Two more photos from yesterday

My new mare is starting to settle in! She's starting to hang her head over the gate and gaze at the house as I look through the windows. That is almost painful for me, that was exactly how Baasha stared at the house, with that "Got feed?" expression. She doesn't pace around as much, but acts more at ease in her now-nighttime-only paddock.

Another neighbor came by and said how lovely she is. I am starting to really see it. I think if the seller had access to these photos, they would have asked for more money for this horse. She was the cheapest horse by far of any I'd looked at in my 2 year search. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, but hoping it won't: )

I took her for just a tiny walk tonight and she is really staying behind me nicely. She does this grinding/chewing with her teeth and it's a sign of submission, but it is odd that instead of licking, she grinds. Lots of tension there still. I am slowly, slowly teaching her to lower her head and this is the first horse I've done this with where I can feel the muscles sliding around under my fingers on her poll. Ouch. I'm gonna do this until her nose touches the ground, and then go further and see if I can teach her to bow/put her nose between her feet. I see lots of Feldenkrais in the future, but not yet.

The fish guy said, "Your new horse is really friendly!" I said, "Really? I don't really know her yet." I guess she makes friends easily then: )

Oddly, this mare will not eat our grain pellets nor our minerals. I don't plan on giving her any grain until she's in work, but I just wanted to see if it would help her eat the vitimins. Tonight I'll try beet pulp, just a tiny bit, to see if I can get the vitamins in. How odd, a horse who isn't into grain.

I want to repeat that I do not hand feed the mare yet, and in the photo my friend said "Call her over to you, see if I can get a portrait." And I thought, "Geez, I've never done this before, and I have been chasing her around the pasture the last 15 minutes, there's no way she'll come over to me"...but as if she were being round penned, she actually wanted to come to us. I had no food, so she just sniffed my wrist. I love a horse that is easy to catch.

I was looking up the etymology of the name Mara and surprised by what I found today. Then I saw it's a variation of Amara, which I find gorgeous, rhyming with Inara, one of the best names ever, but already taken by another blogger's horse. Amara is a city in Romania and Iraq. That fits with my naming animals after places - our cat is named after a Seattle street. I haven't decided yet. My colleague at work was like, "You have had PLENTY of time to think up a name, come on now!"

My sister commented here that it is a bittersweet time for me, so the name might fit in that respect. Also, the crayola color Bittersweet was a reddish brown, somehow, although if I worked at Crayola company, Bittersweet would be a dark anthracite. Not that they are geniuses with crayon naming, check out this article, which includes a reference to bittersweet. I enjoyed the "flesh" crayon rant the most.

So here is more info on the word Mara...

Mara

The name Mara occurs only once in the Bible. It's the name that Naomi gives herself after returning to Bethlehem from Moab, where her husband Elkanah and two sons Mahlon and Chilion have died. Chilion's widow Orpah stayed behind but Mahlon's widow comes with Naomi. In Bethlehem she meets and marries Boaz, and they become the parents of Obed, the grandparents of Jesse, the father of king David.

Noami says, "Call me Mara because Shaddai has dealt bitterly with me" (Ruth 2:20), and the word for bitter comes from the verb marar (marar), meaning to be bitter. This verb comes with no less than twelve derivatives, all pretty much meaning the same thing, from the adjective mar (mar), meaning bitter to the noun morah (morah), meaning bitterness, and from the adjective meriri (meriri), also meaning bitter, to the noun mmerirut (merirut), meaning bitterness. Hebrews love to lament, and it shows through their many ways to say bitter.

However, it should be noted with some stress, that for the Hebrew audience the idea of bitterness has as much to do with grief as with strength. A dish with a bitter taste is said to have a "strong" taste. HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament reports that the Ugaritic, Arabic and Aramaic cognates of this root mean to bless, strengthen or commend. And since these languages are most often very similar to Hebrew, any Hebrew audience would surely be aware of this secondary meaning. HAW lists four texts in which this verb may be more appropriately be translated with strength/strengthen than with bitterness/being bitter: Exodus 1:14, Judges 18:25, Ecclesiastes 7:26 and Ezekiel 314.

When Noami calls herself Mara, she is not simply complaining that she's been dealt a lousy hand; she's saying that the grief that Shaddai has visited upon her has made her strong.