“Book Review: From the Heart of a Horsewoman”
by Pablo Capra
Photos courtesy of Lynnea Paxton-Honn
In the 1960s, a group of girls in Lower Topanga roamed the land on horseback, riding in the creek, on the beach, and all over Sunset Mesa before houses were built there.
“I was thirteen years old when horses came into my daily life,” says Lynnea Paxton-Honn, “one black named Dilly, and one bay named Mazie, in the neighborhood horse facility that our fathers built.”
To buy her own horse, Lynnea got a waitressing job at French’s Wee Nook at the corner of Topanga and PCH, where Oasis Imports is today.
A lover of Westerns, she confesses, “The horses, not the men that rode them, were my heroes.... My heart wanted the same communion... that was shared by Silver and The Lone Ranger, Trigger and Roy Rogers, and Champion and Gene Autry.”
Her friend Sara Lane became a cowgirl actress on TV’s The Virginian, and Ingrid Lindquist completed the group that shared a “piece of heaven with me.”
Now in her 70s, Lynnea has published From the Heart of a Horsewoman, a book about the love of horses which she and her friends still share. It examines the bond between humans and horses from a scientific, aesthetic, and spiritual viewpoint.
Lynnea cites a 2010 article by Ellen Kaye Gehrke, PhD, called “The Horse-Human Heart Connection” about a study that was done on horse riders. The study noted that “each person synchronized his or her particular [heart rhythms] to match the horse’s specific frequency cycle.” In other words, the calmness of a horse has a real therapeutic effect on humans.
According to sculptor Diana Reuter-Twining, horses teach us about beauty because they embody the Golden Ratio. Lynnea defines the Golden Ratio, in her own wonderful words, as “an asymmetrical balance that creates an ever-evolving movement, forever seeking to bring the whole into balance and forever recreating its asymmetry in a harmony that carries the eye into a mystery of searching.”
Finally, Lynnea says, horses help us to grow spiritually. “... a rider experiences their church on the back of a horse in nature.... This amazing, beautiful connection we have with horses is but a schooling place for the bigger connection that we have with all Life.”
Horse lovers will be moved by the myriad ways Lynnea has found to explain their joy.
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| Lynnea, 14, on Ingrid's horse Lace, 1961 |
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| Lynnea on her first horse Champagne, 1962-63 |
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| Brother Kurt and cousin Debby with horses Brandy and Dilly |
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| Lynnea Paxton-Honn today with horse Sparkle Plenty |
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EXCERPT:
Was I born with the passion for horses? I don't know. I was born with a passion for life and horses are the epitome of life-energy, rhythm, beauty, symmetry, mystery, primordial connection to earth and heaven. I have spent much of my life wrapped in the pursuit of understanding the unifying essence that is the Horse/Human relationship. What I have learned is that there are no words to describe that instant of unity when bodies and minds meld into one intent, one dance, one expression.
When I was growing up, I spent my summers on the beach in a Southern California bay along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. Swimming out just past the breakers I would allow my body to float on the surface of the undulating sea, letting go and allowing the rhythmic surge of the water to hold and carry me. Just as I was lifted by the gentle heave of the ocean, in that place where tension and release are held together in mutual and balanced suspension, there is that moment when horse and rider release to the other, allowing form and movement to hold and carry them in one intent.
