On Oceans, Horses, and Feeling
How herd wisdom invites us to drench our senses
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Christopher and I arrived on the Big Island of Hawaii in the middle of the night after a day of flights and near-misses. When we finally secured a car and buckled in, we followed the volcanic mountain elevation down to the coast from the airport to the city to roads we couldn’t find by GPS.
On the drive to the apartment that we’d call home for the next two weeks, there were no streetlights or landmarks. Through my passenger seat window, the knowledge of the ocean — the expansive presence of the water — was an intuitive sense, like knowing without seeing that someone was in the house.
It was something I felt.
I couldn’t visualize the ocean beyond the misting rain that swirled through the headlights on the bumpy, narrow road, but I recognized its presence, a frequency moving beyond my limited sight.
As the morning light filled the corners of the apartment, soft and golden, I heard the ocean for the first time. At first, I mistook it for the sound of my blood rushing in my ears. Then I noticed the rhythm came from somewhere beyond me and like being shy to meet a love and basking in the wait, I procrastinated for hours before I walked down the street to find her.
The walk took me past two stop signs and a turn and then the immensity of the sea stretched out before me, the land ended in water. I looked in three directions trying to find an end to it, but the horizon line was the only break. I’d never seen so much sea at once and the immensity delighted me, scared me, and opened up something inside of me. Something I don’t yet have a name for.
The sight of that much sea broke me open.
On the second day, a place found us. It sought us out and pulled us from our bones. We had no choice but to gladly comply and seek it out.
I know I’ve been discovered by places before, wondering how I got there, but as we drove and explored and looked aimlessly, every bend in the road revealed a new treasure.
But the final stop, the place that looked for us and called until we found it, was a pull-off and a twisting trail of roots that led to a high overlook with a bench carved from smooth driftwood. On either side of the point, the waves crashed so powerfully, so loudly, so constantly, that all of my senses experienced the water: my eyes, my skin, my ears, my tongue, my breath.
The waves inside of me synched with the clock of the earth.
Christopher and I didn’t really speak for hours while we were there. We watched and listened and felt. Sea turtles played in the waves. There was a rhythm to the sets, smaller crests (still massive to my Atlantic comparison) rolled in by pattern — smaller waves growing larger and larger — into a surge of such power that made me tremble in awe of the water.
Like the old saying that a fear of heights is a response to the desire to leap, I noticed how my apprehension held the seed of desire. That’s how awe works. It stuns you with the novelty of sensing.
The sun sank through the wind-shaped trees along the cliffs. Every so often one of the waves peaked as it moved toward where we sat and offered a window of clarity into the ocean floor, a magnified reflection, a mirror into the deep.
I’m pretty sure that in the days since Hurricane Helene, Tamar Reno has said that “water doesn’t ask for permission.” If she has not, she should. It sounds like her words as I write them.
As I sat on the cliff in Hawaii, I let the water take me.
I could try to write what we saw and felt as we watched the waves on the bench beside the road in Hawaii. I could do this a thousand times, and never be able to capture an honest picture of what we experienced.
My mother is very respectful of the stories that warn about taking a stone home as a souvenir from the Hawaiian islands. As we set off on our travels, she was afraid we’d bring home a pebble in our shoes and incite a curse from Pele.
My mother isn’t wrong, because during that trip something inside of me changed, or something long lost found me as I experienced the magnitude of the point where the water met the lava rock cliffs.
My take on the Pele curse is this — with my senses opened up, I could no longer hide and ignore my fears, the dark impulses that have become lifelong habits. The water asked me to open myself up and see things for what they are. And having your fears brought to you, being asked to look at them, smell them, taste them is a great task for a seeker — someone like me who loves figuring internal stuff out — but that energy must be hard for someone just looking to have a nice vacation with flowery shirts and fruity drinks.
Hawaii, in my experience, asks you to learn how to receive, how to take experience into your body. Her feminine wisdom is straight, direct, and brutal — like water, like fire.
Which brings me to how the horses prime me to be receptive.
Waves and Particles
My work focuses on nervous systems, both human and horse. The horses are beautiful teachers for many reasons, but if I’m going to talk to them I have to forget about my words. Our communication hinges on physical/mental/emotional responses to external stimuli. Horses experience the landscape and respond to it. They talk to the world through their senses. We cannot, despite my attempts, talk in words. And this is a good thing. Humans use enough words — and I know it’s rich hearing this from a writer.
We talk to horses through our nervous systems.
Humans are so verbally dominant — we like to talk — that we forget that we’re also animals who respond physically/mentally/emotionally to external stimuli. Our nervous systems are whirring day and night while we, oblivious, keep talking.
Last week I wrote about being oddly spontaneous despite being such a pathological planner, and that’s how Christopher and I ended up in Hawaii. He told me early on in our expanded relationship that his mother was from Hilo and had returned to the Big Island because of a sick family member.
I immediately researched flights. Not because it was Hawaii, a chance for a tropical vacation in the month that the farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains is coldest — that was a sincere bonus — but I seriously felt the call to go. It was a sense that welled up inside of me, a surge that pushed me to act. It started near my feet and rose up through my body. Like waves, the desire crashed where it met the land of my thoughts.
Everything I’ve supposed to do in my life has started that way: applying to programs to study writing, selling art, starting a farm, buying certain horses. I love bookkeeping and forecasting, but I’ve never made a major decision for any reason except intuition.
I decide by feeling, not by thought. And that’s probably how the horses found me.
Sensory Drenching
On the beach in Hawaii, the magnitude of the sensory stimuli quieted my mind and brought my awareness into my physical body. I allowed awe to shift my perspective from inside to outside.
It’s off-putting to ask my internal narrative to shut up.
Traveling anywhere can do this for us, but I don’t think it would be half as easy to make that shift, even on a sensory-drenching cliff like the one we accidentally discovered on the Big Island, if the horses hadn’t for years been wearing away my internal chatter like a scrubby field of brown clover.
Horses rip plants up by the root.
They don’t shear the tops like cows, they pull the whole plant up and toss the roots to the side because they have no use for them. This skill is how they get through to me, past my hard head. Noticing can be acquired anywhere in the natural world, but horses work for me because I’m with them all the time, and as my co-workers, being aware of their bodies helps me in the most primitive way — awareness keeps me safe.
I could share space with my border collie and accomplish the same thing, but it’s easy to check out from my surroundings with cats and dogs because I’m comfortable in their presence and forget they’re near.
But if you’ve ever encountered an aggressive animal of any species, you know how fast your mind gives way to action. Horses don’t need aggression to remind me — they’re big and fast and their nervous systems are primed to act. This is true for the most docile horse. When I’m near them, I must stay aware of what’s happening around me.
There’s so much that’s out there now about how horses help humans heal. This question has guided most of my work, but in our search to fix our nervous systems gone haywire from modern life, we can’t forget the horse’s autonomy. They’re not our medicine, but we can find a clue of how to get over ourselves through the resonance of their frequencies, by noticing how our nervous systems speak to the environment.
Noticing begins as I approach a horse.
Does the horse blink or flick an ear, do the little wrinkles above their eye change, the ones around their nostrils? I can spend all day with this minutia and only maybe sometimes see it, maybe not.
Am I here to understand, or am I here to see, sense, notice?
This.
Understanding, or trying to grasp, is where I stop feeling in my body and get lost inside my mind.
Back to what’s in front of me.
The horse dips a head to eat, lifts a neck to see what’s moving in the shadows of the tree line.
It’s like that exercise for when you’re anxious about something — name the things you can see: mailbox, tree. Or the one where you count down the numbers through your senses — 5 things you can see, 4 you can feel, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell, 1 you can taste.
We’re washing our minds clear of the chatter. And the horse, sensing that I’m noticing, stops eating and watches back.
Not to speak for the horses (but speaking for the horses) how crazy they must feel dealing with us and knowing that most humans are so removed from their environment that they hardly realize they’re present at all.
In golden moments of shared space, my internal chatter fades away and I’m present with the horses — just our skin and blood moving through the rhythm of the earth’s clock — present and allowing, ready to receive. Nothing big is happening. We’re just here.
Nature can do this for us all the time — if we allow it.
As I sat on the cliff in Hawaii and allowed myself to be transported by the power of the convergence of water and land my chattering mind slowed and I was present.
Rhythms
As the light fades, Christopher and I feel our way back to the car.
Our skin is scaled in dry salt as the roaring of the waves and rocks recede behind us.
Every action, every movement, feels deliberate.
I notice the strap of the bag on my shoulder, the ball of fishing twine scavenged from the hill in the palm of my hand. I feel how the stones bruise my feet. I taste the dry grit in my mouth.
The tree frogs sing a rhythm that sounds like cof-fee, cof-fee.
I have changed, but nothing has happened.
Everything has happened.
I am here.
Thank you for joining me here
Next week, I’m going to tackle the psychology of giving. This week, I needed to spend some time revisiting Hawaii with my words because so stinking much has happened since we arrived home in March. We lost two horses (one of them like a second limb to me), I became sick, we got married, the hurricane blew through, I became sicker, Thanksgiving was postponed by a virus that descended on the house, and then my father went into the hospital.
Since we were married, it feels like we’ve been riding a sea of brutal waves with barely time to gasp for breath before the next wall of water engulfs us.
I needed a palette cleanser, a little sensory-dripped break from the continuous chatter in my mind — but the work still remains. And I’m lucky because I have the horses to remind me of my presence every single day. Thank you for letting me bring the horses to you.
In this season of giving, if you feel the call to help people whose lives have been irrevocably altered by the devastation of Hurricane Helene, this constantly updated list of vetted sources is a great place to start. More than 70 days have passed since the storm blew through the mountains, but people are still rebuilding their lives as winter makes living harder. Please help if you can.
We’ll talk about this even more next week.
If you’re new to Stable Roots or catching up on previous posts, be sure to check out my rebellious love story, Ten Times I Said No To Love. It’s about love and so much more. Read all ten chapters here:
|| Chapter One || Chapter Two || Chapter Three || Chapter Four || Chapter Five || Chapter Six || Chapter Seven || Chapter Eight || Chapter Nine || Chapter Ten ||
Thank you for joining me here and being a part of my herd.
Love,
Kim
After Helene took house and contents when I thought nothing more could upend my life..it happened again and again. Each day another “event” til I threw my arms up and yelled, “what more can You throw at me, God? Just fling it? How much more will You test me?” Then I knew I had not learned the Lesson yet.