Zhenevere Sophia Dao
Post-Daoist & Neo-Romantic
Cultural & Existential Philosophy
& Counter-Capitalist Imagination
Mythosomatics
My little flames kip up everywhere,
trying to burn us with sameness,
but you say, “
You poor, poor ocean,
you mess of endless stars.”
ZSD
Photo by Willa Roberts, August 2024
In the mid-1990's I began a career working with horses, studying farriery (horseshoeing) and natural hoof wear as a science, and apprenticing in blacksmithing and equine veterinary medicine. Before that I was an academic, a professor of poetry and literature. But the horse touched me too strongly, like the inward pounding of the real world. I needed an earthly life—and the horse to me was the mood at the heart of the Earth. The first iteration of that vocation lasted fifteen years, a career that spanned continents, between America and Italy, and included all manner of horses, from elite competition horses to beloved backyard pets. Now, in Northern New Mexico, I work with horses because their very being is what in the realm of philosophy I have tried to describe as "a religion of sensitivity." Their kinetic power, beauty, and fragility, and their locus of emotion as communication is to me a kind of existential justice, a rightness of being. I have tried to live toward that justice, toward the profound tempest of the horse.
Toward Eternity
Anatomical Hoof Care
& Interspecies Communication
Zhenevere Sophia Dao
Farrier/Barefoot Trimmer/Trainer
The Equus Series
Using some of the Mythosomatic forms that I have choreographed over the last 25 years, I have assembled an Equestrian Mythosomatic Series, The Equus Series, specifically designed for riders, trainers, and horse lovers to draw humans toward the fragile and powerful sensorium of the horse.
For more information, please contact me on either of my websites.
