The Walking Mother and The Special Box and The Mountaintop.

I have three great questions which I give to all my clients. What do I love? What do I want? What do I need?

When I’m working with horse people, I get them to ask what their horses want, love and need.

These plain, profound questions take us all back to first principles, and that is a lovely place to be.

I was thinking of this because I woke this morning and wanted to write you a postcard. And I wanted so much for this postcard.

First of all, there is something on Substack which dwells vivid in my mind. It’s that feature where you can take a bit of someone’s essay and reproduce it in a special little box. And I keep thinking: I want to write a paragraph so good that someone will want to reproduce it in the special little box.

That is what I want, right now.

I don’t think about writing in that way, usually.

I don’t think of paragraphs. It’s higher and wider and broader than that. I’m always trying to stretch and expand and lift my eyes to the mountaintop.

I think of the mountaintop all the time. I think of it because it’s such a perfect metaphor, and I think of it because of Martin Luther King, who made one of the greatest speeches I have ever read, the night before he died, and it’s such a mighty speech it’s worth looking up so you can let the whole thing delight your eyes. It was at the very end that he spoke of the mountain -

‘Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.’

That’s something that someone could clip out and put in a special little box.

Anyway, the point is, I don’t think, in normal times, of trying to produce the perfect paragraph, worth quoting all on its own. I’m just busy striding off in the direction of the mountaintop, even if I might never get there. (‘I may not get there with you.’) Most writers, I think, are trying to find those dizzy heights. I think at least half of us are convinced, somewhere in our secret hearts, that we might just one day write The Great Gatsby, if we keep trying hard enough.

So it’s not a question of finding the perfect line or being quotable or inspiring someone to put your words in the little box. That’s not what I’m in it for. It’s a bigger prairie, that I’m galloping over. (I quite often think of it as a wide, grassy Steppe, especially in the first draft.)

But now I want a special box.

Yes, I’m sorry to say it, but I do. When I begin thinking of sending you a postcard, I think: can I do just one burst of dazzling prose, so that it can go in the special box?

And I’m the one who is always banging on about letting go of the need for external validation. So it’s very confusing.

Well, that’s going on. And the other thing I wanted to tell you was that the younger niece is here and her baby is five months old and she wheels him round and round, through the woods and along the burn and past the hill.

She makes jokes about doing performance art.

‘I am Walking Mother,’ she says.

I walk with her and we laugh about the performance art. And I think of all the mothers, and how they walk and walk, with their tiny babies, and how nobody really gives them enough credit. (I think the mothers are shamefully overlooked, but that’s a whole other story.)

I join the two adorable people every morning at 9am and sometimes they will have been walking since 7.30am and the niece has the slightly translucent look of the very tired; the tired who are sustained entirely by love.

And we talk and talk and talk and I silently remember her when she was a baby. (Sometimes not so silently. She was talking to her friend Alice the other day, who is now our vet and had come to see the horses, and I suddenly burst out, ‘I still think you both are three!’)

I quite often say, when I’m trying to write about the red mare, that I am about to describe something for which I don’t have the words. It’s almost always to do with the amount of love I have in my heart. (The red mare inspires me to new heights of love.) Well, there is something about this walking with the niece and the baby which I can’t describe in words. Is it something about the ordinariness of it and yet the wonder and the enchantment, at the same time? Or is it the acute sense of time being fleeting? (That small chap will soon be twenty-five and a vet himself, or an astronaut, or a poet.) Or is it something about the wheel of history and all the aunts who have come before me and how we are someone all connected?

No idea.

There is something magical and magnificent there though, and I want to write it down, because soon the niece will have gone back to the south and I shall only have the fleeting telegraphese of WhatsApp to keep me warm.

I wanted to tell you that. This is my postcard. It’s not quite as focused and filled with clarity as I would like, but that’s the nature of postcards. I smile as I write that, because really it’s such a beautiful thing to be able to come face to face with one’s own imperfections and not run away screaming. (It is this that the red mare has taught me.)

And I can’t quite find a place to end, but that doesn’t matter either. We don’t all need to go out on a sweep of violins and a bang of the timpani drum. I can’t even say the sun is shining through my window, because it isn’t. (The sky is the colour of disillusioned pigeons.) But very soon I shall go out to find the Walking Mother, and all shall be well.