Of Horses and Pipelines

December 19, 2013

These days, I live and breathe horses. Even when I drive home to the city, I can’t scrub the dirt from the lines in my skin and I can’t wash the smell from my wrists (where glove and sleeve separate and let nature in), and when I get dolled up to go dancing I love that I’m secretly still full of horses.

These days, I am blessedly free of some of those daunting human considerations. With programs at the farm done for the year and volunteers and visitors busy making Christmas happen, I’m mostly alone with the herd. My days are determined by the weather, by the movement of the horses, by how much they eat and how much ice has formed in the water buckets. I have no need to put anybody through any paces – I’ve touched a halter once or twice in as many months. When the horses want to be touched, I touch them. When they want to be with me, they come. When they are busy being who and what they are, I busy myself doing the same.

When I finally succumbed to the cold and the cats and finished my tea and finished my (horse) book, and reluctantly turned on the laptop, I was bombarded by today’s disappointing news: “the National Energy Board Joint Review Panel just recommended the approval of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline”. Oh JRP we never had much faith in you, but goddamnit maybe we slipped up and hoped, just a little, for a minute. This threat we now live under – the unquenchable thirst for oil and the plans to destroy and disregard some of the last intact ecosystems on this earth along with their inhabitants, dependents, and stewards, animal vegetable mineral all – it sometimes feels a little like living under a wrecking ball. You have to keep living, doing your dinky little life things, making toast and complaining and feeding the cat. But you’ve got one eye on the lookout and your heart in your mouth, for days and weeks and months and years. It’s quietly exhausting.

I called my mother, trying to articulate the aching sadness that filled my lungs and pressed my sides til thick salty tears fogged my humorously large glasses. Not fear, not anger, no I know we will do what we have to do when the time comes and yes of course we cannot and will not allow this project to be completed but –

These days, as I live and breathe horses, I climb deeper and deeper into this thing people call empathy. Or compassion. The with-feeling. And it’s not some great virtuous thing that you have to work hard to achieve and it doesn’t make you better or more spiritual or weaker or crazier or anything. It’s just what happens when you spend time under trees, with animals. It’s a dissolution of the perception of separation. It’s not cognitive, or it ceases to be after a while. When another species looks like family to you, maybe that’s when you realize you can’t go back, your fingers slipping from the lip of the rabbit hole.

What’s so interesting is that it has extended throughout, like being with horses has shot me through this improbable gateway and concreted me in the fabric of life so that I really do feel at home just about anywhere so long as I can go outside. Which is fine, and maybe dreamily poetic, but it also serves to completely rattle me when I realize that others do not feel the same, do not want to feel the same, and would not choose to feel the same if they realized they had the choice. When I witness the willful destruction of delicately balanced earth systems and the wanton accounting of sentient beings as resources to be extracted, exploited, exhausted, I can’t help but wonder what the hell kind of crazy is steering this boat.

What a ridiculous notion, that ideas or actions or objects or beings can be separated from each other, can exist without irreparably shaking the existence of everything that is and ever will be. What unscientific bilge, that something like bitumen can be extracted, transported and burned without devastating lives, habitats, communities, climate, planet. What a laughable lie, that humans have dominion over anything, when we lack the wherewithal to survive a day without fuel.

If we are anything of any value and valor (and I believe we actually are), then we are stewards of our lands, waters, and fellow creatures. And as I know in my on-going attempts to understand and fulfill the mental, emotional, physical, psychological – the biological – needs of my circumstantial wards (those glorious equines), I realize what a very large task this can be, should we choose to accept it. I realize just how much work we have to do.