January 3, 2016

Philosophical Ponderings ...

We have been very busy getting the TEAMS sorted out over on Green Bean.   It looks like we are once more going to have a good group of riders.   I'm almost done with the year end awards on that (just waiting to get the call that the embroidery has been completed on the jackets and a horse blanket).  I will be glad to get the year finished up in that regard.  There is a lot of effort (fun though it is) in organizing that many riders.   We have all but one TEAM filled...so three more riders and that one will be under control as well ☺

December has come and gone and I keep waiting for the drop of the shoe...you just don't have winters like this in Indiana.  We have not chipped ice or had the water tank freeze into a chunk yet.  The barn did flood from torrential rains early last week, and that was a mess with two stalls standing several inches deep in nasty water.   After a lot of baling, scooping, scraping, and bedding applications (and rinse repeat) the horses are back in the dry again (at least barring another torrent of water from the heavens).

I am in a very funky place in my life.  Maybe it is the mid-life crisis (albeit a bit late) people talk about.   The winter months find me restless and contemplative of things of importance and things not.   Winter gives me much too much time to think.  It really does!

Yesterday was particularly hard.  A young family member who was told he could not hunt our property did so anyway.  He shot a doe and left.  (figured out he'd been caught)  I found her early morning and held her head in my lap as her eyes drained to gray.  It made me very sad.   LSEGH came down later and did what needed doing that her killing not be a total waste, but holding her and telling her I was sorry hurt as much as if it were my horse, or my dog.    Don't misunderstand.  I try not to make judgements on people who hunt to provide meat for their family, but it is something I do not take lightly either.   It is a life, a very beautiful  and peaceful animal.  My heart will always prefer to just leave them be...where by, come the philosophical pondering that when I go drive to the grocery and toss a steak, or a chicken into my cart how impersonal that is.  How disconnected that is.  Maybe we should all have to hunt it down, and have a moral conscience for it.  If so, there would be a lot of vegetarians.  Be present to watch that life drain out.  See that animal opened up and gutted.  See that life move from a living creature, to a product.   It was not a good day.  But she will feed "somebody."    I will see that deer's beautiful dark and frightened eyes going to gray for a long, long time.

3 comments:

  1. Oh no, how awful for you. My heart breaks just thinking about that poor little girl, and knowing how hard it must have been for a caring person to show her some compassion in her last moments. Thank you for doing that.
    I'm glad to hear that you consider the packages of meat you put in your cart. Most don't. I've been a vegetarian for about two years now; I just can't bring myself to eat an animal. Raising chickens for eggs helped me stop eating animals. They all had names and distinct personalities, and three used to take turns sitting in my lap! No way could I eat them, and that feeling quickly spread to all animals.

    About Green Beans: I've been procrastinating because my horse is IR and horribly out of shape, as am I. But about the teams, are they all in Indiana, local to you? I don't know anyone who rides endurance in my area of upstate New York; the people I know with horses don't do anything even remotely like it. It doesn't mean I'm not enamored and fascinated by endurance, it just means I don't have much stimulus, I guess you'd say. Am I a lost cause?

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  3. Robynne I'm going to link you to the facebook site for Green Beans of Western New York.
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/1392124134343243/
    Our TEAMS competition doesn't matter where you live. Many of the TEAMS riders don't ride together at all. They log their own rides, we assign a point value to the ride, and it goes on their scorecard as a group of five. We also have an Individual competition going on which is solo one rider, one horse. The competition is fun, and of course somebody wins...but that is not the purpose of the group. The purpose is to build a social network so that when you get to rides you can find riders with something in common (your green bean-ness) and even the facebook interactions believe it or not are very positive.
    Our actual group can be found here:https://www.facebook.com/groups/greenbeanteam/
    and the actual website is here http://www.greenbeanendurance.org

    I do wish you were here in southeastern Indiana, we would take a spin down the trail, or two, or three ☺

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