Reading – “A Language of Love”

Loretta Würtenberger and Hubertus Graf Zedtwitz talk about love in its many forms: their love for their horses, for the nature around them, and, on a friendly level, for one another. Accompanied by Hubertus, her trainer and friend, Loretta seeks harmony with her beloved horse—the dark-brown Hanoverian mare Grace. During the many hours spent in the riding arena, she soon realizes that riding is not about command and obedience, but about friendship and connection. Equestrian terms such as “contact,” “aids,” “looseness,” or “responsiveness” become metaphors in her exchanges with Hubertus. Together they discover that the language of horsemanship is, in truth, a language of love. Their learning process becomes a journey: into the history of the more than five-millennia-long symbiosis between horse and human, into philosophy, architecture, and literature, and time and again into art, in which the horse is omnipresent. But engaging with Grace is above all a journey to oneself: for only when Hubertus and Loretta have found their own individual rhythm can they find the rhythm with their counterpart—be it horse or human.