A friend turned me onto a Los Angeles Times story about Mary Breckenridge. At 64, she crosses the High Sierra with two mules and a saddle horse. She’s done it for years and has some incredible insight about being alone in nature and relating only to the outdoors and to her animals.
Lately, it’s a topic that’s fresh on my mind as I consider the growing ranks of formal “equine therapy’ — for veterans, kids with diabilities, adults with mental and physical handicaps. Seems like everyone is beginning to realize and quantify how good it feels to hang with horses.
It’s more complicated than that, of course. But horsemen and women know this intuitively. Wasn’t it 200 years ago that someone uttered: “There’s something about the outside of the horse that’s good for the inside of a man”?
The newspaper did a fabulous job with photography and video. I highly recommend checking out the video (which you may have to scroll to the bottom of the story to see. The Reporter’s Notebook, a daily journal kept by reporter Diana Marcum, is equally enthralling. (You can find a link to it within the story link above.)