality, which combined with the horse element must have spoken to a generation of pubescent teenagers!
#whitehorses #horse #stable #elemental