I want to take you on a journey.
A journey filled with experiences that I have come to understand were always meant for you, as much or more than they were ever meant for me.
My designated task, I now believe, to share what happened. That which forever changed me. To share every strange twist and turn, the discoveries, the questions, to make you a part of it. To help you question what you thought you knew, what you think is possible—a journey of discovery. A mystery that has always been right here, waiting for us to find.
It was here in these pages where the mystery began to unfold. It was not until the words were put down on paper to share with you that surprising glimpses of the answers began to be revealed. The pages themselves unexpectedly revealing answers that I couldn't find before, even after looking for them desperately for years.
But it turns out this is not my story, not mine to take a hold of, or to take as a testament to who or what I am. What follows doesn't belong to any human. What follows comes from them, from those that we call Kjrsos, the spirit of the horses. This is their voice. Their voice so we can hear what we have yet to hear. A voice that can be hard to hear, yet a voice that all of us need to listen for.
Kjrsos is our spelling of a word from a long-dead reconstructed language called Proto Indo-European, called PIE for short. The common ancestor language of all of the Indo-European family of languages that came afterwards. Today the most widely spoken language family in the world. The beginning of hundreds of languages that came afterwards. A language that is, in a way, still a part of all of us, evolving through the centuries with us and continuing to live on in the words that we use every day.
Before English, French, Spanish, or German, thousands of years before Latin or Greek, this is one of the words that linguists believe was used to represent the idea of the horse. Before the word horse, cheval, pferd, or equus, the word Kjrsos came first.
To understand how Kjrsos is pronounced, think of the name Kirsten, the r trilled, the 'os' sounding like the 'oas' in toast. If you listen carefully, you might hear the echo of the word horse even today in this word Kjrsos.
They lived 6500 to 9500 years ago on the vast forest steppe stretching from the northern shores of the Black Sea, and as far east as the Caspian Sea. It is told that they would not name that which they held sacred, special, magical. And so they could have many names for those they revered. Kjrsos is one of those names.
This naming of Kjrsos linguists believe came from their word "kers" to run. The naming a compelling representation of the horse's breathtaking beauty, power, strength, and the freedom they represented. A naming of an idea.
Representing the magic they felt deep inside their souls when they gazed upon the herd springing into action and racing across a steep slope dotted with yellow wildflowers and onwards across vast plains. Something that spoke to their hearts and to their spirits even back then.
There is power, I believe, and a common history for all of us in the concept of a name that existed from the time that we first clambered onto their backs thousands of years ago from a language that is still alive in over four hundred languages still spoken today that exist because of this other language that came first.
We have had a relationship with horses for thousands of years since since the time of this long-dead language. And while the language is now long gone, the horses are still here. And delightfully, for all the time that we have been together, the horses can still surprise us. Delight us. Challenge us. And perhaps most importantly of all, choose to be by our sides, choose to be there for us.
I hope the mysteries of what follows fills you with a childlike wonder and fills your heart with joyful curiosity. And that together, we can explore and share what we learn along the way.
This story belongs to everyone. This isn't my story, but amazingly, it is our story, our story to wonder and marvel at.
I want to take you on the journey that I was taken on, with the hope you can be inspired the way I was inspired by these others. So that you can learn new things or at least be inspired by some new questions. I hope you can feel what I felt.
Inspiration can lead to change - can lead to transformation. I hope this sharing inspires you.
Each of these events made me look at the world, at the horses, at everything in my life in a new light.
They surprised me, made me wonder, made me question what I thought I knew.
These experiences gave me so many questions and mysteries, many of which I still struggle with today, years later. But they all filled me with wonder, delight, and thanks for these extraordinary gifts, and in the process, they made me very humble.
I no longer believe that I am unique as a human.
I no longer look to just other humans for answers.
I no longer look to other humans for the best questions. Although I hope that together you can help me towards the answers.
I know there is a grace, there is a wisdom for us to find.
And I finally understand that the best things come not from us but through us. Which is why this story and the books that follow are signed as authored - by Kjrsos - The Guiding Light of the Horse. Because it is their voice we need to hear. Honouring the true authors of what follows.
Here I present to you the wisdom to be found in this the first book of the horses, Book One in The Books of the Horses/The Books of Kjrsos
Nadja Caroline Kostiuk - The Naming of My Birth