Sunday 20 September 2020

The Joy of a Winsome Beast


 We were here.
This may be an odd one. 

It takes me a long time to relax on the weekend. Our favourite thing to do is to go for a long country walk, and I find that very helpful. I don't always expect JOY as it were. Just moving along, looking at beautiful vistas, like the one I photographed, is enough. I feel generally tranquil, or perhaps a little challenged, if we are climbing something steep. But yesterday I wondered why I was not feeling euphoric.  

"Should I not be feeling joyful?" I thought, for after all we were with friends, and we were hiking through the incomparably beautiful Scottish countryside. The sky was blue and cloudless. There were no cars to be seen. We even saw, after we came back down a hill, a horse and rider clopping along as if the car had not yet been invented, or was confined to highways and cities. 

We continued walking along what one of our friends calls "The Hidden Valley", replete with tiny stone villages and church in good repair, and castles and other churches in ruins. We had stopped to look at a church in ruins, when I looked behind me and saw a horse's nose reaching out towards a tall shrub of some  sort. The horse was having a little nibble while somehow contriving to look winsome. 


He or she was adorable and suddenly I felt what I felt when I was about 12 and had drawn and coloured the head of my dream horse. I was positively delighted with this work of art but forgot all about it, of course, until yesterday. The image swam before my eyes, and I felt overjoyed.  

I'm not sure if the joy was joy in seeing an extremely cute animal, or if the joy was in suddenly and magically being 12 again. 


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