Sometimes,with people and animals there is an indefinable magic, and you can read and write about it, but you know it when you see it, and I saw it this morning with Jenna Woginrich and her new horse, Merlin. I should say, in the interests of full disclosure, that I am not entirely comfortable with horses. The first one I was on was spooked by a gunshot and ran me some miles into a tree-limb when I was nine and left me unconscious in a Rhode Island woods. That was the last one I rode on. And I am not much better in riding stables. Just do not feel at home in them, places that just do not seem made for people like me, another of those worlds. I mention this only because I thought that would make it difficult for me to photograph Jenna and yet when I saw her and Merlin, I felt completely at home, and I whispered to my Canon, “magic, let’s get it.”

So yes, I do talk to my camera, give it pep-talks, exhortations, exclamations and strategies. There is a mystery to the human animal bond, magic. Jenna writes about it on her blog. Megan Mayhew Bergman writes about it in her great new book “Birds Of A Lesser Paradise,” (she is reading tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the fabled Battenkill Bookstore, where Maria and I will be) and I write about. But having a good camera and the right lens and the right light and the right animal and human all in one spot at the same time.

I see this magic sometimes with Maria – with the donkeys, with Rocky, with the dogs. I have experienced it – Orson, Izzy, Rose, Lenore, Frieda. With Simon.  I saw it clearly this morning in the riding stable where Jenna keeps Merlin. Jenna is like me in some ways, and was not born with a riding crop in her hand. So that made the photos all the more challenging, all the more interesting. The pictures touched a nerve, and the one above is my favorite. For me, it captures that mystical place that sometimes forms between the right person and the right animal. See what they can do to us, for us, if we let them, if we are open to it, if we learn to listen.  All sorts of things go into that chemistry, and I do not know enough about Jenna to know precisely what brought her to this barn this morning. I was glad I was there, though. And grateful to have had the chance to capture it.