Now, sitting atop Óski, waiting for everyone to get situated, the big gelding turns his head all the way around and grabs the toe of my boot with his teeth.
Hey lady, he says. What say we ride the shit out of this thing today.
Óski is six years old and this is his first season on long tour. Icelandic horses aren’t generally started until five, and their fifth winter is one of serious training. Óski belongs to Hróðmar, Nonni’s brother, and I’ve heard he’s a favorite of Hróðmar’s wife, Brigitte. He’s approaching this, his first tour season, like an eager freshman shipped off to a fancy college—I’m just here to learn and do my best, ma’am. He’s getting a little beat up by the older, tour-savvy horses when he’s loose in the herd, but he’s been universally loved by every human who’s ridden him.
Óski has beautiful gaits, par for the course for a Hróðmar-raised gelding. He’s strong and surefooted for a youngster, forward, but not too forward, eager to go at exactly the pace I ask for, with plenty of energy to spare. And there’s something else happening between me and Óski, which can be chalked up to both his age and his nature. He wants, with his whole heart, for him and me to be spending this day as a team.
There exists many a meme claiming a horse can hear a human heartbeat from four feet away, followed by a flurry of so-called scientists debunking it. True or not, when I’m sitting on a horse, I can feel his heartbeat and he can feel mine. There are recent scientific studies proving that when humans and horses interact, their two heart rates become coherent, which means the frequencies of my heart are lining up with the frequencies of Óski’s heart, which may be what produces that utterly addictive feeling of two becoming one. This is another thing any twelve-year-old horse girl could verify. If we paused to make a list of things twelve-year-old girls know about horses that scientists are only now catching up to, we might be here all day.
At first, what Óski and my hearts are saying to each other is pretty typical for horse and rider. Can I trust you? That’s great, because you can trust me! Which elongates into isn’t this fun and yes it’s so much fun, and then if you gave me just a bit more rein I would not take advantage of it, and if you threw a little flying pace in on the straightaways it would be perfectly okay with me, which leads naturally into don’t worry about those high trail gullies, I will take care of you if you have to drop your stirrups and lift your feet behind you, and you can be certain that no matter what happens, I will protect your mouth, which blossoms into you know this might be the very most fun day ever, and I don’t think there’s any question about it, and I wish we could keep riding together just like this until the end of time.
...
In the four months since I returned from Iceland, I’ve lost one friend and three acquaintances to suicide. Several of my women friends are on high alert because, in the face of this administration’s war against women, their daughters have become suicidal. Suicide has risen exponetially among LGBTQIA+ and trans youth since public hatred toward them has been relegitimized. Native Americans continue to have the highest suicide rate in the nation, a direct result of five hundred years of erasure and genocide, and suicide rates for Black youth spiked in 2025 as those in power made racist rhetoric great again. An organization I follow called JED informs me, on a daily basis, that one in ten high school students tried to take their life this year.
One in ten.
On the positive side, several of my friends who work in equine therapy are seeing deep and beautiful relationships form between their young clients and their horses. Here in the US, formerly wild mustangs, in particular, are providing sensitive and useful mirrors to deeply troubled teens. I have ridden a friend’s rescued mustang named Birdie on several occasions, and she is simultaneously half-wild and sensible, the closest thing to an Icelandic I have met at home.
I’m at an age that makes suicidal thoughts feel pretty redundant, but the despair and moral shame I carry watching the daily harm those who have stolen their way to power in my country are enacting, on children and wolves, on our allies and the Earth, sends me as low some days as I have ever been.
Animals are here to help us live. I am absolutely sure of it. Not to the exclusion of being their beautiful, brilliant, wild, and sentient selves, but because of it. Horses know, without even having to think about it, that deep connection and mutual care fill our tanks rather than deplete them. Generosity is its own reward, someone said a long time ago, not only because of some karmic equation, but because it is in the moment of giving that we are most full. All animals know this and would share that knowledge and so much more with us freely, if only we would stop exterminating them.
I would love to die while riding an Icelandic horse in full stride on a beach, or on an endless sheep trail in the highlands. But I would love even more to live in that condition. For at least a little while longer. And if I organize my working life just right into semi-retirement, it’s possible that I can.
Nearly six weeks after I arrived home from Iceland, I got the following email from Hróðmar:
