Every generation of artists has the obligation to REPAINT the WALLS of the CAVES

28,000 BC In the Pyrenees mountains of southern France 30,000 years ago, Skyler rescued a young foal from a pack of wolves. He led it home for his daughters to raise and they painted its image on the walls of a nearby cave.

3,000 BC In the hills near Karaganda, Kazakhstan 5,000 years ago, a nomadic Botia woman chased a wild colt into her tribe’s corral. With a calm voice and kind gestures, Jilqui Ayal raised him to carry her family’s cookware and tent on their travels.

400 BC 2500 years ago in the hillside village of Desulo, Sardinia, Aisar quietly coaxed his 3-year old mare into a yoke attached to a round millstone. Together they began grinding barley and bitter herbs for his family’s medicinal brews.

Year One In the hills of Germany’s Teutoburg Forest 2100 years ago, a Grecian-trained medical practitioner packed the saddlebags of her horses with medicinal herbs, roots and olive oil. Attached to the Roman Legion, Coquo tended to the wounds of cavalrymen and their horses alike.

900 AD In a steep mountain fiord along the coast of Western Norway 1,200 years ago, a traditional wise-woman loaded her horses into the midsection of a longship. Hallveig Fróðadóttir packed her staff alongside the food and feed for the journey across to Iceland.

1200 AD Nine hundred years ago, a Mongolian soldier in the service of the Great Genghis Kahn strapped three bags of mare’s milk onto his horses. Moriton prayed to the horse goddess that the slowly rocking movement of his horses would ferment the milk along the long ride towards the Black Sea.

1850 AD On his journey to the wharfs of the Ohio River at Portland, an Irish-born teamster tied a canvas tarp over the back of his stakebed dray wagon with a protection knot to hide the sight of his cargo. Under cover of darkness, Jack Carter helped escaped slaves slip into the river to freedom on other side.

2200 AD A root-worker and mountain herbalist in the hills of Eastern Kentucky whispers encouragement into the ear of her horse as she hitches him to the plow. In the post-fossil fuel economy, Persephone’s healing skills are highly sought after by her hill folk neighbors.

Dear Friends,

Celebrate Kentucky Derby this season with an introduction to the traditional bonds between humans and horses, starting with a walk down 30,000 years of our co-evolutionary relationship.

Kentucky Horse Charms is a Call to the Post for the next generation of Commonwealth Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha citizens to start preparing for a reduction of hydrocarbon energy to pre-industrial levels. Over the next 25 years, fossil fuels will slowly become commercially extinct, and Big Oil is calling the process ‘managed decline’.

To help Kentuckians negotiate this decline and loss of current energy use, you’re invited to an art exhibition that lays the groundwork for a prudent reintroduction of horse-and-buggies to the streets of Louisville.

Horses helped us build modern civilization. Horses will help rebuild civilization after the hydrocarbon horsepower runs dry.

Together, we must begin a dialog on how society might successfully adapt to an upcoming age of eco-peasantry. Join us in this discussion and we’ll send you home with a free Kentucky Horse Charm— a personal good-luck talisman for trotting down the rocky roads of energy scarcity.

Saddle up on your maiden ride to environmental resiliency.

Yours for a sustainable and biodiverse future,

Ken McCormick