Equuality: Reflections on Life with Horses

Rhythmic Transformation


About the Book
Transformation isn't possible, it's probable. Are you ready? -Dolly Stavros

One of my favorite places is a large parcel of grazing land on the edge of town stewarded by the Bureau of Land Management. It is surrounded by small acreages with homes and farms, but when you are in it you feel as though you are miles from everything. Though it is dry high-desert land, there is an irrigation canal that runs its length, providing water for tall pines that shade the narrow, two-track road the ditch-runners maintain.

In the middle of the parcel, you can turn onto a side road and follow it through the sage and junipers to a wide open meadow. The meadow is sandy, with a smattering of short desert grasses and a path around the perimeter. During grazing season, we will often find a herd of cattle camped in the meadow, enjoying the sun and munching on the foliage.

In order to provide better fodder, the irrigation district floods the meadow twice each summer. The open, arid expanse is instantly transformed from a sandy pasture into a broad pond. Bone-dry soil becomes rich with moisture. Grasses that have been brown and dormant for months burst out green with new shoots. Insects buzz and whiz. The air grows pungent with the smell of algae and muck.

Sometime later, a few days after the water has arrived but before its volume has visibly diminished at all, the pond is suddenly teeming with tadpoles. Though they have appeared as if from the ether, they are plump, energetic, and prolific. There must be thousands of them, swimming and wiggling and growing larger by the day.

Then, though it has likely been shrinking all along, one day the pond is noticeably smaller than the day before. The next day it is smaller still. As it contracts, the water seeping into the porous soil and evaporating into the desert air, the tadpoles come closer and closer together until it seems there must be more amphibian mass than water. And finally, you come to the meadow one day and there is no pond at all, just an expanse of muddy sand, drying before your eyes.

The first time I witnessed this process I was amazed. I couldn't believe the transformation from tadpole to frog could happen fast enough to save the little creatures from drying to death in the high-desert sun. I had been scared I would return one day and would find the muddy ground littered with tiny corpses. But it has never been so. Mother nature's timing is so perfect that even when we create an unnatural rhythm by flooding the meadow, she synchs the natural rhythms up to create a series of transformative processes that is nothing short of amazing.

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