It has been one of the joy’s and great gifts of my life to see Maria fulfill her destiny, find her full moon, to see her life as an artist unfold and flower, to follow her passionate bliss.
This was our covenant, our commitment to one another, the wellspring of our great love for each other, to fully support one another in the pursuit of our creative spark and our lives. A month or so ago, Pamela Rickenbach, one of the co-founders (with Christina Hansen) of Blue-Star Equiculture, the wonderful and controversial retirement home of the New York Carriage Horses and other draft horses, asked Maria to design a symbol, a quilt a work of art that captured the feeling and work of the Blue Star farm in Palmer, Mass.
If you are wondering why a retirement home for work horses could possibly be controversial, it is because many elements of the animal rights movement – the movement that seeks to banish the carriage horses from New York – oppose any form of work for animals with people, they consider it abusive and exploitive. Blue Star supports working animals and seeks to educate the world about them.
People who call themselves supporters of animal rights have vandalized Blue-Star, broken open the fences at night to try and release the horses on a busy road, harassed the interns and employes of the farm – they have hacked into their cellphones and released personal information on the Internet, refused to allow people from Blue-Star to speak at equine events, picketed them and insulted them.
It is sometimes hard for me to imagine why running a retirement home for animals caught draw so much hatred and rage, but that is the story of our time, in many ways. Pamela and Paul are heroes to me, angels for animals. Sometimes I think the animal world is all about inverted morality.
In reality, the farm is anything but controversial, it is a warm and loving place, well and lovingly run. Pamela and her partner Paul Moshimer have created a wonderful home for the big horses when they need to retire and they live out there lives there. The carriage drivers often come up to Massachusetts to see their horses and visit with them. It is a tender thing. Maria and I have gone there to meet the horses and photograph them.
A few years ago, Maria would never have accepted this challenge or believed she could do it. Now, she spoke with Pamela and grasped her vision of Blue Star and the meaning of horses in our lives and for the future of the world. For all the animal lovers that there are in the world, it seems there are few people who grasp the centrality of animals in our world, and the great importance to keeping them among us. The horses have a powerful connection to humanity, Blue Star is fighting to preserve it.
This is the story of the New York Carriage Horses, of course, one of the reasons it is important to me. This morning, Maria and I are going to Blue Star to give this quilt to Pamela, she says it is exactly what she hoped for and imagined in her mind but could not quite articulate.
Maria has a powerful spiritual self, she connects so powerfully to nature, mysticism and animals. I was not surprised.
I told Maria, who is as modest as she is gifted, that is an astonishing artistic achievement, and she, of course, did not really believe me. She captured the meaning of Blue Star.I hope she gets to understand that today. For me, too, a great personal moment of pride, a coming of age of the brilliant and brave woman I love so much, she has come so far, she has so much farther to go.
