About a year ago @elodieunderglass wrote a series of posts about an extinct type of horse, the Irish Hobelar. She ended it with art and a story, and beautiful words: he threw his heart over and she follows it still; and they’ll never land!
It made me think about the kinds of stories we tell, and why, and what the best, most heart-wrenching ones have in common. All of them mean something. The journeys those characters take, that we take with them, they all meant something — it’s why we tell these stories again and again, even if they’re sad. We’re all reaching out to tell each other that everything we do matters, even if the ending is sad or tragic or you never finished what you set out to do — it all matters.
So I told this story again. And I linked it to stories I love, stories it reminded me of, quotes I’ve heard that have stuck with me and made me look at life differently. Because it’s not the ending. It’s how they got there. It’s what we’ll remember. And this story deserves remembering. Your stories deserve remembering. I hope we all keep writing them.
Credits, links, and the full image without text below.
The original post references this discussion on medieval cavalry and this series of posts about the origins of Hobelar. Quotes unattributed below are from these posts.
“This was always going to happen. She’s been dead since the beginning.” from the Orestia, by Aeschylus
“Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.” from War of the Foxes by Richard Siken
“This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” and "a strange thing about stories..." are from the Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith novelization by Matthew Stover
On the Siege of Calais is on the Internet Archive
“The Hobelar is something of a sideshow…” is from the essay Re-thinking the Origins of the ‘Irish’ Hobelar by Robert Jones
“Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved?” from Ovid’s Metamorphoses
"Her faith carried him with her" is from the Rogue One novelization by Alexander Freed
“People really be like ‘that’s not realistic’ as if the entire universe isn’t a living miracle beyond human comprehension” by Twitter user omgsidewalks
"We only look sad because you can't imagine a stillness that's not" and "you are here on this earth forever. Nobody seems to tell you this." are from the book Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer
"What about the rest of us? What about the nobodies..." is from Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo
"all the war did was identify the spear that would not break" is from Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson
"Get in loser we're living past the end of our myth" by tumblr user aridante
All handwritten text (in the paper cutouts) was written by me, and all art was hand-drawn in Procreate. You can find the full art (without text) here!
