Wild Horses

Photo by Amanda Black Photography

Walking down the steep slope that is my driveway towards my second front yard to check on what I thought to be my favorite horse. A wild stallion who has a bad history of doing crazy things that can result in injuries or fear, but I never looked at him with fear or as a problem. I only looked at him as a horse who had different perspectives on situations as he seemed to view a large pasture as a prison that he could never escape from.

But that never stopped him from having good times with my family or his new family that was the other three horses he found himself living with. His life was not one that I saw him enjoying so all the times he would jump the fence and my family would have to get him back into the pasture.

I was the one to visit the barn that morning to see the animals as they had all been fed earlier that morning, too early for a seven-year-old to wake for, and I wanted to go down and visit what I thought of as my friends. I trusted animals much more than humans and still carry that aspect of myself because it is easier to know whether an animal likes you than when a human does. You will always know when an animal doesn’t like you because they will either charge you, maul you, or voice a warning that is not as mistakable as the one people give to the people their fake to.

With all this trust I placed in animals it came as a shock to me when I saw this 5’6” stallion coming around from the corner of my barn going faster than I could even dream of going to get away from the situation I was presented with. So in my young age I thought the best solution for this charging animal was to curl into a ball and hope this tall, brown horse would not notice me.

What happened next was scarier than this horse charging me, but he came to a fast stop right beside my body and simply nibble on my clothes as he had no intention of causing me harm. He was just excited to get out of the pasture and spend more time around the apple tree. I just assumed he saw a person and went to me thinking he was going to be put back into the pasture where he would not be graced with a bountiful apple tree or space that is not closed in my fences. He always knew what the situation was before me or my family would with the experience he had been the farm’s escape artist.

This horse simply saw me and came to me, and I was scared, more scared than I ever thought I would in a situation with an animal. A situation like this is important and crucial to the trust people can find themselves developing with an animal, a situation like this just made me laugh. I did not know why I was laughing or what brought about this laughter. Maybe it was from the stupidity I felt in myself thinking that this animal was coming at me to hurt me. It might have been the situation I placed myself in being curled up in a ball, on the ground, in the grass, getting my clothes nibbled by this stallion who I found myself placing so much respect and trust in. Maybe it was that I came down here to gain more experience with animals that I respected and found myself being in a completely unprecedented situation for my life.

Laughing is powerful, it can change a situation significantly or it can make a situation clearer or less clear than what one once thought. Laughing possesses a strength that everyone can find laughter is a binding agent for one’s personality to a memory. The laughter I had brought into this situation changed how I experienced this watershed, it made the situation less clear but much more clear than what I would have ever thought of. I never would have wondered why I was laughing, I might have had a worse experience being scared of this situation I was placed in. But my laughter, my binding agent helped me to understand what exactly I was living through and how important it actually is.