Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

Farside's first day  Five years ago, I could barely walk up a flight of stairs, and in April of 2008, I was literally about to get back in the saddle again. In many ways, I was coming home. I had first learned to ride in this mountain community fifty years ago, and this picture was taken the day my friend Sheri Griffith trailered her handsome gray Arab endurance horse Farside from his home in Moab, Utah, to Colorado, where I had just returned. Riding my first horse Bingo "Farside just doesn't seem to have his heart in racing like he used to," Sheri told me. "He'll be perfect for you."   And so Farside was about to become mine.  But he was leaving behind his stablemates back in Utah.  Would he miss the younger horses who looked to him for leadership? Rio? And Dakota and Diego? Of course, but I didn't give it much thought the day I watched Sheri lift my heavy old western, hand-tooled saddle onto Farside's back. I was too overcome...

Horses have been studying humans from across the safety of a river, or from the overlook of a high ridge, or from across an expanse of grassland, for thousands of years. The oldest archealogical evidence links horses and humans as far back as 400,000 to 600,000 years ago, not as companions, but as prey and predator. When horse and human first touched because of a far more benevolent mutual curiosity, we may never know. But horses have been a part of the human heart, and of our history, for time immemorial. We incorporate their beings into every aspect of our lives. We celebrate their presence in our art, our stories, our lives. You can view Chinese painter Xu Beihongat's beautiful images through January at the Denver Art Museum .   In Washington, DC at the National Museum of the American Indian, the exhibit A Song of the Horse Nation , created by museum scholar Emil Her Many Horses , celebrates native arts and the horse, the impact of the horse, and the decline and rev...