From The Archives: Feeding Horses And Other Things
How regular tasks hold our lives together.
When she walks out to the barn for the evening feed, what she notices first is how dark it is already, and how with the darkness a stillness sets in. Stillness is not the same as quiet. The soft but urgent whinny of the pony wanting dinner ripples from the front pasture, the drumbeat crunch crunch crunch crunch of hooves hitting fallen leaves begins as the herd files into the paddock. The pony and two donkeys stop at the gate that leads to their side of the barn. The two horses walk to their stall doors, waiting with heads hanging over for her to switch on lights, open the squeaky feed room door, set down the bucket with their wet feed inside. They know the routine: the gathering of clean tubs, the warm splat of wet food hitting the bottoms as she pours, the twist of supplement jars being opened. She calls out her apology for being slow.
The stillness persists, not in quiet but in the texture of the air, the weight of the earth underfoot, the night sky unfolding above them, horses under shelter waiting, pony and donkeys putting knees and muzzles against the gate to rattle the chain that stops them undoing the latch, the woman still inside the feed room mixing and stirring.
She feeds the largest horse first, his drool as he nuzzles her arm sinks into her shirt sleeve, making a wet circle. Before he lowers his head to dinner, he turns to touch her arm once again. The pony and donkeys hurry through the gate when she opens it, looking to see if she has put down their tubs. She walks back inside the brightly-lit barn to retrieve them, stacks them on her left arm like a seasoned server in a restaurant, sets down the pony’s first, then the donkeys’ at the same time. The other horse comes last, only because he’s the most patient.
Now herself still, she leans against the barn aisle wall, listening. Night seeps in through the open barn aisle doors, filling the space around her with its blanket, wrapping around the horses as they eat. Through an open stall door she looks through the barn to the back of the house, lit with warm light from lamps, her daughter’s red hair gleaming white in the upstairs window as she studies, as brilliant as the largest star in the sky.
Think of a task you do regularly and notice the details of each step of the task. How you feel as you’re doing it, what your body is doing, the sounds and smells and textures of anything you touch as you do it. Let the structure of that task hold you. Be curious. Could it become its own meditation, its own song, its own daily prayer?