In the mid-1990's I began a career working with horses, studying farriery (horseshoeing) and natural hoof wear as a science, and apprenticing in blacksmithing and equine veterinary medicine. Before that I was an academic, a professor of poetry and literature. But the horse touched me too strongly, like the inward pounding of the real world. I needed an earthly life—and the horse to me was the mood at the heart of the Earth. The first iteration of that vocation lasted fifteen years, a career that spanned continents, between America and Italy, and included all manner of horses, from elite competition horses to beloved backyard pets. Now, in Northern New Mexico, I am joyously returned to my work as a horsewoman. I work with horses because their very being is what in the realm of philosophy I have tried to describe as "a religion of sensitivity." Their kinetic power, beauty, and fragility, and their locus of emotion as communication is to me a kind of existential justice, a rightness of being. I have tried to live toward that justice, that inconsolable mood of horse.