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Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
Wild Horses II There’s a statue I love in New York City and even when I cannot be in New York, I travel to this spot in my mind as a form of meditation, quite often.
The other day, quite by happy chance, a series of photographs I’d taken on a particularly happy and mellow trip to that city appeared among my “papers.” Which means they were in a folder and fell out into my hands right when I needed them to appear.
The photos were of this statue I love, situated at the end of West 93rd Street at Riverside Drive and for me, symbolizing immense courage and faith in self and the androgyny of the soul in an extremely powerful manner. I remember falling in love with the statue without knowing a thing about it. Running my hands over the stone base, gazing up, smelling the trees, considering so many things.
As I look up tonight after a long day of work, of ass in chair as we call it, I see Jeanne and I smile. Her sword slices up to the sky, determined. She is astride her beautiful equine friend and prepared to face: well, anything, I gather.
This statue is a gorgeous Tarot card brought to life, albeit frozen in statuary, circa 1915. Anna Hyatt Huntington’s work blew my mind from the first time I saw it, and I was directed to it by a very good friend whose apartment I was borrowing on the Upper West Side for a week I will never forget as long as I live. In that week I discovered a female photographer who would change my life [Mary Ellen Mark] at the ICP and I re-read Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights” and I went to Brooklyn for the first time and of course, fell in soul-love there too.
Horses have a very special place in my life, even though I do not ride. I have no idea why, but when they recur in my work and in my daily experience, I make sure to listen. They usually signify change and challenge: a gallop ahead.
I have been writing and working a great deal so far in 2010, but the message of Jeanne D’Arc isn’t lost on me: we will have to hang on, and be immortalized for our better qualities, not our lesser ones.
Listening to: I'll Be Around: The Spinners
Reading: My own novel, 1000 words a day or bust.
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