Why do I write, and who do I write for?

Today I spent several hours fleshing out a rather long paragraph I had written on the ambling gait of horses way back in 2019. It’s sort of a longish sidebar or a companion piece to go with my Kiger Mustang blogpost. I posted it there because that was when the genesis of the essay began, but the bulk of the work was done today. And little of the original writing remains. What took so long? Every time I circled back to it, I never felt like I had the chops to flesh it out. Today was different. I was ready to tackle it. I realize that I have an audience of one.five people on this rather obscure topic. But that’s what floats me. Sometimes my thoughts are like a three-dimensional scaffolding built by synesthesia. I hear rasping sandpaper sounds as I uncover ideas, words take on notes and color. Writing soothes them, puts them on the bookshelf. Ever since I was a child, I was fascinated by obscure and ancient horse breeds. In contrast, I wrote my Connemara pony piece all in one long go—because I was irritated that an acquaintance, Phil Cousineau, who leads spiritual journeys to Ireland wrote that the Vikings brought the Connemara pony to Ireland. I went ballistic—nothing like cultural appropriation via Wiki and Google to get my knickers in a twist. So why do I write, and who do I write for? Myself, alone. And for you, Dear Reader. I don’t think the web crawlers can read.

The wild northwind

When the wild north wind blew, my horses would dance and skedaddle down the fire roads as if death were on their heels. They became unpredictable in flight with leaps of fancy and sudden swerves that left in my heart and stomach abandoned by the side of the road, or caught in my throat. They imagined fierce creatures chasing them, they took the bit between their teeth and ran harder still. Their hooves beating a staccato on the hardpan earth by the lake. Inevitably gravity was around the corner in the form of a cliff, or low hanging branches. I don't know how we survive childhood. But those horses, once they had run their course, were weary with a savage grace and they had a lightness of step, a new glint their eyes. And I realized it invigorated them. Perhaps they felt more alive at that moment, having run a race with imagined death, and won. Descendants of the tireless Arabian, hey held their tails up high to the wind and pranced more like swallows them horses, with nostrils flared, and breaking a sweat and solidly alive. 

(A Bedouin escaping his enemies threw off his cloak in order to let his mare run faster but her tail was raised so high it caught the cloak and he still escaped.)

8/24/2007 Writers' Group