** Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)
I was pretty much born a horse nut. There's ultimately no "why" to it; "obsessed with horses" is just one of my character traits. I love the multiplicity of breeds, colors, shapes and forms, styles of movement, varieties of equestrian sports and disciplines. I love the horses themselves as individuals, the subtleties of relationship, the challenge of riding well and of shaping and educating a horse, the physical realness and even the risk of riding and handling a large animal. Horses have always been a deeply satisfying part of my life.
But I don't get to be around them much any more; I live in the city, horses live in the country, and I don't drive, and I'm too poor to ride anyway. This is the one weekend a year when I get to indulge, at the
Midwest Horse Fair. I wander around the stalls patting horses, sometimes talking to their owners, watching demonstrations and clinics, some by well-known trainers. And each year, taking pictures continually, obsessively, greedily. It's a way to take the horses home with me, in all their many breeds, colors, shapes, movements, costumes. I used to justify it as gathering reference material for sculpting and painting, but I don't do a lot of that anymore. Really it's just a desperate way of harvesting the experience in the hope that it will last me through the winter, so to speak.
Tomorrow is the third day of the Horse Fair, and I've decided not to take my camera. I didn't go today, but I took 150 pictures yesterday, and that was almost all I did. Tomorrow I want to actually go watch the horses and pat their noses and learn from the demonstrations, and really be there, without trying to gather them up and can them, as if in Mason jars. I want to eat them fresh and juicy and alive, as nature intended, at the peak of the season.
But, I thought I'd share with you Zelloponysians some of my canned ponies from yesterday:
Yawn! Bored with ponies? How about a zedonk?
So what's your effing problem? And are you taking pictures of life, or are you living it?