For the past year or so, I have watched at horses have moved into our lives, work and consciousness. Before I began writing about the New York Carriage horses, Maria took riding lessons and began to explore a growing connection she felt for horses, as well as dogs and donkeys and sheep.

Then I got into the horse controversy in New York in earnest, writing about them many times this year, and researching their lives and history. I also felt a powerful connection to them, I believe they have been communicating with me, calling me and others to their side in their struggle for relevance and survival in New York and elswhere.

The horses have awakened me to the narrow vision and rigid ideology of the animal rights movement in America, which increasingly seeks to remove domesticated animals who are not pets from our lives. The horses remind us that what animals desperately need is support in remaining among us.

Maria and I have pursued this new interest in different ways and on different tracks.  We both loved Rocky, our blind Appaloosa Pony, Maria especially became attached to him. We have become friendly with a number of horse people, often visit Blue-Star Equiculture, the horse rescue and retirement home for work horses, in Palmer, Massachusetts. Maria has become attached to one or two of the giant horses, and is planning a visit to the farm for a week in February. My interest is mostly in photographing them and writing about them, I am not drawn to riding them.

Maria does want to learn how to ride them, and I believe she is thinking about eventually having a horse on the farm.

In New York, I met Chief Avrol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Sioux Nation and a peace activist and  horse defender. He told me the horses had prayed for me to come and speak with them, something that is hard for me to accept but I have come to feel must in some ways be true.

I watched her today with Chloe, a rescue pony at Ken Norman’s farm. Eli-Anita Norman, Ken’s wife, gives riding lessons and she and Maria were talking for some time, but that is for Maria to write about. I think this is something deep in Maria and I want to be nothing but encouraging about it, I think it is a natural, empowering and beautiful direction for her.

Maria’s love of animals is very deep, it is perhaps part of her faith, along with her art. She has much love to give, I have seen it again and again.