Section III. Sunset

Before I can move on, I must clarify what it is to be at the barn, to truly be a part of the living world, of the place. The body is at work in every aspect of the barn. Whether one is cantering across fields, sweating in a difficult jumping lesson, walking a six-year-old human through the field on ponyback, scrubbing a dirty trough or water-bucket, carrying stacks of hay, raking the floor, currying a horse, or even sitting around a table eating good food and talking, there is a great sense of reciprocity; we work for the horses and the land, and the land the horses provide us with something other-worldly, with that divine wisdom so coolly possessed by horses, with a speed and strength man alone could never achieve, with a dual senses of openness and shelter, real danger and safety.
It has a very simple, perhaps quaint beauty to the visitor—lovely fields, yes, a nice skyline, a well-built barn—but those of us who have invested ourselves in the landscape, who have showered off its dirt at night only to wear it again in the morning, who have suffered injury from falling, who have flown up hills and over jumps, who have, when hungry and impatient for dinner perhaps covertly tasted the horses’ sweet-feed—for us, it can perhaps best be contained in the burning autumn sunsets we catch as we emerge, sweating on our sweating steeds, from hours spent in the woods, in the breath we take as we watch the orange in the moments between the ride and the work of untacking, washing, feeding, and turning out our horses. The barn is in those moments of calm in which the physical beauty of the landscape is magnified a hundred times by the air we pull into our tired lungs, by the salve of those colors on our exhausted arms and legs.
The involvement of the body, the crucial nature of physical work and the physical nature of the more recreational aspects of the barn, call to mind the writings of Edward Casey. Casey discusses the body as a place, as the container of all our locales. Without body-memory, or habit, we would not remember places; the body makes the memory true and complete. Grooming, tacking, untacking, feeding, riding, cleaning; all these actions are stored in my mind, my muscles, as a kind of alternative map to the place. I know my way around the physical dimensions of the barn, and I can physically respond to all its demands. As I have lived the place, it is now a part of me, and myself, a part of it. As the body “forges a sense of attuned space” (193) in a new place, so too does it deepen that sense of attunement in the old. Casey writes that, through the body, the past of a place becomes present; certainly, the memory of my place in my body is a living, omnipresent thing.