Running today and the sun was out. It was cold, frosty, patches of ice on the tarmac so I slipped a little. I was only going a short distance. Not feeling 100% super if truth be told.
I got out into the common land and felt the cramps take me. Just period pain. Now I think about it, how pathetic. I've been listening to - and indeed at that very point it's what I was listening to - Wolf of the Plains by Conn Iggleden. This is the story of Genghis Khan and yes it's a bloody as you'd expect - though he's only a little kid when it begins and about twenty when it ends. This is the first in a trilogy. Or quartet. Anyway. I like Iggleden. Rollicking good adventures. I might have preferred Adrian Goldsworthy's Vindolanda series but Iggleden's Ceasar books were great fun. He's not rigid about the history, apparently. But he's a fine storyteller.
I mention this because young Genghis wouldn't even notice the worst possible period pain. He was a man or iron, man of steel. The cold face and the will, stamina and strength of a machine.
So I feel a little pathetic admitting that I stopped my desultory jog and walked up the field holding my stomach and moaning rather piteously.
At the top, a mother and son were free schooling a pair of ponies and I stopped to watch. Started talking to them. The people were sweet. The ponies too. This one, Alfie ('The best £350 I ever spent.') came and stood next to me so I talked to him and rubbed his ears. Smelt his horse smell and let myself be horsified.
The pain went. Evaporated. Maybe that's what the Mongols were so brave. They lived with horses. Not that it did me much good when I had them... But I guess I didn't tap their veins and drink the blood. Nor did I drink mare's milk. The horse. Pack animal. War animal. Status symbol. Ongoing food supply. Meat and leather and whatever when dead. It doesn't get much better than that. Multi-purpose horse.
This reminds me of the documentary, The Horse Boy. Journalist Rupert Isaacson and psychologist Kristin Neff took their son Rowan to Mongolia to interact with shamans and horses as these two connections seemed to be reversing his autistic behaviours. Now, the dolphin people are pretty pissed off about using dolphins for therapy - but as horses are domesticated, I guess there are fewer arguments against horse therapy.
These animals aren't magical, though. But something does seem to happen to some people. What I think is that if the person feels drawn to some being and feels better after an interaction, there's a feedback loop and the person expects a positive feeling and it thus primed for it... Like a sort of specific placebo linked to the subjective initial positive feeling... Maybe.
Unless the animals are magical.
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