In summer I rode on weekday evenings, racing the setting sun. I developed a slick technique to drive to the barn hitch my trailer, load Brena and set off. So it was also today, the first Sunday of winter time, as I rushed to ride between the demise of faltering afternoon rain and the beckoning dark of a depressingly early evening.
I was rewarded by bright sun for an hour and, with it, a probing low light that brought out the soft relief of the rolling hills. This landscape, much tilled and subdued by man, nevertheless retains ancient form and character. The heights and curves are there still than ancestors recognised.
Driving down a new road earlier I realised that it possessed no history. It had existed for just a decade or two. The trails that I ride all have history, often gained over centuries and in special instances gleaned across millennia.
Being adopted and having so much of the relics of my grandparents destroyed, that I have no family – not in the sense of history. I know nothing of my birth family, and that which I know of my adoptive family is the result of censorship and whitewash by psychologically stunted parents. The most memorable, my iconoclastic grandfather – traveller, photographer and esoteric – has been scoured leaving just a ghost image.
The one possible source of inspiration has been blotted out. So I will seek what I can, and the only place to look is the great formless chaos of my unconscious. At least my fragment of the collective unconscious might tell me broadly from whence I have come.
I've tried the deep wilderness. Ultimately I found beauty there, but could not reconcile myself to the tragic history of my chosen place of exile. It had horses and trails, remote valleys and places to stay. But I could not establish a connection.
So I am back here, in a land that exerts a peculiar draw. I seem to know these hills, to carry a part of their spirit within me. What is it from deep within that brings me fulfilment in this place?
Can my personal fragment of the collective unconscious of the descendants of my ancestors have transferred from a birth family of whom I know nothing? Or is such transfer just fanciful imagination? (Here I think of the "genetic memory" process expounded to me by a Native American enthusiast.)
In other words what can I learn about the generalities of my past by looking within? I won't find anything useful from the few remaining members of an adoptive family that seemed collectively to have all but abandoned breeding half a century ago.
Anyway I feel at home here. I sense that my ancestors rode. I am just the most recent amongst very many riders to travel these trails.
The peculiarity is that I am one of the first from through the ages to be using my horse neither for transport nor agriculture.
If there is one thing that the fleeting shadowy memory of my grandfather can tell me, it is not to become cowed by conventionality. He became a sad frustrated old man, ending his days in a grey northern town in the company of an unimaginative wife. After years in India capitulation to conservatism of family and society, abandoning hope of growth, must have been heartbreaking for him.
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