A horse, night.

Wanderers are my favourite people. And one of my favourite people and collaborators, Mr Tim Mummery, is currently wandering the Kimberleys in remote Western Australia, making new films, finishing old ones, camping with the old folk and meeting new mob. Every now and then, during his travels, whether in Mexico or the USA, India or the Gulf of Carpentaria, he sends me a cluster of beautiful images or a small excerpt of his meandering/thinking from wherever he is. Things like this:

And a while back he sent me this poem by an acclaimed and well known US poet I'd never read and never imagined I would read (but have since planned some time in this life to read more of): 

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

 And he sent these:

And these:

And this:

Then, a few nights ago, he sent me this mysterious and intensely beautiful photograph he had taken while sleeping rough on the edge of a horseman's camp. Over the space of several days, the horses would slowly let him approach closer and closer until they met in this way:

It was strange to get this image as I had been having some kind of day dream just before receiving this (perhaps around the same time as the photograph was taken) about frightened horses in a paddock at night, whinnying and rearing. And, with this thought in mind, I'd resolved to incorporate an image of the slightest light in a horse's eyeball into one of the end sequences of a film I'm working on. In the sequence an approaching fire frightens the horses and kangaroos in the paddocks near to the fringes of the fire. I didn't want to be able to see anything other than a frightened eye in the darkness. The image in my mind's eye was almost identical to this. Somewhere his thought had wandered to mine, or mine to his. Whatever it is, it's a beautiful thing.