When Chance Slows Down Time.

Noticing the Magic of the Mundane.

Rain dripped through the canopy of leaves above us, our hoods were pulled tight, dad had an umbrella, and it was cold, colder than we thought.

Chance stretched his neck down to the feed dish of grain that was filled mostly with water.

He slurps and chomps.

Slurps and chomps.

He looks up at what must have been a noise he heard but we didn’t see anything there, and he stretched back to the feed dish to slurp and chomp some more.

The dark woods are peaceful and disturbed only by the small flashlight we brought. This was before we had flashlight apps on phones and before we bought the headlamps to guide our way, so the small light danced in one of our hands as all three of us stood quietly watching and listening to him eat.

Oh, the joys of remembering life before smart phones.

Chance is an Arabian gelding, a bay, and has a slight build but he was working hard as a competition horse so we fed him an extra meal each night. A slop of grain and water.

The water was meant to slow him down because he eats too fast. Eating too fast might not seem like a big problem, but Chance eats too fast in a way that will choke him, which has happened, and that would be a terrifying way to die so we do what we can to slow him down and make the food mushy just in case he eats too much at one time.

When we were standing in the woods on this particular dark night, we had had Chance for seven years, but before he got to us and before he got to the person who had him before us, he had lived on what horse people sometimes call a “starvation farm” where the horses weren’t fed enough or in some cases at all.

Chance pins his ears back when he sees food coming.

And he eats too fast if there’s not water in his food.

But he has never fought another horse to stay away from his food in the pasture, which meant that sometimes he didn’t get to eat all of his food.

Some of you reading this have felt the pang of hunger, have watched others eat when you have had none. I imagine most of you, too, did not fight others for food. Although, perhaps, some of you have.

This is another reason why we make an extra trip – every single day -  to the barn, prepare food for him, walk it out 10 minutes into the woods, stand with him for sometimes 30 minutes to eat it, and walk back 10 minutes out of the woods to feed him. If another horse pushes him off his feed bucket in the pasture, Chance won’t get enough to eat.

If Chance doesn’t get enough to eat, he won’t have the energy he needs to do his job that he loves so much. And his food anxiety will get worse.

Food, something so plentiful at least in the United States, and yet something that so many people and our animal kin are deprived of, creates so much anxiety. Fear. Anger. Sickness. Desperation. We can do so much better in this society, in our communities, in our lives.  

“It’s so dark out here,” one of us will say in the quiet.

“It’s really dark. Come on Chance, you don’t have to eat so slow buddy,” someone else will say.

But he does.

In the dark forest with no other horses around and only his trusted humans nearby, Chance takes his time.

He really takes his time.

Good for Chance, right? Take. Your. Time.

Our sweet daughter, barely a teenager at the time, holds the lead rope, dad pets one side of him, and I pet the other, rubbing his neck, feeling his belly, patting his hind end. A soft, wet nose reaches out of the feed dish and feels the ground around it, checking for something edible among the soaked leaves and slippery red clay.

“Is that it buddy?” one of us will ask.

Then we make the trek back to take him to his pasture where he starts grazing right away.

“Goodnight Chance,” we’ll all say.

Six feet slop and slurp their way back through the woods to the barn and finally to the car for the drive home.

It doesn’t take three of us to feed one small horse but we almost always go together. We slow down with Chance, listen to the rain, feel the cold wind on our faces, talk about our days, tell funny stories, or just stand quietly watching him eat his meal.

If Chance hadn’t been on a starvation farm and had so much food anxiety, we might never have eaten a meal with him this way, and we might not be able to see and feel in a deep, visceral way, how food shapes experiences of “domesticated” animals who are largely controlled by humans. At the time there might have been thoughts about other things one of us could be doing during that time: making dinner, doing laundry, getting food ready for the next day, cleaning the house, getting ready for school.

We humans are so good at telling ourselves that we could and should be doing something different with our time. We might even tell ourselves we can be more “efficient” or “productive” if we split up and do things separately instead of as a pair or as a group.

But those minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months of standing quietly together with Chance in the middle of the woods were magic.

Magic in the mundane.