To Be Known is To Be Loved

The wind knows the rider before the horse does. Long before sunup, boots scuff barnwood and the rawhide creaks with memory. A buckaroo doesn’t announce himself… he just is. A silhouette stitched into the mesa’s edge, hat pulled low not in mystery, but in reverence. Out here, to be known is not to be seen, but to be trusted. The land doesn't care for noise, only for the kind of silence that speaks from the chest. He moves like water, slow when he can, fast when he must… always listening. The cattle don’t flinch when he rides through, and that’s a kind of love, ain’t it? Unspoken, wide-eyed, mutual. There’s a gentleness to the way he loops the rope, as if he’s telling the steer, “I see you, I need you, I won’t hurt you.” Love, in the hands of a working man, looks like sweat and callus and quiet intention. And the horse… the horse knows everything. He knows what the rider’s holding back. When the world falls off the edge of the plain and a man’s only company is his own breath, the horse still walks beside him like a brother that doesn’t ask questions. To be known is to be loved, and the horse loves him for who he ain’t trying to be. So when the fire dims and stars poke their cold fingers through the sky, and the coffee’s gone bitter, he sits still. Ain’t got much to say. Ain’t much he needs to. The land knows him. The wind knows him. The old dog at his feet knows the rhythm of his sigh. And that’s enough. That’s everything. Because out here, to be known is to be loved… and to be loved is to still be riding come morning