Moons Revolve, Moons Adore
As part of a long term artist research and studio project investigating thresholds of shared experience, sensory processing and proprioception, and concepts of invitation, initiation, and trespass, empathetic awareness and imagination between horse and human, Moons Revolve, Moons Adore explores intimacy and longing, companionate mirroring, and pair bonding.
To know another, whether horse or person, is a mix of empathy and nearness, vertigo and vast horizons. Psyches and souls contain multitudes. One is held to another with gravitational pull. In deep space, we revolve, we adore.
To perceive another involves limits closer to hand. Gates and fences keep out, they keep in. We peer through narrow openings. Intimacy is skin and hair, touch and proximity, breathing and heartbeat. Species delineations are barriers but also protections to central identities and senses of self. To be close takes respect of difference as much as the draw of affinity, affection. The moon climbs the horizon, shows herself in.
The dance between horses, between humans, between humans and horses, involves presumption (a form of cognitive empathy) and empathy (a form of trespass, an act of hope, a move for connection).
The flight response of prey animals-like horses to humans-mirrors fear of intimacy: being alive to touch, prone to startle or flee. Grazing, reclining to rest in tandem, the deeply tactful reinforcement of companionate mirroring.
A horse reads a person. A person dreams of being a horse. Signifying freedom the horse shows us how to wordlessly love. A horse is an apparition in the night, a watcher of moonrise and sunrise.
Once I sat with a horse, intending to write a poem. About him or buttressed by him, breathing into my hair. He snuffled the paper in my lap, took it into his mouth looking steadily at me and masticated it. I laughed and tugged. The paper tore. Nothing lost, everything gained.
Parts become wholes. Poems and horses become themselves.
A rock in deep space. Pocked and cratered. Walk upon her once, she will keep your footprints.
Discharge of matter, ashes and embers.The loved one blazes. This is life, this is lethal.
Death is a conversion of energy, say the physicists. The astronomers extrapolate past comprehension. We are smaller than dust, each of us. Love- and grief- is cosmic. Grief- and love- is granular. Revolution. Adoration.