Ah.  The pungent smell of year old turpentine, the musty scents of a worn student lounge, and the sweet smell of Mudslide coffee.  Yep.   It's the start of a new semester at Paier.
    Actually, we're about 3 weeks in at this point, but no less, the unmistakable smells of Paier have yet to disappoint my expectations of inspiration.

    So this semester I decided to take a little bit of a different approach to my thesis. Sticking with the horses, no doubt. But this time I'm basing my pieces more on the spiritual connection between a woman and her horse. Why is that bond always associated with women and not men?  What is it about horses that makes women desire to be around them, to be on them, to experience the freedom of galloping down a wooded trail or along the crashing ocean waves?  Why does such a connection exist?
    Despite my own intense love for equines, my inspiration here came from a menagerie of different sources and conversations.  I'm currently reading a book called "The Tao of Equus" by Linda Kohanov. Its the story about how the author found a horse that changed her life (blah blah, you can all assume the outcome). But I'm finding the book to be a perfect road map of where I'd like my thesis to go.

"The Tao of Equus reveals the transformative, healing power that is implicit in the human-animal bond, and is a startling challenge to anyone wishing to limit consciousness to humans."
— Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Healing Beyond the Body and Reinventing Medicine

    The book is quite a good read, and I highly recommend it to anyone with a love for animals, especially horses.  My pieces I plan on perusing this semester will focus on the raw foundation for a woman's reliance on the horse. It is not about riding or using them as tools, except to obtain a better connection to the world and the nature around us.  I believe that horses bridge the gap between our own conscious and our subconscious, as I have experienced first hand that they have the ability to recognize and reproduce the emotions we don't even realize we display.