I'm horse riding because of Leo, because of the Titanic, because of feelings.
World Environment Day: focus on the feels!
It’s World Environment Day today. So I will start by saying sorry to the world’s environment that we’re screwing you over badly. So badly.
Today, the day just happens to be a Thursday so that means I will be commiserating celebrating thinking about Earth Day by going to my weekly adult beginner horse riding lesson. I think tonight will be the night I learn to gallop (it all depends on how high I can get my thighs off the saddle and into a rising trot. I’ve been diligently doing my leg raises at home to prepare but I feel my trot might be more bumping as opposed to rising).
Adult beginner. Appropriate name. I often feel like I am a beginner adult at most things, including life. I do appreciate that the riding school have not called the class for what it really is: a class for women having a mid-life crisis and deciding to deal with it by getting on a horse for the first time in her life despite being super scared about (or being scared about it is one of the reasons driving why she wants to do it in the first place). That would be a long class title.
Oh my goodness though. How much do I love these lessons? A lot. I had a long chat with my therapist teacher the other week about why this is. I do love being outside, and especially love walking and running on the trails in the mountain (hill) around my house but being on a horse is a whole new way of experiencing nature (and yourself as you realise that having born three kids means rising trot brings with it a whole set of complications that have nothing to do with your (limited) thigh strength (this will be another story). Horse teacher tells me that horse riding is a way of getting up close and personal with animals that grounds you to nature. Which is funny because the ground seems an awfully long way away when you are on top of a big horse.
Anyway, horse riding has turned out to be everything I wanted it to be. While I am not yet Jessica (from the Man from Snowy River) I have already booked myself into a three day trail ride in the Snowy Mountains next month (the site of the movie) in the hopes that I may transform.
I am, in my mind anyway, Kate Winslet, aka Rose, from the Titanic.
And this brings me back to World Environment Day. Anyone else feel that we’re all on board a sinking ship right now? We’ve already hit the iceberg, and we’re now making a slow descent into the abyss (the dark, dark waters below). To be very clear about my analogy: we’ve so screwed our environment that we’re now all (well most of us) are going to drown.*
Leo/Jack is in the water.
Remember that part of the movie when Kate/Rose tells Leo/Jack how she wants to be Jack? Leo/Jack talks about their future (when it seemed that they were going to have one, before the ship hit the iceberg)
Leo/Jack says to Kate/Rose:
“We'll drink cheap beer and go on the rollercoaster until we throw up and we'll ride horses on the beach... right in the surf... but you have to ride like a cowboy, none of that side-saddle stuff.”
None of that ever happens. Well, it does not happen for Leo/Jack. Remember, he drowns. Like so many others (1,517 to be exact).
But it does for Kate/Rose. When Kate/Rose is interviewed at her house years later, there is a photo of her at the beach, sitting on a horse right at the surfline.
To state the obvious, she followed through: Leo/Jack saving her was not in vain.
Sigh.
Let’s talk about Leonardo DiCaprio.
In this world, (the one where he was not Jack and did not drown) he is very much around, and has been, for years, warning us that the ship is sinking; that we have to do better on the environment.
From the UN:
Mr. DiCaprio also serves on the board of several environmental protection organizations including the World Wildlife Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, International Fund for Animal Welfare, Pristine Seas and Oceans 5. He is also an advisor on The Solutions Project, an organization dedicated to scaling up the adoption of clean, renewable energy. In 2014, DiCaprio was honored with the prestigious Clinton Global Citizen Award for his philanthropic work.
Oh, and he founded his own foundation - the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation (LDF) - in 1998, at the age of 24! LDF provides grants to organizations working on the ground to protect fragile ecosystems and key species.
(He’s also done a lot of activism in Australia around the protection of the Maugean Skate in Tasmania, native forest logging and endangered species protection
Leo is who I think of, sometimes, when I am on a horse.
Which is not what I would have thought of when I first watched the Titanic in 1997.
I was 22.
I would not have predicted then that, when I was close to 50, I would learn to ride a horse.
Clearly, the Titanic (and The Man from Snowy River) have had a massive impact on me.
My point therefore (I know, finally) is that we need more movies like these movies! We need to - almost subconsciously - have aspirations, embedded deeply within us, of riding a horse on a beach that:
exists - it has not been washed away (there are no rising sea levels); and
is pristine and has no plastic** (or fish that have died because they ate plastic).
And the way to do that is for many more of us to recognise that our environment is an incredibly important part of us - and we are a part of it.
This is how I imagine Leo/Jack is looking at us now as we sit, sipping champagne, on the sinking ship.
Do not let his activism be in vain.
Be Rose.
Ride a horse.
Happy World Environment Day.
jb
*I could have written loads about the parallels between the class warfare that is a massive plot of the Titanic and the inequality of the climate and biodiversity crisis today but I might save that for another day.
**Coincidentally, the theme for this year’s World Environment Day is ‘Beat Plastic Pollution’. And it is being hosted by my second home, South Korea.