Image courtesy of TheSoulOfAHorse.comImagine in place of your 9 to 5 concrete jungle of skyscrapers and taxi cabs, rolling green pastures that stretch off into infinity. Clean country air instead of thick, orangish pollution. Horse whinnies instead of car horns.
For Joe Camp, having left behind the highly profitable world of Hollywood production, this is exactly what he and his wife, Kathleen, have to look forward to every morning on their ranch in Valley Center, California.
After having warmed our heart’s with the Benji tales (Who could resist that furry, floppy-eared puppy?), Joe embarks on a journey into The Soul of a Horse.
What started out as a surprise birthday present from Kathleen turned into an eye-opening experience into how little we as people actually know about the needs of our equine companions.
Throughout the story, Joe carefully weaves his own experiences with a parallel story of what it must have been like for his first horse, Cash, to go from the absolute freedom of the wild to the strangeness of the world of captivity.
Through his stories, Joe promotes an organic relationship, unfettered by “conventional wisdom,” with both horses and, by extension, other people.
“We humans are in such a hurry that there’s no time to build a relationship,” he writes. “To learn to communicate. To gain and give understanding. To walk in the horse’s boots, so to speak. To begin at the beginning.”
Perhaps the most wonderful part of reading such a masterfully written book is that, though the reader may believe he is learning solely about horses, the lessons expounded upon in the book are completely applicable to person-to-person relationships as well.
“The philosophy behind everything has learned doesn’t apply just to horses but to how you humans approach life as well,” Cash (through Joe, of course) explains in the opening.
For anyone that has ever owned, thought of owning or simply loved the idea of owning a horse, this book provides a stirring and thought-provoking look into the world of relationships.
“When we stop learning, we really stop living,” Joe concludes. “Because nothing propels us more effectively through life than knowledge.” TheSoulOfAHorse.com
rachel grice 