Horse Wisdom
Remembering us back into nature's silence
When I look up, I see buds along the knuckled tree branches. When I look down the bank below where I stand by the arena fence, I see a big oak split in the storm like a bloom of ink in water. I see where the briars and moss creep up the recumbent trunk, nature’s stage crew working behind the spotlight of the sun.
Forty degrees feels balmy but things are still growing while the earth sleeps.
We grab clippers to cut the thorny vines back where they emerge from the still-standing branches that drape the arena.
Tomorrow the vines will return and there will be even more to cut back. The cycles of the earth’s clock are so slow that we forget the world is turning around us while we sleep and dream the worlds inside us.
Humans are nesting dolls of possibilities.
In the house after lessons, I fall asleep while the new kitten dozes — I wake up confused from a dream — for a moment it feels like I have forgotten how to write.
Lakin asked why my post last week made her cry. My writing wasn’t meant to be sad. I introduced the new kitten to the world but that was just the surface. Underneath my words, grief pooled, a catch in my throat as I swallowed.
You’re sensing the sadness trapped between the words, I said.
Horse people like Lakin are adept at sensing the energy between things, the truth in the unspoken, the white spaces that, like glue, hold the world together.
This is the season of transition, the weather holding her breath between winter and spring, the sunlight inching longer into the days, the awkward silence of waiting. We’re neither here nor there.
My work with clients this week has been about noticing, about getting comfortable with the awkwardness of stillness, of not trying to fill the spaces between the words. Because it’s only when we sink into stillness that we can see and hear and taste the invisible fullness contained inside the gaps of our understanding.
Horses are masters at teaching us this.
We were halfway home in the long drive across the mountains to bring the new kitten home when I learned that a beloved member of our farm family, of my family, had suffered an unimaginable loss, the kind of loss that changed the landscape of her life forever.
My skin went numb for her.
I watched the road, looked down at the sleeping kitten in my lap, up to the road, down to the kitten.
I lost my words.
We’ve talked a lot since Hurricane Helene about how disasters boil us down to our essence like a condensed roux, but we don’t really talk about what essence is made of, that stuff of us that exists in the waiting between actions.
I had big, lofty themes I wanted to explore this week in my writing namely, pride — that’s a subject I want to tackle — and those recurring themes of awe and creativity that I’m obsessed with in this new year, but like my sessions with the horses and clients, what’s really on my mind is the ineffable, the unspoken, those thorny vines that keep growing while I sleep in winter.
I realized that I work with horses every day but somewhere along the way, I’d stopped seeing them. Same with people around me and the present moment. My work is about helping people find themselves — I know the tools but am I really using them?
I’m in a session and I lean on the arena fence beside the bank of the storm-split tree, where the moss creeps up the drying bark. I watch a client stand in silence with a horse. We’re working on noticing.
In inches and minutes: When did the horse notice you? Did you catch it? Did the moment pass but you noticed it after the fact? That counts too.
I’m the witness watching the little bay mare pin an ear, a nostril balloon to hold the scent of a brush fire in the woods, her neck twitching at the creak of the budding branches above us.
What if I let go of my discernment? What would that feel like?
To me, discernment is weighing the balance of right and wrong. It’s a life work of constant planning, aching into the future, the next moment, constantly searching for the next best move.
In the sacred space of the client and little bay mare’s silence, I let go.
I let go of my need to deliver. I let go of my need to make sense. I let go of trying to tell the future so that I can prepare, so I can plan, so I can only travel the paths that I see clearly. I let go of all that.
The world doesn’t stop turning.
The low winter sun stays put along the edge of the horizon. Nature keeps on naturing.
I almost write that nature keeps on naturing without me but this isn’t true. I’m a part of it too. But when I drop my urgency to produce, I can actually feel it. I sink into the in-between spaces.
There are no words — I’ve said this so many times in the past months. But words are my currency and I feel broke without them.
Horses and humans have many similarities in their nervous systems but the human brain is very different. Horses don’t (for all we know) extrapolate. They don’t try to constantly guess the future. For centuries we have tried to use the explanation of animals lacking a complex forebrain to argue that humans are intellectually superior.
That logic holds when we expect animals to recite Shakespearean couplets or state their species in French, but what if humans have filled their heads with so much stuff that they’ve reached capacity? I imagine (because I’m human) over-information filling like the septic system in the farmhouse. If the tank isn’t cleaned every so often, the waste backs up through the drains, spilling out and over, dirtying an otherwise clean space.
I remind my client to feel their feet, to press the shallow breath in their chest down into their belly. I remind myself to do the same.
We’ve become phobic of noticing what’s in front of us. That’s why silence and stillness feel so awkward — like it’s foreign to think with our bodies instead of our brains.
Good thing the horses are here to remember us back. Or a warm sleeping kitten in my lap as I watch the road and try to comprehend incomprehensible news.
When the words in our heads are spinning out, we need a touchstone to ground us back into the earth around us instead of living in the world we’ve created inside our minds.
I do that with my clients in Respite sessions. Respite is a catch-all term (until I can think of a better one) that means a lot of different things to different people but all Respites share a similar theme of being in nature with the horses.
My client stands with the little bay mare whose big, deep eyes drop in rest like the winter sun along the low rim of the horizon. I notice the sense of the mare’s presence in the space between us, the edge of my presence mixing with the shared space of the horse and my client.
We don’t have to fill this quiet with words.
Somewhere in the space between the birds resting on the budding branches and the imperceptible lengthening of the thorny vines, relationships are braiding through the mingling of our breaths.
And somewhere in that in-between space, we find our essence.
Love,
Kim
NOTES:
I can’t wait to have you join the conversation with me and Jane Pike as we explore creativity in the next episode of my Relatively Stable podcast launching this week.
Click here to help people in the Blue Ridge Mountains recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Helene.
Click here to help the beloved member of our farm family who is living the daily trauma of unimaginable loss.
Please join me and other paid subscribers for my monthly Zoom this Friday, January 31st at 7:00 PM.
“I almost write that nature keeps on naturing without me but this isn’t true. I’m a part of it too. But when I drop my urgency to produce, I can actually feel it.” I felt these words in my bones. My blood. I related to almost counting me out of nature… but how can we if we are, too, nature? Thank you for the reminder to slow down and use my senses to absorb what this wonderful natural world has to offer.