What Waits Beneath the Surface
Matilda, mystery, and the art of listening
In my recent post about a little mare named Magic, I mentioned a big draft horse named Matilda and noted how her story was worthy of its own post. I always mean to write bios for the horses who shaped the farm, but the stories of the present always demand my attention first.
Still, some horses refuse to be forgotten.
It’s different when I’m leading a new visitor through the farm. On your first visit to Bramblewood Stables I introduce you to the herd and their stories immediately after I’ve mapped out the hike to the bathrooms.
We do, despite the rumors, have bathrooms. But I’m not going to stop you from visiting an empty stall or the woods if you need a quick break — horse people adapt.
(TMI: I was at a horse show with few bathrooms and I slipped into my empty horse trailer to relieve myself between classes, but the custom tall boots I wore had gotten too tight as I gained weight and the act of trying to use the restroom cut off the circulation in my calves and I completed the rest of my classes without being able to feel my legs.)
We don’t do horse shows anymore at Bramblewood, but it has nothing to do with restrooms. However, it has a lot to do with sorting through poo to find overlooked treasures.
But not all treasures reveal themselves in waking life. Some return to us in dreams, waiting to be understood.
Night-Mare
I don’t remember my dreams often but when I do they permeate my waking like sleep pictures I remember as sound, like the images are tones I hear in my body.
I rarely dream about horses.
When Matilda visited me this past week in a dream, she lived on a farm I have never encountered, but in the way of dreams, I made myself at home in the foreign landscape, accepting the strange as true. There were other people in this dream and there were things happening around me. I don’t recall the details but I know this farm existed in a wooded valley with a big, dark lake at the center near the barns.
It was nighttime but I could see clearly. I went out to the field where Matilda stood and I shimmied onto her broad, thick back. She took off at a trot and the rhythm rolled into a gallop that raced up hills and down embankments. Realizing I was out of control, I panicked and searched the area for a safe place to jump off but there were obstacles everywhere — tree trunks, old farm equipment, fences.
Resigned to whatever would happen on this big, familiar beast — the old origins of our word night-mare — I sank into a fear that gripped my legs against her sides and I then sank into a sensation of excitement. I began to rock with her motion and I gave up control, letting her carry me wherever she wanted to take me.
We explored the valley at high speed until the ride culminated in the lake where I braced to be dumped head first in the water, but Matilda galloped into the smooth surface and I gently floated off her back.
I swam to shore and noticed that she was stuck in the mud of the lake bed and couldn’t get out. I spent the rest of the dream trying to find someone with the knowledge to help me retrieve her from the water.
She was still in the water as I woke.
Water Spirit
The kelpie is the most common water spirit in Scottish/Irish folklore. A shapeshifter, the kelpie commonly appears as a white or grey horse that lures people onto their back and then gallops into the water, dunks them under, and tries to drown them.
I find that cautionary tales contain some seeds of good living.
When I nap after physically traveling long distances — South Carolina to Turkey, South Carolina to Hawaii, etc. — it feels like I’m swimming up from a deep abyss as I slowly wake from sleep.
Matilda wasn’t supposed to happen in my life. I’d just merged all my freelance teaching into a central facility under my personal management. Bramblewood Stables is the culmination of dreams and goals I formed into being through willpower and pure, dumb luck.
Many students came with me to the new riding stable, but I didn’t have enough school horses. Riding horses suitable for the general public are few and far between and the good ones are trustworthy professors. I was well connected in the horse trade, but finding a herd to staff the barn on short notice was nearly impossible. Two other farms in the area were expanding their string of school horses at the same time and our paths kept crossing through classified ads and the brand new way of advertising horses for sale — the internet.
One of my mentors told me the only thing certain when shopping for horses was wearing the tread off my tires. This proved to be true. I needed two more horses and a friend found a prospect she wanted to buy with me as an investment to use as a school horse and sell as a field hunter.
Draft crosses were the rage back then because they were cheaper than warmbloods. This mare was advertised as a Gypsy Vanner/thoroughbred and she was a baby at two years old. She wasn’t really school horse material but I was still living under the delusion that there was ethical money to be made training and selling project horses.
I suck at selling because I can’t lie — my face gives me away. My superpower is selling other people’s visions.
I shared space in the new barn with a woman driven to form a partnership in my work no matter how much I stressed to her that I needed to try this new venture alone. The farm itself, Bramblewood’s historic launch site, was the place I had grown up riding, the farm that had raised me, and it was also the setting for a novella I wrote in college. I didn’t feel a sense of ownership as much as a belief that the farm owned me — that feeling hasn’t changed much even though my location has.
I needed horses. Good ones that could be steady, patient, willing teachers. I needed horses that took care of their riders and knew more than they said.
I didn’t need a young horse with little training. I didn’t need a Matilda.
The woman I shared farm space with went with me to test drive the big draft mare at a sales barn. A storm pounded the tin roof of a storage shed filled with jagged tractor equipment as I sat bareback on Matilda, a pig squealing between her hooves. She felt like a mountain beneath me — unshakable, unreadable.
I tested another horse, an Appaloosa, by jumping him over a pile of scrap wood heaped in the aisle of the shed. He was a more suitable school horse so I chose him instead of Matilda and made the deal and arranged for the Appaloosa to be delivered. I thought that was the end of it.
The next day, a trailer pulled into my farm drive with two horses.
The woman who I shared farm space with had bought Matilda for me as a gift.
Gift Horse
Matilda spent her first year with me in the middle of the ever-growing feud between the woman I shared barn space with and my growing need for independence. I refused to claim the mare because I didn’t have paperwork proving I owned her and the woman insisted that Matilda was mine. As we hashed it out, Matilda lived like a feral creature in a herd of retirees in the massive back pasture of the farm, a place filled with springs and gulleys and landmarks featured in folklore.
I wrote stories about the place and imagined Matilda springing from the marshy banks, a kelpie formed from moss and water — a creature of dreams and caution, an unasked for gift with a thousand strings.
All the while, a tumor grew on Matilda’s face, hanging down and obstructing her vision. I refused to have it treated because she wasn’t my horse. The woman who bought her also refused to have it treated because she claimed Matilda was mine.
The day before I packed the horses up in trailers and moved to the new farm, the place that Bramblewood calls home to this day, a vet came and laid Matilda down in the arena. He removed her third eyelid and as the sedation wore off, Matilda refused to stand up. She just laid there and stared at us with her newly unclouded eyes and a sense that nothing humans intended for her really mattered much.
I remember thinking, she doesn’t belong to me, and she doesn’t belong to anyone else either.
Matilda was not a school horse. She was not what I needed. She was a gift I never asked for, given by a woman who wanted to tie herself to my work no matter how much I resisted. I refused to claim her; she refused to release her hold.
The kelpie lures its rider with a promise — something beautiful, something useful, something too good to resist. Then it carries them into deep water, into places they never intended to go, where they’re drowned in mysteries.
As I packed to leave the old farm behind, I put Matilda on the trailer and took her with me.
Crossing the Water
I traded the strings of awkward partnership with the woman at the old barn for the overreaching grasp of a perfection-driven, horse trainer husband. He got to work at the new farm riding Matilda and pressing her fast into deep collected work in dressage and high leaps over fences. Matilda was now four years old. Like big dogs, draft horses mature slowly. She was still growing.
Matilda’s resistance became legendary. She simply wouldn’t comply if her rider hadn’t taken time to have a civil discussion with her. Her massive size allowed her to pull away on the lead line to go wherever she wished and she once leaped the fence out of the arena — sideways — at a full canter and deposited herself, and her rider, back in the barn.
We tried to take a two-day vacation but Matilda came down with a mysterious virus that stumped the vets and kept her sleeping for a week. When we took her for walks for her stall to be cleaned in between naps, she yanked us toward draping vines of poison ivy that she grazed with a fervor that told us she had found her own cure.
An adult couple learning to ride with us leased Matilda and it became a running joke of how Matilda would offer an unplanned dismount for the wife whenever she hopped on after the big, wide mare scraped her off vertically on a tree branch that the wife gripped and dangled from as Matilda walked away.
That wife was Sarah Farris. Matilda’s purpose with us was lost until Sarah did the long work of learning to speak her language. The goal was simple: make Matilda a school horse.
For all the ways she resisted, Matilda was waiting for the right person to listen.
You can find the entire story of Sarah’s relationship with Matilda at her blog: The Matilda Project. You can also hear many Matilda stories on episode one of my podcast where I sit down with Sarah and ask her questions about her journey.
The turning point in our understanding of Matilda came at a crux in my understanding of myself, of the farm, and my relationship with horses. My ex-husband moved on to bigger horse sales, by taking a sudden turn to another life, and I was finally alone and at a juncture where I could create a unique riding program — except I didn’t know how that should look.
I didn’t know how I wanted my life to look.
The farm lived at the mercy of me finding a safe place to land.
I didn’t know how the work with Matilda should commence but I figured it should involve an immense amount of groundwork. I knew it should involve us viewing the horse as a partner and not a tool (think dog/cat). I knew it should involve communication on a different level. I knew it should involve an immense need to understand ourselves and our direction, intentions, and desires.
As Sarah worked through Matilda’s mysteries she took it slowly, she stopped to listen, she changed track when Matilda said no.
Sarah, with Matilda by her side, found a better way and Matilda became a full-fledged member of the lesson program through years of Sarah’s dedication to learning her language.
The lessons Matilda had to teach weren’t about performance or obedience—they were about patience, presence, and a willingness to rewrite the script.
Sarah and Matilda discovered a different rhythm and I was privileged to watch their story unfold.
A decade after the re-training of Matilda commenced the world came to a standstill with COVID and Sarah and I found ourselves at a similar crossroads. We had delved beneath the surface of “natural horsemanship” and groundwork with the horses, but we needed to go to the next level. Sarah dove deep into mysterious waters with the horses and I dove deep into mysterious waters with the humans. We came back to each other routinely and compared notes.
What waited for us beneath the surface?
Not to speak for Sarah or the horses, but what I gleaned was both of our paths led to similar answers. What worked for the horses worked for humans, and vice versa — we needed to be still and listen to what was in front of us. We needed to trust our guts and our inner voices. By getting out of familiar patterns, we could see more, connect more, and communicate better with the horses (and humans) using a whisper instead of a desperate scream.
When I don’t have a clue what to do next, I go BIG.
My entire work now is helping people find a way back into themselves to retrieve the information they’ve lost. The horses are great guides in this endeavor, the very best, but they don’t need to perform or do anything special — they just need to exist.
The horses don’t even have to be present for this magic to work — they show up for my online clients as heartily as they do in person.
For all the times she went BIG, Matilda taught me most in her moments of stillness. I can still feel the mountain of her beneath me as the storm raged against the tin roof and a young pig squealed around her hooves.
I’m so glad she came to visit me in my dream and remind me to let go of my constant need for control, and how to allow the right answers to find me (thank you, First Horse.)
One more thing about Matilda — she continues to inspire people who never met her. Shortly after her sudden death in the fall of 2020, someone in prison dreamed about her, sketched her image in pencil on commissary paper, and sent it to me in the mail. It remains one of my most prized possessions.
And this image below? If I have my facts straight, the artist — who became a client at the farm began the painting before she met Matilda. And after she got to know Matilda she used the piece as a template for artists in one of her classes.
Horses have pulled humans toward art since the beginning of time. Think of all those cave drawings.
Matilda didn’t stop teaching when she left this world. Like the best stories, the ones we don’t expect to shape us, she keeps resurfacing, waiting beneath the surface for those who are ready to listen.
What will you allow Matilda to inspire in YOU this week?
Love,
Kim
Field Notes:
The right answer starts with learning to ask a different question. This evening 2/20/25,
and I are hosting a free online workshop inspired by her beloved First Horse’s wisdom— an open conversation about shifting perspective, deepening kinship, and rethinking the way we approach uncertainty. If this resonates, we’d love for you to join us. RSVP HERE (a recording will be sent out if you can’t join us live).The Appalachians still need your help after Hurricane Helene. The big charities and systems aren’t working for people who still need propane to heat their temporary dwellings and housing for people who are still displaced. Your $10, $20, $30 donation goes a LONG WAY. Please help if you can. And if you don’t know where to start, send me a message and I’ll connect you with individuals who are living in service to their communities today.
The number one thing you can do for me and for this little farm is to read, listen, comment, share, and subscribe to my little corner of the internet. Let’s make this world a better place together. ❤️
Such a beautiful testimonial of the power of horses. Thank you