Yesterday I slipped on Grace for a short ride. While I was on her the hail started pelting the roof. Her head came up and she instinctively wanted to get to the end of the barn where the other horses were eating some hay. Just as she began to worry, I lifted the right rein. What happened next means more to me than any ribbon or prize ever could.
Grace softly and confidently gave me her attention. Just that one second when our minds connected brought the most peaceful response I have ever seen in a horse. She literally lowered her head and licked her lips. Then she chose to walk back to the opposite end of the arena. Back into what sounded like fireworks pelting the walls.
As we moved around she turned her neck so far as to look me square in the eye. Her eye was full and soft, her head low and her whole body at ease.
She’s just turning 3 next month. I have done everything different with this horse than any horse in my past. And this day I knew that the old ways are not the best ways. That my willingness and her’s is not written in some agenda. Our relationship or “The Third Entity” as I call it, does not fit into a plan. It is of its own making. The combined consciousness of our source is even beyond nature. It’s beyond instinct even.
I hear folks talking about not projecting human emotions into the horse. And I couldn’t agree more. In fact, for me to find this point in my life, I had to let go of my “humanness”. But this also means rising beyond the “horse”. Neither Grace nor I are stuck in the label and the conditions of our form. We now see what is hidden in plain sight, but habitually overlooked.
We are life itself. Life meeting life.
It was time for me to let go of my tendencies. They have not served me. When the horse comes into our world and we into their’s, there must be a blend or it will not work. This I call the bridge. And yesterday, I could’ve spent the rest of my life on that bridge and longed for nothing more.
These words pale by comparison to the unity in that moment. All I know is that it was not created. It was allowed. The recognition of what is there, and has been here all along, took the willingness to see things differently. To let go of what I had always done, to be free of opinions, mine and others and to make the relationship what mattered most. This is marriage to me. And what life on earth is for. The ending of separation. And the allowance of what is recognized through that willingness to live its life here.
Grace is not born of this earth. It is not stuck in separate forms and characters. Grace rises from the willingness to go beyond what our senses say, to not rely on past or future and to live through these bodies not by them.
I hope you can catch a glimmer of this at least once in your life. But I will say this. one must be dedicated to another way. We must have faith and focus on the heart of life itself ,not in its manifestations. And when we search in this way we most certainly find. In fact we find that we are the very thing we are searching for. And so is our horse.
Grace is expressed in unity.
If you would like to explore the world of wisdom that horses and nature offer freely, please have a look at “Perfect Practice; A Philosophy for Living an Authentic and Transparent Life“
