She Flies Without Wings
How Horses Touch a Woman's Soul
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
From a renowned horsewoman and gifted storyteller comes this groundbreaking new book that explores a powerful relationship like no other: the magical kinship between women and horses.
Drawing from myth and literature, the author’s own experiences, and interviews with countless women, we learn, through women’s deeply personal stories, how horses enrich our lives and connect us to nature–making us readers of rhythm and invisible signs, helping us harness our youthful sexuality, sharing the “horsepower” we need to reach our dreams. And here we see how, for thousands of years, the deep kinship between women and horses has connected us to our most intimate feelings of delight, helped us learn to solve problems, and set our creativity free.
From the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer to the fiction of Jane Austen to folktales from around the world, She Flies Without Wings uses great literature and myth to encompass a wide spectrum of beliefs and perspectives–and creates a true celebration of speed, air, and the spectacular animal that connects us with both.
Filled with the moving lessons–-about sensuality, commitment, power, nurturance, and spirituality–women riders have known for centuries, written with a loving hand by an expert equestrian, She Flies Without Wings is an eloquent paean to a pairing that enlivened history, inspired literature, and continues to enchant us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In stables and paddocks across the world, young girls lean against horses, sighing with the kind of happiness only horse lovers know. Midkiff (Fitness, Performance, and the Female Equestrian), obviously an equestrian down to her very marrow, tries to convey this ecstasy with a combination of autobiography, storytelling and snippets of poetry, essays and novels. For the most part, she succeeds, recalling her days growing up near a horse farm, nurturing her passion through horse clubs and finally assuming responsibility for her first horse, a temperamental beast unlike the one she now calls her muse. When she takes a step back to examine why women love horses, Midkiff stumbles into sticky sentimentality, evincing none of the detachment necessary for such an exercise. She does better when it comes to the book's real meat: her emotional autobiography. By including passages of breathless admiration, love and obsession, she allows a rare view of horse-based compulsion. She ambitiously divides the book into introspective sections (e.g., "Power," "Creativity," "Danger," "Transformation Through Compassion" and "Freedom") based on what horses have brought into her own and other women's lives (more than 80% of people involved with horses are girls and women), namely a liberating sense of self-acceptance.
Customer Reviews
Horses horses horses!!!!
Love this book, if your an absolute horse freak, nature lover, and a true girl-horses