Meditations on Equestrian Art

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

In Search Of Meaning

It has been an uncountable number of days, weeks, and months since my last blog post. How does one go on as only a shred of what one used to be? I am whole in myself, and yet feel less than I was when Myrnah was part of my life. I find myself questioning, am I still relevant to the conversation of these blog posts? You don’t need to answer that, I am not searching for reassurance, I am searching for the meaning of my moments threaded together.

Without Myrnah to bounce ideas off of, who am I to share as I did before?

I certainly have continued in other ways, sharing tea times and videos with my boys Ari, Atlas and Occasio. They still have my back and guide my learning and I am beyond grateful, yet still I search.

What do I have for all of you who might read my words? Perhaps I still have a filter to offer from which to see through. A filter that Myrnah helped me shape that lives beyond her physical lifespan.  

We all are offered up a plethora of information to gather at every turn. A sea of things we think perhaps we should know, understand, encompass and act on. If Myrnah taught me anything it was that nothing is as complicated as you think it is. It can be if you want it to be, but it really doesn’t need to be.

When I look at life and all its natural excess of information through the lens Myrnah helped me curate, everything makes more sense than it might otherwise, so perhaps it is time I picked up my writing again and shared what has helped me.

The book, the one I mentioned writing for years and years, has finally made its way to completion, found its home to be published with Trafalgar Square Publishing, and is due for release in November of 2024. I will not share the inner workings of its pages with you all yet. Instead, I will let the sweet anticipation of its reality sit. A promise of greater clarity both looking back in time and a shining light forward, clarity of what can be between horse and human.

This post is a tip of the hat toward life in all its paradoxes, and horse training for all of us who find meaning in life through that lens.

We are all herd creatures, we long for community and connection. Also, every one of us is unique and different in a million complex ways.  We struggle to define terms like community and connection with horses in ways that satisfy everyone’s unique perspective and live within the paradox of wondering if it matters while feeling certain that it does.

My specialty is in the study of freedom, in a world where horses and humans may only feel free in brief and temporary ways. We long for it, yet perhaps when faced with freedom it feels as much overwhelming as it is wanted.

There is no world of community where my freedom does not brush up against someone else’s freedom and then which needs and desires win out?

I want to be close to my horse, feel the fur in my fingers, ride like the wind feeling the bunching of muscles under my thighs and let the ground pass behind us like a forgotten dream. That description is about me and my unique being wanting what it wants, but my being wants community and connection with the horse more than it wants anything else.

The herd creature in me wants the horse to want what I want, but this is where my freedom brushes against theirs.

“I want to be close to my horse.” My horse will only want that too if past experiences in that vein yielded feelings of being alive, not overwhelmed.

“I want to feel the fur in my fingers.” My horse will only want that too if their nerve endings celebrated the contact as mine did.

“I want to ride like the wind feeling the bunching of muscles under my thighs and let the ground pass behind us like a forgotten dream.” My horse will only want that if it can relate the experience to a pattern of familiarity that has in the past led to increasing vitality.

How I behave today will shape the things my horse wants to do with me tomorrow. It is that simple.

Freedom is the ability to make choices one wants to make, but where does the freedom of oneself collide with the freedom of someone else’s self?

This is what I study and this is where I am eternally grateful to Myrnah for the lens she helped me form to answer these paradoxical questions confronting all of us, horse and human alike.

We are all perpetually gathering information through our five senses. Even as you read this through your eyes, you may feel some of it through your inner physicality and perhaps link it back to the smell of that wind whipping past you under a fast horse. We are physical beings gathering information, linking it to memories and using our reasoning to sort through the information. Both horses and humans do this.

If it feels overwhelming, you may not finish reading this page and that is ok too. If it doesn’t tickle your sensory system at least a little you probably have not even made it this far through the words.

We seek meaning through feelings. If the feelings are too much we abandon them and shift to something that isn’t too much for our system. Or perhaps we fight against the part of our community that seems to be inflicting that overwhelm on our system. If the feelings are not enough we seek out something more dramatic or entertaining to feel something. Horses do this too.

I am here to suggest that perhaps we can all support each other in this search for meaning, and it doesn’t need to be as complicated as one might think.

You have only two choices with your horse, from moment to moment:

Action or Passivity.

Action distracts from the current moment. To give an example, if I jump up and down on the couch next to you as you read this, your sensory system will not be able to fully absorb the information that might come in through these words. This may be a good thing if you find the words overwhelming and you need a reason to put down the computer and attend to something different. This might be a good thing if you find the words underwhelming and you really need something more entertaining to feel alive. If I distract you from what you are doing or feeling I give you support to find something better and forget this moment ever happened. There will be times and places we can do that for our horses and when we do so we will foster the belief in our horses that we are on their team with their best interests at heart.

Passivity allows all the feelings to be felt and all the information available to flood in through the senses. If I read my book quietly next to you as you read this blog post I show you we are similar, we are connected, we are community and I value your perspective to feel all the things you choose to focus on. This “matching steps” is the most beautiful form of passivity when we can see someone we value is having an internal experience that is forming into a memory which will educate the nervous system to enjoy future moments like this.

There are a million types of Activity and a million types of Passivity, but it isn’t exactly what you do with your friends that builds a bond between you, it is when you do it.

Horse trainers around the world will tell you WHAT to do better. I would like to help you know your horse so well you know WHEN to do those things.

Do you know your horse well enough to see when their nervous system is overwhelmed or underwhelmed and they could use your action and distraction? Do you know when your horse is feeling all their feelings in a moment of life that is so precious it may never happen again? If so, help them remember that and remember it linked to you.

Your freedom to want what you want when you want it is all tangled up in your horse’s freedom to want what they want with equal intensity. This entanglement is the beauty of community and connection, it doesn’t have to be as complicated as it seems. You can train each other through your awareness of activity and passivity to want more of life together. It is that simple.

When I want to feel the wind rushing past me, depending on the past experiences of the horses around me, they may or may not want the same thing as me. As my own unique being I can seek out the feelings I crave independently from my horses.

I can also over time shape a relationship with them that may lead to their freedom of choices aligning with my freedom of choices. 

Their fur in my fingers, riding like the wind, feeling the bunching of muscles under my thighs and letting the ground pass behind us like a forgotten dream…