A horse of course

I've been drawn to horses lately. I was never a horsey girl, never played with horses, didn't want one, didn't see the use or beauty of them. Never wanted my wild heart to be broken, never cared for Fur Elise, never pretended to be Elizabeth Taylor.

Lately I've noticed how many of their likenesses I keep around.

Like any Svenska flicka, I keep a dala horse in nearly every room to welcome good fortune.

A coffee-stained red horse prances on the back of my writing journal.








Plus...I grew up next to one of the biggest (probably, right?) dala horses in the US.

The biggest is in Mora - I've never visited it, but it's on my list.


I had dinner with a friend on Wednesday night, and we were talking about bad news and catastrophic thinking. She mentioned how sad it was that we spend so much time putting these energies and thoughts about disaster into the universe...that a more positive approach would be to think and plan for what you hope will happen, for the good and lovely experiences that pass by so often when we're worrying about the bad ones that rarely seem to hit.

It made me think about Diomedes, the savage Thracian king who (in myth, at least) trains his horses to be just as savage by feeding them human flesh. In the end, Hercules feeds Diomedes to his own horses, and there's a great painting immortalizing this gory end. It's been five years since I last saw the painting, and I still keep an eye on the horses at the county fair.

Maybe when we feed the bad things in the universe pieces of ourselves - our thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreads - we let them keep living and, in the process, they develop a taste. There's something to be said about the hero who's eaten alive by the savagery he's created to protect himself.

I have a friend who says, "Every thought is a prayer...so be careful." He's also a pilot, so he knows how to sign off:

Blue Skies, Everyone!