A Horse Called Tomorrow
As a child, Becky longed for a horse. At 8 years old, she began asking her dad. When her family left the heat of Texas for the winds of the Chesapeake Bay, he finally agreed: When they got their land, she’d get her horse.
They got their land. But she did not get her horse.
Life was busy. Her dad a pilot, in the sky four days a week. She and her sisters high school athletes, constantly obligated. A horse didn’t fit the rhythm of life.
Two decades later, in the windy high desert of North California, a herd of wild mustangs sprints desperately across an open plain. An angry helicopter gives chase. Sweating and weary, the horses are driven into a crowded pen. Tallied and tagged. Removed from their wild home, victims of a policy that ranks them lower than the cattle that will take their land.
Among them, a pregnant mare. Running for her life, and for the life she carries.
The late spring that follows, we meet the mare. At a rescue ranch in Montana, in a pristine valley where fog settles on summer mornings, making the horses look like ghosts. She is tired. Her tiny foal nearby, a clumsy, stumbling jokester.
She is small, as horses go. 14 hands. Tough. And something else: World-weary, world-wise. For days, my wife dances with her. Approach. Retreat. Touch. Retreat. Hand on shoulder. Retreat. Hours spent merely sitting on the fencerow, telling stories, singing gentle songs.
Then one morning, Becky arrives to greet her, and the mare turns toward her, walks to an outstretched hand. No retreat.
For months, we return here, a week at a time. Cowboy Joe and his 50 years of horse work teaches Becky the ropes. And knots. Harness and saddle. To ride, to steer. Above all: to build trust. To find companionship. To see yourself as a horse sees you. To see a horse as you see yourself.
It is winter again when we decide. Mountain cold so brutal we dance while we muck, hoping our blood finds our fingers. The painted mare will come to Virginia. Along with her lanky foal. She will be ours. We will be hers. She will not have to flee again.
We named her Tomorrow. For the hope she must have held to survive. For the hope we hold for the same. For the promise collaboration with the natural world offers: Something more in the sunrise to come.
Our new venture The Tomorrow Company, that brings the wisdom of Nature and Story into companies and communities, is named after this tough and mild mare. After a belief: the crises of our time are surmountable, if we see the natural world as both origin and destination. When we look at a mare like we look at ourselves. When we think not just of today.
But also Tomorrow.
