I am supposed to be creating curriculum for the new membership I just released, since we start in just under a week now. Instead, I am writing this piece because it is the only thing I am capable of doing today.

Because I am no longer dissociated from my emotions and body, and cannot just push through.

Because pushing through would go against what I teach my students to do with their horses (and in order to be able to do that for their horses in a sustainable way, they usually must be able to cultivate some practice of doing it for themselves - at least to the degree which is possible under the oppressive and life annhilating systems we live under).

And because I need to give the feeling of anger and grief a place to live other than my own body.

So here’s what happened.

PS Best to read on Substack, not in the email! I needed to post this in a hurry, but since, made some edits I think are important.

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Reminder that doors are now OPEN for enrollment to The School of Equus: Tending the Flame of the Horse-Human Connection. If I wasn’t clear before: This is a school for radical horsemanship at the end of the world, from a feminist, animistic lens – Brought to you by an Unbridled Woman.

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A Man Named Steven Comments on My Facebook Post

I woke up today to a comment on a video I posted to social media, in which I shared my expertise and experience around using food rewards with horses.

A man commented in response to the video giving a lengthy paragraph long explanation of why food rewards should never be used with horses.

I commented back with two words that sent this man spiraling into a fit of aggressive attack towards me:

“I disagree.”

This man instantly replied with an onslaught of multiple comments.

First: Well, you’re entitled to your opinion.

Then: Wildly aggressive jabs at my lack of education, false claims of how I am an internet trainer cut off from reality who has clearly never dealt with tough horses in attempt to discredit my work (sidenote: Practically all I do these days is work with last-chance formerly wild mustangs who have failed multiple training programs), and the final comment, demeaning and belittling my personhood and then my work, telling me to stick to basket weaving (sidenote - which is in response to a recent reel I made about the similarities between basket weaving and horses.)

I wish I could have just decided I don’t want to give this my energy and move on with my day. I wish this wouldn’t have so deeply affected me today.

But it does. It has. It’s impacted my entire day — I have a nervous system that’s been shaped by male violence and I live in a system that perpetuates this violence every single day.

Shortly after the incident, I was relaying it with some friends. One of my friends asked me if this happens to me all the time, assuming I have to put up with this kind of thing regularly.

And my answer might come as a surprise to you, too:

I don’t, actually.

At least not in a long time.

There is a reason for this. And the reason is important.

But to understand it, we need to start at the beginning.

A Seat At Their Table: My Journey to the Big Boy’s Club

When I began training horses at a young age, I desperately wanted the respect of people — especially men.

And I went into total overdrive and over-achieving trying to get it.

First, I started colts undersaddle.

But that wasn’t enough, so I started training them in less time: 2 and 3 day colt starting challenges.

That wasn’t enough, so I began training wild and untouched mustangs.

That wasn’t enough, so I began doing 100 day challenges to train wild untouched mustangs.

That wasn’t enough, so I trained a zebra, the hardest of equines to train.

The list goes on and on. You get the idea.

It should be noted that women in the horsemanship industry have to put forth triple the effort to even think about getting a seat at the table.

When I attempted to enter my first colt starting challenge in the spring of 2015, I was met with pushback from the man who ran them, telling me I needed to start at least 10 colts in the 2 day limit before considering entering.

So I spent that summer doing just that. I videoed everything.

Come fall, I reached back out. I said I had done my 10 starts in the time-limit, and I was ready to enter. He let me enter.

When I showed up at the competition, he seemed surprised I was there and like he didn’t realize I was registered, but after a bit of disgruntlement, allowed me to compete anyways.

When I won the competition, he congratulated me and then said:

You know, you can’t draw such a soft powder-puff every time – next time you might not be so lucky.

For context: The mare I started had been turned out on someone’s back 40 and unhandled for years, with the only training she received being halter breaking, while the man in the roundpen next to me started a young filly who’d received extensive training and hauling experience (and if I remember correctly had even been shown in hand already in her young career).

The message:

You need to work 3x as hard to get a seat at the table. It will still not be enough, even when the proof is in the pudding. When you do prove yourself, your work will be minimized and discredited.

There’s more stories I could tell:

The first video I had go viral online of me re-starting a kill pen mare in which a man harassed me in the comment section, claiming I was lying about the whole thing.

The man who followed me back to the stalls after my first Extreme Mustang Makeover Freestyle demanding I tell him what man trained my horse for me.

But alas, at one point the tides did turn: A result of my insatiable hunger, perfectionism, workaholic conditioning, exploited passion, and the right dose of luck and privilege combined with my meticulous attention to the details of what it means to be an acceptable, digestible woman of power in the horse world and my ability to twist and contort myself into those standards.

My name was all over magazine covers, had taken the internet by storm, and my work became recognized globally — Finally, I was running with the big boys.

I noticed a huge shift in the way men treated me, as if overnight.

Now they were all smiles and handshakes, as if just meeting me was such a humble delight.

Things still happened behind closed doors, in attempts to hijack my progress and sabotage my rise to fame and inner circle appearances, but thats another story for another day.

The point for our purposes today is:

I finally ‘earned’ a seat at their table, I had finally made it into the Boy’s Club—

And it came at the expense of my body, my soul, and my spirit.

The Price of Admission

I can’t get into the full story here, but here’s what feels most pertinent at the moment:

The whole time I thought I was my own person, an independent woman, a Miranda Lambert blasting Gunpowder & Lead bad-bitch, I was actually just a daughter of the patriarchy.

I believed I made my own choices, not realizing the conditioning that influenced what choices I made or what choices were even given to begin with, a dancing puppet of a doll participating in some grand theatrical performance, whose strings were hidden out of sight.

My entire personality and appearance was crafted, meticulously, by patriarchy in ways that I remained blind to during the crafting itself: A plastic doll, every part of me painted by its brush strokes to be Pretty, Pleasing and Polite.

I reached a high level of success in a man’s world – but softened so as to not threaten what it means to be a woman by the presence of lipstick, pearls, push-up bras, painted nails, and a forever plastered smile.

This is a familiar story.

If you go to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, you’ll catch glimpses of it.

I wrote down a quote from a plaque inside titled “Identity”, when I was 23 years old for a reason I didn’t understand at the time. It reads:

“Cowgirls in the Wild West shows carved an identity for themselves that allowed them to live in both male and female spheres. They were skilled equestrians or sharpshooters, traveled thousand of miles in a year, were professionally paid athletes, and participated in a very masculine play of the West.

Yet, they also adhered to those things that made them acceptable as females. In newspaper accounts of the time, a cowgirls ability to cook, sew and clean were often mentioned in the same article as their skills in the arena. There was a deliberate effort made by the media and other to show that the Wild West cowgirls were still ‘ladies’ as defined by their time. This duality is most easily observed in dress and manner.”

Perhaps no figure demonstrates this concept more than sharpshooter, Annie Oakley. This article is a short read packed full of examples bringing this to light. But here’s a few highlights.

“She was famous for her precision and athleticism, but she was known for something else too, something that’s very clear in the Edison movie: her femininity. With her full skirts, poise, and ever-present husband, Oakley never let you forget that she was a cowgirl, setting a foundational precedent for female gunslingers in pop culture that persisted long after her death.”

This is not an attack on an individual’s choices of expressing their feminity — its about the lack of choices. Annie Oakley had a carefully curated image that was necessary for her to find the success she did as a woman in the western world, one that made her acceptable and appealing — and I would add, palatable — to everyone in her audience, young or old, male or female, old-fashioned or modern.

“This appeal was reflected in Oakley’s wardrobe (always long skirts, never trousers), as well as the way she rode her horse (sidesaddle, even when she was performing tricks). Oakley also maintained this demeanor outside the arena. “She furnished her tent/dressing room with a Brussels carpet, a rocking chair, and a parlor table,” Riley writes. ‘Between appearances, Annie sat in the chair, her guns lining the walls, and did fancy embroidery. After shows, Annie often entertained guests with punch, tea, cakes, and ices.’ This very deliberate performance, which also included a ‘dependence on men,’ like Butler [her husband] and her male assistants, “assured women that, although independent and perhaps employed, they could still be domestic.”

When Oakley was later featured in films (made possible by her palatability to the masses) a key piece of her biography — her winning a shoot out against her soon-to-be husband — was rewritten to make her even more demure and ladylike, the article reveals. That key piece? The film portrays her losing the shooting contest to her future husband.

The message: To appeal to a man (and society), you must downplay your skillset as to not threaten him, as to not risk emasculating him, as to make sure he remains the ultimate authority.

“The image of the cowgirl has progressed since then, particularly on television, but in many ways, Oakley was the original encapsulation of the unwinnable question: can women have it all? As her own life demonstrates, you can beat men in shooting contests, achieve national fame, and inspire women the world over, but if you’re not sitting sidesaddle, you might lose the crowd.”

Today, nothing has changed other than the specific ways this careful crafting is done, through modern expressions of femininity.

For a deep dive, I highly recommend this youtube video that covers the ways in which the intricacies of traditional roles of femininity is preserved through dress and appearance in the conservative woman to offset the masculine traits of having a seat at the men’s table, thereby not posing a threat to traditional gender roles.

Needless to say, after several wrestles with death and flirtations with suicide, I finally realized:

I could not die having never lived my own life.

And so I got to work on building my own as if my life depended on it, because it did.

I have grown my claws back, I have removed my muzzle. I no longer am panting to be Good.

I am done being pretty, pleasing, and polite. I have risen to the fight.

The Mustang Maddy most have come to know is now dead.

I am who rose from her ashes.

I am the one who remained after the flames, after all which was not me was burned away.

I am a woman, unbridled.

An Unbridled Woman

“An unbridled or unrestrained horse often represents the human passions run amok. The bridle, when present, then represents the restraint imposed by human reason, triumphing over and subduing those passions. In such images, the bridle also can represent another popular – and not dissimilar– early modern motif, the triumph of (rational) science and technology over (irrational) Nature.” (The Culture of the Horse, Karen Raber and Reva J Tucker, pg 18)

You must know what it is to be a bridled woman in order to understand a woman unbridled.

You must also understand the cultural motif of and scorn for the unbridled horse – how the bridle has historically been the distinguishing factor that determines whether a horse (or a woman) is be celebrated as a force of Good or scorned as a force of Evil: The bridled horse’s power is harnessed and exploited to instill social order and further carry out the violence of the colonial project, while the unbridled, free-range horse – such as the mustang or an unbridled woman– is seen as a threat to civilization and social and political order.

When I say I am an unbridled woman, that I have left my Father’s House, I am telling you that I am now seen by many as a direct threat to the patriarchy. I am no longer so palatable as I once was.

I wrote a while back upon my re-entry into my role as Mustang Maddy:

“May the truth of who I am run wild and feral, escaping the boxes and capitalism’s cold contraptions, refusing to be caught by the shredding teeth and crunching jaws of modernity’s never ending consumption, the consumption the world carries out ‘to avoid hearing the sound of its daughters weeping from its own crunching jaws’, may it get one bite of me to find I taste like shards of broken glass and spit me back out, setting me free once again, let it be!”

“May it get one bite of me to find I taste like shards of broken glass”. This declaration has come to be true in this instance: My existence has sharp edges that slice through the bullshit of what it means to be masculine.

I am no longer digestible. I am an inherent threat to patriarchy and men who worship it. They cut their mouths when they try to bite into me.

I’m telling you this because you need to know in order to understand this man’s reaction to me.

The fact he left such a long, rambling explanation about why using food rewards is bad is significant in and of itself. It marks an important change:

In the past, men who may not have agreed more times than not chose refrained from commenting because that would be to question my credibility and their proximity to power, since I was a daughter of the patriarchy seated at the big boys table.

But now, after leaving my seat at this table, a man feels the need to interject, to correct me in response to a video in which I was teaching and sharing my expertise.

The post was triggering in and of itself:

Women who have independent thoughts, ideas, careers or opinions are seen as disrupting this hierarchy. Whenever women threaten the established order by expressing their own beliefs, autonomy, or independence – especially if these beliefs contradict traditional gender roles – it can threaten the established order and trigger intense, violent reactions from men.

Because men have been conditioned by this system to define their self worth and sense of masculinity through dominance, a woman expressing her own voice and authority is interpreted as an assault on the male’s status, triggering insecurity rather than respect.

“Contradictory as a marker of class, horsemanship was even more volatile in its gendered connotations. The rise of the easily mocked Sunday rider, usually a man, coupled with the growing number of skilled woman riders, brought new fears about ‘women on top.’ With the annexation of the Bios de Boulogne as a kind of horse playground for ‘le tout Paris’ the question of who was mounting whom became the focus of gossip that cut across class lines and threatened male supremacy. Despite (or because of) the strictly gendered rules of equitation, whereby only men could ride astride while women rode sidesaddle, equestrian metaphors carried an erotic charge that linked fears about changing class relations to fears about changes in gendered behavior. Equestrian practice and its representation thus bring to light the instability of what were deemed basic bodily distinctions of class and gender.”

Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture by Karen Raber, pg 179

The post was one thing, but my short response of simply, ‘I disagree,’ was what really turned the heat all the way up.

It’s not just that I have the nerve to be a female horse trainer and clinician, broadcasting my own beliefs, ideas, and independence.

It’s not just that I’m sharing counter-cultural ideas about horse training that upsets the status quo and cultural underpinnings of dominance.

It’s not only that I didn’t submit to this man’s authority and follow his guidance, changing my sinful ways after he graciously took time out of his day to give me advice.

More than that: I didn’t feel the need to explain myself to him to even try to earn his approval.

And this is the moment he became completely unglued.

My response (though honestly at the time I didn’t give it much thought) was a direct threat to the hierarchy of social order, and hence his own masculinity which is based on domination — domination of horses and of women such as myself.

It’s not just that I didn’t please this man by submitting to his authority —

It’s that I didn’t even care to try.

This was the violation of the golden rule: Women should want to please men.

I gave no thorough explanation trying to appease him, no defending my point in attempts to get his approval.

In what was left unsaid, I revealed the truth: I simply didn’t want to. Didn’t feel like it. Didn’t care to.

How dare I throw away my bridle, display such a despicable act of my own free will!

Don’t I know that I exist for him, that women exist for men?

And like a drooling dog who has his bone taken right out of his dish, he lashed out, hackles up, lips snarled, and teeth bared.

It was just words, right?

But how am I supposed to know he won’t bite?

Nowhere is Safe

Though I am highlighting the shifting of tides in male attitudes towards me and my work in its current iteration based on whether I wear a bridle, do not misunderstand this essential fact:

Women are not safe regardless of whether they wear the bridle or not. Being Good won’t keep you safe.

Any perceived sense of safety is an illusion – The illusion which is part of the enculturated belief that women can avoid abuse if they behave correctly. And this illusion means we shift the problem from male violence back onto the woman, blaming and disbelieving them.

Sound familiar?

“If the horse just behaved, she wouldn’t feel the sting of the whip, her sides wouldn’t be bloodied from spurs.”

“If the deer didn’t want to die, she should’ve stayed off the road.”

“‘Immigrants’ could avoid being kidnapped and killed if they just behave correctly, if they just go through the right legal processes.”

Meanwhile, I listen to the story of a native woman in Minnesota, an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, tell her story of being ripped from her car and brutally beaten by ICE agents, resulting in a torn rotator cuff, fractured shoulder, 3 herniated discs, and a ruptured eye which she may now lose her vision in.

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I blocked the guy, sure. But you can’t just go around blocking people in the landscapes away from the cyberspace that is Facebook.

The reality is:

It’s men like Steven, when handed a gun and assigned a mission to exert their power and force in the name of protecting their so-called communities from so-called aliens, who are shooting women in the head in broad daylight, captured on video, and allowed to run free.

And not only is their behavior tolerated and permissible, it’s rewarded. Men like this get to become President of the so-called United States of America, rise to the highest ranks of the social and political order, committing unspeakable horrors towards our women and children. Pedophilia, rape, murder endorsed and ritualized. Documented. Published publicly. Still permissible.

Again, none of this is new.

But nevertheless, a reminder:

To be a woman in this world is to be fundamentally unsafe.

This morning’s comment was my own personal reminder of that.

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Reminder that doors are now OPEN for enrollment to The School of Equus: Tending the Flame of the Horse-Human Connection. If I wasn’t clear before: This is a school for radical horsemanship at the end of the world, from a feminist, animistic lens – Brought to you by an Unbridled Woman.

🧶 For folk wanting to follow some threads, I recommend these articles together:

White Women, Beware: In Trump’s America, Even Your Daddy Can Kill You and Still Walk Free, by Stacy Patton

And then, to see just how old this pattern is and further contextualize this kind of violence, I recommend In the Name of the Mother, In the Name of the Red, by Sylvia V. Linsteadt.

Resources Mentioned

J Stor Article - Annie Oakley

Native Woman Assaulted in Minnesota by ICE - sharing her story

Scolds Bridle - I didn’t have time to find a reputable article at the moment, however I would highly recommend reading Caliban and the Witch, by Silvia Federici

“Glass Bottles”, A Short Story I wrote, speaking to the concept of how being ‘good’ won’t keep you safe

Why Do Republican Women Look Like That? (Youtube video)

Hands shaking and heart pounding, I get in my truck and begin driving.

The letter is the only way I can do it.

I place it on his door. I drive away.

A few miles down the road, crying so hard I can barely see out my window I panic and turn around to retrieve the letter.

I cannot do it.

With lines of black mascara running down my cheeks, I tear the letter from the door and start walking back to my truck.

Then, by stomach sinks. My hands are shaking, heart beating out of my chest.

My boyfriend is pulling in the drive.

Shit.

He’s excited to see me. He thinks I came to surprise him after he got off work.

But I can’t lie. So I tell him the truth:

I’d come to break up with him by means of the letter, because its the only way I could do it, but then I realised what a huge mistake I was making as I drove away because I realized how madly in love with him I truly was, and its okay, everything’s fine, I was just acting crazy.

Which is believable, because I believe it.

And anyways, he already knows women are crazy.

Not long after we started dating, I learned he threw a glass bottle at his ex- girlfriend’s head. He always told me she was crazy.

And somehow, I believed him.

Because every woman grows up with the book handed to her. The book that says:

If something bad happens to a woman at the hands of a man, it’s the woman’s fault. Because she deserved it – she was acting crazy.

Women are crazy.

I am crazy.

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Laying in bed, the tears start running.

Tears for how I could not trust what my body already knew.

When my body said run, my conditioning said you’re just acting crazy.

Tears for all the times I had believed men at the expense of believing myself.

Tears for 30 years of my life being lived by the fucking book I was handed, telling me I cannot trust myself.

And then, tears of relief, that I can finally look back clearly.

That I can finally see the truth, when the younger me was left panicking in swirls of confusion from her body knowing but her conditioning telling her its not safe to to trust it.

That’s why you always wrote it all down, I thought. She knew I’d be able to look back some day and say, yes, what you are feeling is real. Your pain is real. I believe you.

All this time, she’s been waiting for me to believe me.

And together, we burn the book we were handed and write our own damn rules.

Rule 1: Whatever they try to tell you, never believe a boyfriend who throws a glass bottle at his ex-girlfriend’s head is somehow the innocent one. Run.

Forget the fucking letter! Run.

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Renée Good was murdered by ICE today – a white woman.

Plot twist: Or is it?

If you comply, you don’t die, they say.

It’s the same playbook recognized by every woman whose ever gone on the long, treacherous journey of leaving her Father’s House, who has thrown away the book we’ve been given about what it means to be a woman.

Others who have thrown away their own version of the book know it.

This isn’t a new story, but a very, very old one.

And after a while, you can’t help but start to pick up on the way it all rhymes:

“She deserved it. She had it coming. She was asking for it.”

Andi Roach said it well:

“Victim blaming: ‘It was her fault.’

Selective empathy: ‘Well, don’t attack ICE officers.’

Dehumanization: ‘Libtard d*ke.’

Coercive control: ‘She’ll never do that again.’”

But, there are many women who still believe boyfriends throwing glass bottles at ex-girlfriends heads is okay, and that they are safe because, he tells her she is safe.

And she believes him.

I believed him.

He says, but you’re different, you’re not like most girls, so that won’t happen to you.

They say, Renée wasn’t a mother and a poet and a wife and a lover like you – Renee Good was Bad. As long as you are Good, you are safe with us.

And so, the women who have yet to throw the book away believe them.

Believing them, not her own body.

Believing, again, that being Good is what will keep them safe.

With love & fight,
Raven Speaks

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Looking back, I see now — I’ve known it. I’ve always known it, deep in my bones.

I just learned not to trust it.

The tracks were left, a subtle fragrance lingering on the wind. The spirit within, a small flame from the great fire of life, guiding me softly, nudging me.

I saw the tracks before, but didn’t really see them, until now, until I was ready to see them. Magic works like this, Horses work like this— only revealing to you their secrets when you are ready to hold them with care.

One of those tracks is in the first name I ever gave my horsemanship business:

Sixth Sense Equine.

I made brochures and business cards. I was proud of it. Excited to share it. I was 16 years old.

But then, I doubted it. Ridiculed it. I was told it wasn’t magic, wasn’t a kind of ‘sixth sense’, the way I was connecting with horses — it was merely, science.

In the words of Mary Oliver, I believed the voices, all the voices shouting their bad advice.

I wanted desperately to be taken seriously. I had to build credibility in a man’s world. And so, I learned the science. I taught it.

And, ultimately, I became imprisoned by it. Burnt out by it.

My time with horses that once felt full of something inexplicable was now diced and chopped up and served in the name of science for others to consume.

I’m not claiming science is all bad, far from it. Magick and Science can go hand in hand.

But science isn’t the ultimate truth, the holy grail, as the Western Empire tries to tell us; it is merely one way of seeing this world.

And it is not without error, and can never be removed from the hearts and hands who design experiments and interpret results. The very premise of isolating controlled variables to reach conclusions, goes against the holy pattern of life that whispers, ‘everything is connected.’

When we forget that, I think the flame within, may begin to shrink back, to flicker, for it is feeling cut off from the the fire of the Motherhouse, unable to be fed and nourished by her coals.

Sometimes, though, I wondered if my spark had gone out or if I was being consumed by the flames.

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I started having dreams of a tree.

I started drawing this tree and the very first image I drew was of her chopped into pieces of me. The stumps left behind weren’t just the tree’s trunk and branches cut up — they were my own body. An arm there, a leg here. And a sign, that read: Firewood for sale.

It was then I realised: I was being chopped up as fuel to feed someone else’s fire.

(Could it be the world is burning because we have forgotten how to honour the fire, both within our hearth and within our hearts — the flame within?)

My precious energy, the sacred gifts that were brought by the spirit within, which we all have, exploited for the machine, exploited to serve someone else’s agenda — Until something in me broke, snapped. Until I couldn’t remain pretty, pleasing and polite for one moment longer.

This is a threshold moment in the life of a woman. Whether we head the call or turn our cheeks to it once more determines not only the direction of our own lives, but of all the lives around us, and the lives the living breathing persons beyond our human selves.

Thankfully, life is always moving towards more life. And so, the dam collapsed inside of me; the waters were freed and the tears didn’t stop flowing for many years. My heart broke open, and in swam the salmon.

I began the long hard work of piecing myself back together — From the time I drew that tree until now, it took me 5 long years of excruciating stitching and stringing together, of re-weaving what was once severed, of sorting seeds, germinating all the necessary ones and planting according to the cycle of the moon and seasons, when the conditions of soul and soil were just right.

But I was so busy planting, I had almost forgotten about the tree herself. Until she returned to me, a few months ago.

I was working on a new model for my horsemanship teachings. And there she was — whole. Beaming, in service to life, to the holy pattern, and wanting to share her fruits.

I followed this tree, I followed the images as they unfolded themselves to me.

And that is what leads me here, today, sharing with you something that feels very special and deer to me: the very beginnings, the infancy stages, of the school which this Mother tree holds inside — The School of Equus.

I wrote in my journal:

Just when you are about to give up, you meet the Mother tree; there, she stands, knarled, tall, and her bark in knots, with enormous branches and equally enormous roots that can be seen as they run along the ground before descending into the mossy depth beneath your toes. You can feel the thrum of her heartbeat, pulsating beneath the soles of your feet sensing her soul, something that makes you want to remove your shoes and kneel at the base of her body.

She is guarded by two beautiful mares, horses as you have never seen before, standing on either side of her wide-hipped great grandmother trunk — one as dark as the soil hugging her roots, the other as light as the clouds above her branches. Each of the horses wear a rope around their neck, the one on the mare the colour of clouds made of braided smoked deerskin and the one on the mare the colour of the dark soil made of twisted nettle.

And on each of the ropes, hanging in the centre of the horse’s chests and over their hearts, is a gleaming golden key, which seem to reflect the very light of the sun and moon themselves. The horses ears perk forwards, nostrils flaring slightly, their heads turning every so often as if considering running away like startled like deer.

The tree tells you both keys are needed for her to open the small door in her hollow. The cloud colored horse asks you to go up to the trees branches, before she will give you her key. The other asks you to go down to her roots before she will give you her key. Both keys must be used to enter the tree; once inside, your feet land on the place you’ve been searching for, the place which has also been searching for you.

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I am afraid of sharing this with you. I’m not sure if it’s too soon. I still question, who am I to hold this? To tell this story? Am I ready for such a task? But it feels the only thing worth doing as the world keeps burning, the waters are being poisoned and sucked dry for AI data centers, the holy lands are being fracked and mined and raped along with our women, children are being starved, the people are being slaughtered by robot-driven planes dropping bombs, the forests cut down, the wolf driven from her lands, the pronghorn barely holding on.

Time is running out. We must urgently slow down to hear what she whispers to us next. The lives of our children and children’s children depends on this, the lives of the bear cub, the wolf matriach, the old growth tree, the salmon and the sage grouse.

I don’t know what I am doing — and yet, I know exactly what I am doing.

I don’t know where this is leading — and yet, part of me knows exactly where she is leading me:

A return, to something lost. A recovery of something sacred. Moving forwards, facing backwards.

A place where magick meets science — where once the pigeon sat, taking orders and pressing levers, who promised us ultimate truths now lies the shadowed wings, our ears twitching to the beckoning of the ravens call, the one who could not be tamed, the one who fetched fire from the sun and in doing so charred her feathers into deep black hues she has today. Something still feral inside of us, our whiskered faces, fur bearing skins, and wet noses leaning forwards, ready.

A place where our minds are not the only ways of knowing — where we learn once again to listen through land, hands, lineage, and heart, recovering the magic of what the Empire stole from us, lumped together, and discredited into the frivolous sounding ‘sixth sense.’

A place where we recover the olde stories passed along from woman to woman as their hands shaped pottery, wove wool, and smoked hides, containing the wisdom of our ancestors that have been morphed and bound into unrecognisable shapes in present day, reduced to children’s stories and tales not to be taken seriously.

A place where sensitivity is recovered as the super power it has always been— a power so large it threatened the dream of Empire, and tricked us into believing our sensitivity was weakness.

A place where authenticity isn’t just welcomed, it is the requirement.

A place where what once was split, becomes whole again.

A place where our souls once chopped up to be served on a silver platter to feed modernity’s crunching jaws begin to resist, nurtured by the growing feeling within us as we bend down to kiss the black boots of Empire, with him saying, lower, and us bending lower still, — the sense of, magnificently, our spines not wishing to bend.

A future in which dams break, salmon return. Life moving toward life. Us moving with it, taking part in it as a key participant digging roots and planting seeds as we go.

A horsemanship approach responsive to the poly crisis times we find ourselves in — not one rooted in denial, but of medicine, of promises to weave back together what has been broken and severed during the times of great forgetting, hardened hearts and immeasurable violence.

A story of horse-human connection that breaks spells.

A way of being with horses at the end of the world, as she births a new one.

Here, the sound of hoof beats drumming us home, a kind of Re-Membering medicine for a people who have forgotten who they are.

Let this be my call to those of you who feel it too, who know somewhere in your bones this is where it has all been leading.

~~~

I will now read you the formal invitation I have for you, presenting School of Equus: Tending the Flame of the Horse-Human Connection, a year-long quest to connect deeper with our horses through the four seasons and four courses.

The flame of the horse-human connection: The fire who burns a million shades of golden hue between horse & human, whose hearth is in need of constant devotional tending, who envelopes us in her healing light. The fire who makes us human - bringing us warmth to survive the harshness of this world, melting our frozen tears, thawing our icy souls, illuminating a way forward in the long dark of these times, informing our next steps in all our relations beyond horses. The fire who can be used to both generate new life and burn all to ashes in her wake, who shapes us and remakes us. We bow our heads, humbly, to thee.

How we tend this flame of the horse-human connection matters.

The 4 Courses of the Tending the Flame collection are what I believe to be — and many of my students have found to be – the essential materials we must gather for our tinder bundles to nurture, protect, and feed the glowing ember of the horse-human connection as we embark on our journeys to deeper, more authentic relating with these beings in the troubling times of the long dark we find ourselves in.

And while tending this flame of deeper connection with our horses is our primary devotion together, you may be surprised to find the ripples of deeper connection with our own selves, land, human kin and more-than-human-kin taking shape as a new way of seeing the world emerges, illuminated by the light of this flame.

This is a deep time, devotional practice, not a quick fix “30 day transformation.” This is not about coming to the teachings and right away grasping a result, a key takeaway, a prescription, a tangible product that will solve all your problems.

I won’t promise you any of that. What I can promise you is this:

You will not emerge the same as you entered.

The slower time line is about allowing seeds to land, sprouting and blooming at their own pace in time with the seasons, when the conditions of soil and soul are just right.

Each of the 4 courses will be released one at a time over the course of the seasons, in the order outlined in the pages below.

The length of time – the duration of the four seasons and full turning of the wheel – requires devotion built from a deep well of desire fertilized by the dream seeds of the heart and a soul yearning for something different. Tending this fire is not always convenient, asking us to awake from our peaceful slumbers to crawl sleepy-eyed and unwilling to the hearth, blowing the coals back into flame again and again, feeding the heart and the hearth of our homes both inner and outer.

One’s tenacity to such devotion is born from the recognition that (1) everything real and worthwhile in this life asks something of us, which may, at first seem impossible (think: the cloak spun from duck feathers, the straw spun into gold by first dawn) and that, (2) relational depth is not obedient to the ticking of a clock and the confining cells of a calendar, but exists within the rhythmns of the leaves falling, blooming, and turning into their golden splendor once again, in a never-ending cycle of un-becoming and becoming, again and again and again.

Let us enter the year of the fire horse together.

Let us devote ourselves this year, to the tending of this flame.

With hoofbeats & the call of the raven,
Maddy

For more information on The School of Equus: Tending the Flame of the Horse-Human Connection, please visit www.SchoolofEquus.com.

• The comment and how it’s impacted me today, as well as the importance of being honest with how we are showing up moment to moment with our horses as well

• The relief and empowerment that comes with the ability to discern — “what’s me vs what’s them” and unpacking projections

• The kernels of truth in the raw ingredients of the criticism (but why they need more cooking to be truly nourishing!)

• The importance of coming from a situational bias vs a dispositional bias, and instead of trying to ‘flatten the waves,’ influencing the waves from the vantage point of the moon and the depth of the undercurrents

• The Disease of Specialness: Social media influencers packaging/ attempting to capitalize on their disembodied ‘transformations’ and the grief of the deeper collective wounds that actually create this behavior

• Unmet needs that make us human, and the grief of all we came into the world expecting but did not receive (Francis Weller’s 4th Gate of Grief): On Being seen by elders for our inherent gifts, witnessed in ceremony through our transformations, being welcomed into the world at birth, and the absence of true belonging

• The importance of grieving what we’ve lost, starting with the poverties, and Drinking the Tears of the World

• The importance of protocol so that people understand how to behave around you

• Whatever other deer trails and meanders I followed that wove these threads together

Resources I Mention

• Leah Manaema

  https://www.coculturecommunication.com/

  https://www.instagram.com/co_cu1tur3/

• Tad Hardgrave’s post on Coaching vs Culture work

• Francis Weller: His book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow and his lecture series, Living a Soulful Life

• Martín Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust

• Clarinda Tivoli

  https://www.thematriarchalbusiness.com/

• Cristóbal Scarpati - Dear Horse World Podcast by Noelle Floyd

  “‘Kawanche’ [incorrect spelling, using the video’s subtitles’ spelling] means horseman. For us in this time, a ‘horseman’ is a person that works with horses… The translation of the word is horseman. But for them it [Kawanche] is the person that deserves to be with horses. It’s not because you decide you will be, because you like them. It’s because you have conditions [points to heart]— natural conditions— to be with horses. So the Kawanches weren’t everyone — they were the special kids that couldn’t avoid spending hours just watching one horse. Falling in love with horses. That’s a real Kawanche… If you want to see who is a Kawanche, put 10 kids in front of horses. They will get distracted… one of them will be mezmorized. That is a real Kawanche… it’s not something you can decide. It just is.”

I have some thoughts around this I would really love to share, coming from the perspective of being a horse trainer with a huge focus on giving horses a voice + a choice — which of course includes themes around consent — as well as raising animals myself, such as dairy goats and sheep, and contending with these types of questions… mixed in with a lot of thinking around ways of being and relating beyond the current imposed systems of colonization and capitalism.

I think there is truth on both sides of this conversation — from the folk who are criticizing the farmer + the small farmer. I don’t see it as black or white, this or that. (Also note I am coming at this with the belief that there is always truth in what a person brings forth into a conversation… it’s just sometimes it can be the raw ingredients versus the meal that’s ready to be digested as wisdom, or a wound that has yet to alchemize into the wisdom it holds).

First, I think the truth/resonance in the criticism that I feel is a recognition of something being off about our relationship to land, animals, and food.. That “something off”, being a feeling of deep violence, extraction, and dishonoring of relationality that is woven into colonized ways of interacting with the earth and our more than human kin. If I could put my finger on the exact spot that hurts, it seems to come down to a core difference in ways of interacting with the gifts animals offer us: (1) Receiving the Gift (2) Taking the Gift. (I’m putting these into 2 categories for simplicity, of course we could think of these things on more of a spectrum).

In cultures who Receive the Gift, it seems that what animals offer us in the form of their own bodies - meat, milk, eggs, hides, skins, bone, blood, wool - are seen as gifts that are prayed for, are asked to be received in a consensual way, are graciously given to us, revered, and met with a deep expression of gratitude, beauty, and acts of tangible reciprocation (such as harvesting a plant in seed so we can, in one motion, both harvest the root + plant the seeds).

In cultures who Take the Gift, a hallmark trait of colonization, it seems the animal offering the gift is de-personalized, there is a non-consensual taking, a dishonoring of the gift through waste and disregard, and a stealing from the Mother. This goes with the “take what’s yours” mentality. There is no longer this approach of revering the gift and honoring/asking the giver.

There is a quote from The Great Cosmic Mother (pg 261-262) that says it well, bringing up the point that in both hunting and war, men experience the acquisition of things they have not themselves produced, which can swell the ego’s sense of power. In people of Old Europe, prior to colonization (and in still relatively in-tact cultures the world over) this danger is balanced by ritual propitiation and by the strong intact spiritual perception that LIFE IS GIVEN. But in colonizer culture/ideology, the opposite the underlying belief is that LIFE IS MADE TO BE TAKEN, that a real man doesn’t wait for it to be given, a real man just takes it, and that the the spoils of conquest belong to the victor - those so-called “spoils” being the products of women’s labor, women’s bodies, the body of Mother Earth herself. The Bronze Age celebration of war and hunting, seen as “manly virtues” and “male sport” became precisely the celebration of power over women, and over the female earth.

All this being said, what I’m feeling into in regards to the main criticism that was brought up in the video is this pulse of hey, I feel it in my bones, in the core of my being, that I am yearning for life ways that are in deeper relationship, and feel a deep sadness and outrage over the exploitative status quo.

But perhaps when we don’t stay with the yearning and grief for quite long enough, we run into the risk of jumping to impose our solutions and the “I know best” prescriptions, and then can end up villiannizing people as good or bad based on whether or not they are following them, leading to the expression of this valid and necessary grief and yearning to come off as attacking, condescending, self-righteous, and other shadowy forms of expression… which oftentimes is met with pushback.

I think two things that could potentially help with this and steward change are:

1. Expressing the yearning and staying in the place of discomfort that is - I yearn for things to be different, I sense there is a better way of going about this *AND* I am not yet sure what that is.

2. Looking at the system more, individuals less. It is my belief that people are kind by nature - but we are living in conditions that make it really hard for people to be kind and act relationally. This belief leads to me do a lot of investigating of systems and directing my energy towards changing the system to bring change, and having compassion for people who are navigating these systems… Which I think, is necessary, because we need everyone if we are going to fight the system (and the system actually depends on us being divided so we can’t come together to actually fight it and change it).

There are a plethora of ways we can bring more relational, consent-based ways of engaging with animal based life ways. Reading animals emotional states and retreating before the animal is over threshold, when receiving oral medication, for example, or kid/calf/lamb sharing for dairy animals. And of course there are also options like R+ based cooperative care husbandry training.

But to me it seems the issue is not that people would be against engaging in these types of processes (I think most people want what is best for their animals), the issue is usually the limitations that the system imposes on people.

For example, there’s no way that a single small farmer who is also raising kids and working a full-time job is going to be able to cooperative care train 5 cows for them to take oral medication voluntarily. We see these kinds of practices in zoos because they have around the clock teams of employees working on behalf of these animals. So if we take the pressure off the individual and look at the system, why don’t people have the time? Why are people having to do this solo? Where is the village? Why do we have to spend so much time working to make money for things that were once given freely by the Earth - or provided for by community, such as child care? These questions actually lead us to the root of the problem, in my opinion.

As far as a practice like milk sharing and more natural weaning processes, what are the limitations placed on people by the system in terms of pressure, financially, energetically, etc to “maximize” and get ultimate “efficiency” that lead to extractive processes? Does the need for “efficiency” really validate these practices as a “necessary evil”? I think this question would lead us down the road of questioning the myth of “efficiency” and seeing the harm that has taken place in the name of “efficiency” to us as individuals, the land, animals, etc. For example, is it really more “efficient” to selectively breed for large udders/milk production when the fallout is distended udders, mastitis, grain dependent and care intensive reliant animals that can’t sustain drought? I think these are important questions to consider.

These are my raw/initial thoughts and I think this conversation & questions are really important to have more dialogue around.

Even if liberty is taught, prior to the horse truly consenting to touch, by well intentioned folks in ways that appear perhaps benign to most (depending on the individual and views of R+ vs R-), ways that natural horsemanship schools tend to teach it – creating draw and making the right thing easy the wrong thing hard, etc – if the horse isn’t actually okay with touch, the final picture we get still won’t survive transparency when put to the test.

For example, while working with a mustang recently, a mustang who had been ridden for a few years, but had a bolting problem that wouldn’t go away, I set off to find the root of the problem and see just how far back we needed to go. After some digging, it became apparent she actually wasn’t okay with touch. I say digging because it’s not always so straightforward, especially if they have liberty training! I turned her out in the roundpen and she did as she was taught: to follow me. She stayed super hooked on. But she had learned, through pressure & release, that if she follows me, I go away. But what happens when we offer another option?

I left the roundpen and came back in once she had taken up another interest, nibbling some hay at the other end of it. (In these cases, I might also just set a bit of a boundary and ask the horse to go off and not be right by me, which I probably did with this horse at some point, too). When I proceeded to approach her again, she jerked her head up towards me when I was 30 feet away. Before she could latch onto me again, I released the pressure of my presence, and turned and walked away. I released at the slightest stress signal (lifting the head & looking at me). I repeated this, and got the same result, over and over again.

So, if she kept doing this like clockwork, what does that tell me? It tells me that if the behavior repeated with consistency (her giving two eyes when I approached her), then I was reinforcing that behavior (by turning and walking away, removing the aversive stimulus aka my presence). That’s the basic definition of reinforcement: If the thing you’re doing is reinforcing (aka walking away), you’ll see more of the behavior (aka giving me two eyes).

Two disclaimers before we proceed:

1- If you’re training with almost exclusively R+ to the extent that’s possible, this post isn’t really applicable to you. Consent can look different in some ways in the R+ paradigm and it feels like even more of a direct and ongoing conversation, so I’m not trying to apply this to you if that’s the case. Your horse might “fail” this test because the reinforcer isn’t present and that’s a whole different story.

2- The “test” as I’ve described here is not always this simple. It’s easy to get a false read on horses who have built up a lot of coping mechanisms, horses stuck in functional freeze or horses who tend to be a bit bold and go into a bit of “fight” even through mildly “pushy” behaviors. That’s for another post. These horses may require a more tactful approach to start to get a “true” read.

Okay, let’s get back to it..

This transparency test – approaching and retreating when the horse gives you two eyes – is the first step I do when evaluating a horse to try to get a full picture and read on them to find where our true starting point is, regardless of whether they’ve been ridden for years.

For horses who tend to “fail” this test, ie the horse who isn’t actually okay with being touched… this will typically show up in a variety of ways, depending on the horse.

For the sake of explaining here, I’ll put these horses into two groups based on the ways they present themselves when they are not actually okay with touch, horses who don’t survive this transparency test.

In Group 1, we have horses who range from mild but annoying and ongoing mouthiness and nippiness behavior, to full on dangerous displays of behaviors such as bolting, bucking, etc. Pretty straightforward.

In Group 2, we have horses who may on the surface appear to cope pretty well with it, but what they are usually doing is coping by existing in an ongoing state of functional freeze. These are horses that tend to “fit the program.” Could be a mustang formerly untouched for most of their life, could be a selectively bred foal who's been rubbed all over in the days just after birth with no choice but to accept it… This kind of horse who copes via functional freeze since they aren’t actually okay with being touched won’t typically show outward and overt signs of stress, such as the horses described in Group 1. Instead, you might see them and describe them as “compliant.” But perhaps, a bit of a dull eye… an eye that’s lost its spark… (Side note: I think there's a reason it’s been said that eyes are the window to the soul. In freeze, I see it as a horse’s soul leaves their body and hence the eye appears vacant. Like no one’s really there… and it’s a process to help the horse feel safe enough to invite their soul back into their body.) Of course, if we look closer, we will see the horse doesn’t really blink much. And there's small signs of tension in the horse’s face, but they’re for the most part very good about keeping it inside. They might also be persistently spooky, and just seem unsettled in their own bodies. They might also be “dull” and it seems large amounts of pressure need to be used to motivate them.

These Group 2 horses are interesting. Because, they might appear to be accepting of touch and humans. But, the relationship doesn’t survive transparency. It doesn’t survive the transparency of this test I’ve outlined here.

I’ve started to implement this question in my own life when I come across something that doesn’t quite sit right to me– “Would this survive transparency?”

Sticking with the horse world for a moment, if I come across a training method that doesn’t sit right, I can simply ask, would this technique survive transparency? If I ask “why,” does the claim start to get shaky and fall apart? Do I get the answer “That’s just the way it’s always been done” or deflection via a response like “Maam, I’m the expert, I’ve trained hundreds of horses, let me do my job.” Do I get a response that offers an explanation for the why, but I do some research and find it to be false, or find other ways of achieving the same thing without compromising my values? Do I get a response that is emotional with fluffy language but no actual substance?

Now widening our lens, going beyond the horse world and into wider webs of relation… I have a teacher, Leah Manaema Avene, who often says, “Colonialism can’t survive transparency.”

There are so many common narratives, narratives we take for granted, always having taken them for being true since we have been told them since the time we could talk, that cannot actually survive transparency– such as, for example, when we hear history from the perspective of the “conquered” not the “conqueror” (I say this for lack of better words to get my point across, while acknowledging that there are people here among us who are certainly not “conquered” and stand firm in their resistance to this day) or when we hear history from the lens of the global majority.

I thought about that a lot the other day because I came across a video online that spoke about how folks like myself, who are advocating for a Free Palestine and demanding an end to the genocide, are “dangerous terrorists.” Folks in the comments were even advocating for their “deportation.”

Does this claim - albeit emotionally stirring for sure, as it was meant to be - survive transparency? No. If you disagree, are you willing to put your beliefs to the test?

Personally, it feels important for me to put my beliefs to the test. Coming back to the horse world - If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be the horsewoman I am today. I probably would’ve gotten severely injured if not killed, or at least a part of me would’ve had to die - the part of me that longed for a deeper, authentic relationship with horses and the part of me that wanted to dedicate my life's work to helping horses who failed to "fit the program." With so many things I came across, something inside of me wasn’t content with the answers or status quo. I kept asking “why,” kept peeling back the layers, and sought deeper answers. I also needed to be able to articulate what I was doing, especially coming into this industry as a young woman. I couldn’t be standing on shaky ground, I had to be well informed and put my beliefs to the test before others did to question my credibility. Perhaps there’s a lot of different reasons I’ve developed this habit.

I think on some level we know when things won’t survive the test of transparency… but we might avoid putting them to the test because of the truth that would be, then, less able to hide. We would have to come eye to eye with it. We couldn’t keep brushing it under the rug. When we put it to the test, when it becomes glaringly obvious, we’d probably have to do something about it.

There have certainly been times in my life I kept avoiding the truth - which maybe was keeping me alive to an extent - until it wasn't. Until this denial was killing me. Until I was starving for truth.

I think back to a boyfriend I had once, who called me on the phone and said he was at home, when I could clearly hear things on the phone that told me he was in the car. But he told me he was at home, repeatedly. And because I didn’t want to face the fallout, have to come to terms with the pain of the truth right in front of me, I chose to believe him, albeit maybe not consciously. Luckily I eventually did leave that relationship, when the truth became too glaringly obvious, and a friend wouldn’t let me look away any longer. And then I plunged into a long darkness and faced fears I’d been avoiding around being unlovable, etc. But ultimately it freed me to find more authentic relationships, relationships where I was treated with respect. I know other women who haven’t been so lucky. I think of a woman I know who endured years of abuse from her husband and kept the letters of him promising he’d change in a box for 30 years. She is still alive, but there is barely a trace of her left.

I think back to horses and how many of us don’t want transparency, for good reason… What would confronting the truth mean? What would it ask of us? It might mean we can’t keep riding our horse who isn’t okay with touch, and maybe our livelihood depends on riding this horse, or maybe it's the one thing that keeps us sane in this world. It would mean we would have to face the parts of ourselves feeling guilt and shame over riding a horse that was saying no (which, Holly Truhlar, Desiree Adaway, & Rachael Rice have started recognizing as “the sixth gate of grief: the harms we’ve done. The ache of the impacts we’ve had—knowingly or unknowingly—through silence, fragility, overwhelm, supremacy, entitlement, complicity, urgency, and simply being human in times of late capitalism. This grief is sacred,” Holly shares in her recent Substack, Rituals of Repair.) It would mean, in some cases, our whole world view becomes cracked. And this can be absolutely terrifying, when the foundation we’ve thought was sturdy underneath our feet begins to crack. What ground would we have left to stand on? Sometimes it feels like we will just be swallowed up in an abyss of pain. Sometimes that is what happens. And not all of us can afford to be swallowed up, especially in this culture, without the proper support systems in place, when others’ livelihoods as well as our own depend on us showing up each day no matter what.

So I’m not telling others what to do. It’s not always so simple. Not everyone has the luxury of falling apart like I did. This is just my story, and I realize it is not, nor should be, everyone’s story necessarily.

But if I’m telling my story, here’s what I’ll leave you with. I remember when I woke up to reclaim my own life, when I finally saw with transparency. I wrote:

“what you thought was safe was traumatizing
what you thought was love was control
what you thought was weak was strong
what you thought was free was caged
what you thought was you was him

and in that moment, she began walking her path to freedom.”

I'm still walking. But I've gotten past the fence, at least. And on the other side of the pain, I found truth dripping down my chin. Authentic and fulfilling relationships. Unbridled joy. I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s actually, really really f*king hard. There were times I didn’t think I’d make it out alive – I wasn’t sure if it would kill me. But I knew staying in the same place I was most certainly would.

Is it “easy” to train a horse to say no? If we train a horse to say no, do we risk the horse then never saying yes?

These are questions I’ve heard recently, and I’ve heard claims being made that go against my personal experience that I’d like to share.

A little bit of background: When I was active in this space a few years ago, it seemed like a movement was gaining traction– It felt like a rising wave of folks bringing much needed dialogue to the importance of bringing our

horse’s choice. But what I am seeing in this space upon my return is a wave of pushback towards the dialogue of bringing more choice to our horses, directed toward criticizing or chastising people who are trying to do so.

I would like to explore some of these claims and add my experience to the conversation. I think my perspective has something of value to bring here as I have been exploring and implementing ways of giving horses choice for nearly the past decade, both in the realms of positive reinforcement (food rewards) & negative reinforcement (pressure/release) modalities. I will be focusing on how my experience of giving horses choice differs from the claims I see being made in this wave of pushback. I do not disregard the fact that there are shadows and limitations to anything, just as there can be shadows to this movement, too, but that won’t be my focus in this post.

Before we begin, a note about context.

It’s my understanding that decisions we make with our horses are usually context specific– in other words, they are relational. The decisions we make are dependent on and in relationship with our own backgrounds and values, the individual and unique horse we are working with, the constraints we face, the landscape we are working with, etc. As much as we try to create broad rules or generalities it’s usually not the case.

*Exception: unless we’re on the topic of discussing abuse, in which - if we can agree on what is abuse - there is no relevant context that would warrant that kind of treatment or “training” protocol. That’s why for me, when I see something that I believe to be detrimental to the horse (and ultimately the human enacting this kind of treatment even if that doesn’t seem as apparent) and someone comes to the defense saying this was taken out of context .. that feels irrelevant because there is no context that would sway me to condone this kind of treatment.

So, because context is important, for the sake of this post I’ll be discussing a specific scenario with a horse– Oakley, a 15 yr old BLM mustang mare who has significant trauma around human presence, touch, etc who I am doing a “full restart” with, starting over from the very beginning with human presence in the approach and touch, even though this horse had previously been trained to halter, lead, and perform various foundational groundwork behaviors. I am primarily using pressure & release at this point with Oakley, with no food rewards present.

To clarify, as even horses being described as having trauma is coming into question during this new wave of pushback, I say “ trauma” due to a host of observations about this horse beyond her having and demonstrating fear. These include a) the inability to generalize skills in different contexts - i.e. hypothetical ex of this, you can touch horse with the back of your hand but the front of your hand is an entirely new thing and there's no carryover, and b) one of the biggest definers for me, she couldn’t return her nervous system to a baseline relaxation, at least in my presence. Instead, she was “stuck in the up,” stuck in a sympathetic flight, fight, freeze state.

This is a clip of me working with her that I’ll touch more on as we go →

Claim: “It’s easy to train a horse to say no”

One point I recently saw being made during this wave of pushback to giving our horse’s choice is that “it’s easy to train a horse to say no.”

Let's unpack this claim, as it relates to this specific context with Oakley.

Sometimes it is easy to train a horse to say no, and we can do so unintentionally. For example, we release pressure when the horse is pulling, resisting, head shaking, bolting or doing some other undesirable behavior. (Although I would argue it’s not really that simple, as there’s a lot of nuance here when we take into account emotions.. I do believe we can effectively apply negative reinforcement without a release always being contingent on the horse performing the desired behavior, and I realize this sounds like an impossible paradox, but again that goes beyond the scope of this article).

But to really unpack it we need to agree on what “no” is and that varies situation to situation - as well as whether it’s a natural way/reactive way of the horse saying no, or a signal the horse is taught to use to say no– whether that was a novel behavior introduced and established by the human as a tool for the horse to use, or a natural behavior the human decided to strengthen through a reinforcement history.

In the case of Oakley, it was a natural behavior I decided to strengthen through reinforcement history. Everytime Oakley reaches to touch me – which was shaped into more of a head turn so it can be used in a wider range of scenarios– I walk away and “release” the spacial pressure of me being close to her or release the pressure of touching her, which she finds aversive. This head turn behavior becomes a conditioned behavior Oakley can use to communicate her “no.” I typically refer to this an end signal.

The reason I teach her to utilize her conditioned “no” or end signal, is to replace her natural “no” behavior of going into flight and bolting off *and/or* going into freeze/immobility, in which she stands still but is not relaxed. How do I know she is not relaxed? A variety of stress signals such as skin quivers, head raises, triangulation of the eye, etc. But the easiest one is… she doesn't blink. Or her rate of blinking is extremely low.

Speaking to Oakley’s situation, it has been a long process to get her to say no, versus the pathway her nervous system has been most wired to go – freeze.

Oakley’s situation is not unique, though. This notable freeze reaction is what I find with every trauma case I have worked with. I generally have to spend about 30 days, on average, solidifying & strengthening the horse’s ability to use their “no” or end signal reliably for them to come out of freeze. I'll think they have it, then they can revert back into freeze and there’s a deeper layer - this process is a spiral, it’s not linear. So its actually a significant part of the initial part of training to get them feeling like they can access their no, versus going into freeze.

Why does her ability to say “no” help her come out of freeze? Well, according to my understanding, the whole reason an animal (humans included) go into freeze is when other options haven’t worked – flight, and in some cases fight, have been thwarted. In other words, freeze and going immobile is their last ditch survival mechanism, like a possum playing dead. So, the whole reason they’ve gone into freeze is because they don’t feels safe. The quickest way I’ve found to help a horse feel safe again, and hence begin to thaw and release the tension they’ve been carrying, is to not just allow, but to help them learn, to say “no.” For the horses I work with, this restores a sense of baseline relaxation with the presence of a human.

So when people suggest that horses first answer to everything will be “no,” claiming this is especially true for horses whom their first contact with people was violent or forceful, I have found this to absolutely not be my experience – and for context, for the past 8 years I’ve primarily worked with BLM previously feral mustangs who have “failed” conventional training and were found to have severe bolting/bucking issues, found to be explosive and unpredictable etc (aka trauma cases). To claim these horses coming from a violent and forceful training methodology are the ones who will be most likely to say no to most if not all new concepts we introduce is severely misguided – in my opinion, these horses actually are the most likely to say a false yes, meaning they comply and go into freeze. This is not a true yes.

I’d also like to add that it does not take apparently “violent” or outright abusive methods for a horse to have trauma. Not at all! I have certainly caused trauma unintentionally with horses, even after I was more “trauma aware.” The two primary ingredients for trauma according to Dr Peter Levine is (1) high state of arousal and (2) *perceived* inability to escape. Take a wild horse, an unhandled horse, or a particularly sensitive horse and put them in training in closed spaces and attach a rope onto them with a conditioned response to give to pressure and be contained… combined with training that doesn’t recognize a horse’s stress signals and thresholds or respond appropriately to them with unpredictable environments and things outside of our control in some cases…. and wa la, the perfect concoction for trauma to occur. I believe it happens a lot easier than we think, even with well-intentioned and caring trainers and owners. The survival reaction is not completed, it’s thwarted, and the energy horses went into freeze with never really goes away… not until we can help the horse find a way to dispel this energy and release it through licking and chewing, yawning, and other forms of calming signals.

(also, especially with mustangs some have gone through trauma before even being put into human care, during round-ups and in holding facilities which is again usually outside our control).

Claim: If you allow the horse to say no, you teach them the answer is no and then they will never learn to say yes. Ever.

I have also found this to be false. In fact, I would say that the opposite feels true in my work: If we don’t begin by allowing the horse to say no, we can never get a true yes.

And if we don’t begin with the no, in Oakley’s case, we have nothing to work off of – there is no established baseline safety for any kind of healthy relationship to take root. Nothing will bloom without this soil of safety. And “practically” speaking, she will never be a “safe” horse, in my opinion, because there would be all this heightened, stuck energy in freeze (visualize the momentum at the top of a rollercoaster, or a volcano that could explode at any moment).

I would add that horses who tend to go into freeze are often labeled as some of the most dangerous horses because their bolting, bucking, and other unsafe behavior seems to come out of nowhere. In every single mustang case I’ve taken in that demonstrates this kind of seemingly unpredictable reactivity, I’ve always found that these horses were never actually accepting and relaxed with touch - but rather went into freeze, meaning there was never any baseline relaxation. Every interaction is full of stress, tipping the horse into freeze and sometimes spilling over again into flight/fight.

Okay, so you may be seeing how establishing a horse’s ability to say no is important – but then, how would they ever say yes?

Honestly, I was surprised that they would, too. I had lived out, with positive reinforcement, plenty of approaches allowing the horse to say “no” and opt out of certain behaviors, including offering them a mat or some sort of target that was always present in training sessions so they could go there and get “free food”, noncontingent reinforcement (inspired by Ken Ramirez and Dr. Susan Friedman, under the concept of control itself functioning as a primary reinforcer). But had never experienced it with just using pressure & release, until cases like Oakley.

You can see she is allowed, at any time, to say “no” with a head turn. And in fact, if she’s not using her “no,” and I sense tension in her – stress signals, not blinking, etc – then I will stop and remind her she can say “no” through a little prompting. I take great care to make sure this is very solid, and she can access it at any time out of her own volition. And the more I allow and encourage her to say “no” when stressed, by giving the head turn behavior, the more she gives me a “yes” and allows me to touch her, with blinks, licking & chewing, and yawning, and ultimately, relaxation at the point such displays of releases aren’t as present because there was never any stressed energy that needs releasing to begin with.

Some of this work seems to be quite similar to CAT-H and I haven’t done a ton of research into it yet – I have actually been purposefully refraining from doing a lot of reading and taking in information the past few years to focus on felt and lived experiences with horses. One could say the new “no” is the “blink,” and maybe so at first, but my guess is this process takes us outside the learning quadrant, and I am not feeling the need to dissect it, pin it down and box it in right now.

I just know through my lived experience and relationships with horses, that allowing them to say no always has led to what feels like a truer expression of “yes,” and a reliable, relaxed and willing horse (physical limitations aside), and would like to add this piece to the collective conversation right now.

Contrary to many beliefs that have been shared and are currently circulating, I don’t believe giving our horses more choice is some kind of self-serving projection of human values onto our horses project that ultimately doesn’t serve them, nor do I believe it is solely based on lofty ideals and values that don’t have practical functions. And I certainly disagree with the claim that this wave of folks wanting to offer horses more choice is leading to an increase in accidents and less safety for people.

I think horses that feel safe keep us safe.

I think this approach may take more time up front, but it’s time you’d spend later on having to go back and fix the holes at some point if not addressed deeply early on, more times than not – at least with the horses I get in.

There is nuance here, of course, and there’s a wide variety of applications when we speak about giving our horse’s choice; but overall, I think this is a move in a healing direction and of repairing our relations with horses and other more-than-human kin, and with ourselves… lots of layers here to dive deep into. Of course with any new wave or movement, there will be some challenges, some unseen shadows, some applications that may not work out so well in the end, some misunderstandings and misinterpretations – but what I see is a growing number of folks who at least are wanting to try. And I would hate to see criticism of this movement preventing more folks from fumbling through and giving it a try and from even starting the journey at all.

* * * * *

I hope you found this share helpful, clarifying, and perhaps even inspiring.

If you would like to engage deeper with my work, you can…

> Join the waitlist for upcoming online programs at mustangmaddy.com (“learn with me” tab). *Please forgive the outdated website and note that moving forward my online offerings will be taking new forms than what is currently presented on the website.

> Join me for 5 Day Mentoring Intensives in-person this summer near so-called Ridgway, Colorado with your horse. Dates and more info to be released soon. You can email us at info@mustangmaddy.com if you’d like to be put on the waitlist and get more information as soon as it’s available.

🎧 Audio Recording 🎧

Resources Mentioned

and her course, Women Who Run with the Land

Reading

Many of us are familiar with the proverbial saying, in the words of Buck Brannaman, “Your horse is a mirror to your soul.”

Oftentimes, when working with horses we find that horses can mirror back to us our emotional states, relational patterns, physical tension patterns, and other conflicts or themes we are experiencing in lives whether that be in our bodies, at work, with family, or some other realm of our lives.

But when we look to horses as our mirrors, are we just engaging once again in an exploitative, narcissistic, human-centric practice of a culture obsessed with seeing our own image looking back at us, a generation of humans trying once again to make everything about us?

I recently heard some discussion and discourse within the horse community calling this practice of horses as our mirrors into question, calling for a more horse-centered and less human-centered approach to horsemanship.

This sort of reckoning with a culture of humans obsessed with their own image, is not exclusive to the horse world, a subculture, a microcosm of the greater Overculture. In her book, The Flowering Wand, Sophie Strand writes:

“Academia, across disciplines, has been increasingly caught in tautological investigations. Let me examine my words and find the reflection of myself inside their syntax. Let my philosophy always be a deferral of action, a dilation of the ways in which I appear in everything I study. Let me measure the placement of this electron, and find that my measurement device, my observing brain, entangles with the electron itself…. We have turned the world into our glassy pool…our worldview has become narcissus’s mirror.”

If we are gazing into our horse’s eyes to find more of the idealized picture of ourselves, to better ourselves, to self-optimize, improve, grow, to serve our own agendas, to uphold my belief systems, my enlightenment, my brain, my psyche… Then yes, this feels incredibly “ick” and extractive. This feels like a mirror-obsessed culture, drowning in its own reflection and in the process drowning everyone else, a species that has become obsessed with talking only to itself, a culture of people making everything about “me” all the time, asleep in a nightmare of a thousand empty mirrors, our own faces hauntingly staring back into our own.

Yes to this. And, what if there is more to be revealed here?

What if somewhere deep inside our blood and bones, there lies a deep intelligence who knows that there is something important in the mirror, something more expansive, but our deep seated instincts are cut short, unable to finish some essential process to the making of a human being, and this thwarting, this falling short, is when the mirror gazing turns toxic, when we find ourselves not just looking in the mirror but trapped in the mirror, endlessly and neurotically searching for something we came into this life expecting but did not receive?

And, let us consider this: What if the deepest form of narcissism is to believe we would see only us looking back in that mirror, whether it is the horse holding it up to us or some other being?

Dear Reader, let us begin our wondering and wandering through this pond filled wood, together.

The Human Need for the Mirror

Humans are wired for mirrors. To see ourselves reflected back in the Other, and the Other reflected back in us, is necessary for healthy human development and our ability to form loving relationships later in life. A quick Google search will confirm this:

“Young children develop a sense of themselves as a result of how their parents ‘mirror’ back their thoughts and feelings. If a child is experiencing a strong feeling and a parent mirrors back that emotion with relative accuracy, validation and empathy, the child feels ‘seen’—which allows them to then move through that emotion more quickly and better access their ability to behave differently or find a solution to their problem.” (BriggsTherapy.com)

Not only is the child wired to search for the mirror, but the adult is wired to respond, in a process known as the “serve and return” relationship between children and their parents or other caregivers in the family or community.

“Young children naturally reach out for interaction through babbling, facial expressions, gestures, and words, and adults respond with the same kind of vocalizing and gesturing back at them. A baby smiles at you—the urge to smile back is irresistible! This ‘serve and return’ behavior continues back and forth, like a game of tennis or volleyball. If the responses are unreliable, inappropriate, or simply absent, the developing architecture of child’s brain may be disrupted, and later learning, behavior, and health may be impaired.” “The Science of Neglect: the Persistent Absence of Responsive Care Disrupts the Developing Brain.” Working Paper 12. The Harvard Center For the Developing Child, P. 3

This process of mirroring is linked to both a healthy ability around knowing oneself and knowing the other and building empathy for others’ emotional states. Dr. Sue Johnson writes, in her book, Love Sense,

“When we see our sweetie’s mouth droop down or eyes well with tears, our brain mimics the experience for us. In a sense, we physiologically try on the feeling. The line between us and our partner blurs, and we automatically, without conscious reflection or deliberation, feel and know he or she is sad. This is invaluable in helping us tune in to a mate and in building intimacy, safety and trust–the very bonds of love. This exquisite sensitivity begins when we are about 2 years old, at about the same time we start to be able to recognize ourselves in a mirror. “Knowing me” and “knowing you” are linked; they are two sides of the same coin.”

But what happens when there is no mirror where a mirror should have been? Perhaps we become destined to become trapped in the mirror, forever seeking something we expected but did not receive. And if that’s the case, what might be the path out, back to connection?

Let us now turn to myth and story for possible answers.

The Story of Narcissus

*As told by University of Cambridge School Classics Project and a version by Alan Mandelbaum

There once lived a man, a prophet, who could see into the future the way you and I remember our pasts. His name was Teiresias. One day a woman came to him. She'd given birth to a child she'd named Narcissus, and Narcissus was so beautiful he broke hearts as he wriggled in his cot. She was afraid one of the immortals would envy his beauty and destroy him. Tiresias shook his head. 'The gods pose him no threat. He will have a long life, unless he learns to know himself.' Shaking her head the woman walked away.

Years went by and with every passing day Narcissus became more beautiful. Wherever he went women fell in love with him. But they never approached him because of his flaw. He wore about himself a glassy pride that kept his suitors at bay.

Until a nymph named Echo, who was cursed to repeat the last words of anyone whom she spoke to, came along and spotted Narcissus.

Echo spied Narcissus while he was out hunting deer with his companions. She immediately fell in love with him and, infatuated, followed quietly. The more she looked at the young man, the more she longed for him. Though she wished with all her heart to call out to Narcissus, the curse prevented her.

For months she followed him, waiting for the words to come with which she could proclaim her love. At last, the moment came. Narcissus and his friends went hunting in a forest. They became separated from one another. Narcissus called, 'Is anybody here?' Echo joyfully stole the word: 'Here!' 'Then come to me, come to me!' She ran to him. She put her arms around him. He pushed her away. 'Get off me! What are you? I suppose like all the others you love me.' 'Love me,' she said 'Love me.' 'I would rather die' said Narcissus 'than let you lie with me.' 'Lie with me,' she said 'Lie with me.' 'Leave me alone.' He fled. 'Alone,' said Echo 'Alone. Alone.'

The nymph Echo fell in love with Narcissus’s beauty but he paid no attention to her increasingly mournful cries. To the gods looking down upon the play of men, unrequited love was a crime. They punished narcissus in appropriate symbolic form by causing him to fall in love with his own reflection, ever reaching out to embrace an illusion.

Poor Echo was a slender thing. Her sorrow made her slighter still. She became spindly, bony, pale, gaunt, feeble, and frail. One morning when she tried to stand her sharp bones ruptured through her thin skin. Her body collapsed in on itself. Her bones turned back into stone. Only her voice survived, hiding in caves, hiding among high hills. Echo's voice can still be heard on mountain slopes everywhere.

Weary of the nymph, Narcissus went to a pool to drink. It was a perfect pool, as smooth as any mirror. He leant over the side and saw a face of such beauty that suddenly he was filled with another kind of craving. He leant forward to kiss it but it broke into wrinkles. He gave a cry of anguish, and the image staring back at him cried in anguish back. He lay beside the pool like a fallen statue. He was transfixed by it.

And so the prophecy of Tiresias was fulfilled. Narcissus had learned to know himself, and his awful torture began. No thought of food or drink would take him from the spot. His eyes could never have their fill. At last he said, 'You, please, come to me. Lie with me. Love me. When I laugh I see you laugh. When I smile you smile. When I cry you shed tears. You give me every indication that you love me and yet we do not embrace. I think I understand: I am in love with myself. Always we will be together and yet always we will be apart.

Narcissus closed his eyes and lay his head upon the ground. He realizes he is dying and in his last words, says, “i die in my youth prime, but death is a good thing because death will end my own pain.”

His soul drifted out of his open mouth beneath the crust of earth, down a steep flight of stairs, into the underworld, into the land of many guests, the realm of the dead. As his soul drifted across the River of Forgetfulness it left behind all memory. Even so, some urge too powerful to resist drew it to the edge of the river, where it leant over the side and stared at the greasy smear of a reflection that quivered on the surface of the water.

Up on the earth rumours reached a village: lovely Narcissus was dead. So the people searched the forest to burn the corpse with proper honours. But they never found a body. Instead they came upon a delicate flower with white and yellow petals leaning over the edge of a pool, as if gazing at its own reflection – a flower we know today as, the narcissus flower.

Layers of The Story

Let us look now, at the deeper layers of this story, that may offer some guidance on our question around mirrors and horses. We may seem to be a long way off from our original question, but let us linger here for a moment, let us wander through the wood together; and after, we will circle back to where we began.

Layer 1: The roots of Narcissism

Whilst most will be familiar with the image of a youth pining over his reflection in the water, the beginning of the myth of Echo and Narcissus is less well known. It is told that Narcissus’ mother, the nymph Leirope, was ravished by the river god Kephissos who “encircled her with his winding streams.”

Thus, Narcissus was a child of this rape, conceived by the raping of the feminine.

There are a few important details I’d like to share with you in order for us to understand the depth and importance of this act that is the story’s true beginning. Namely, who was Liriopie, the victim? And who was this river God Kephissos, the abuser? And what does this contextual information tell us about the roots of Narcissism displayed by Narcissus in this story?

Who was Liriope?

According to Sylvia Lindseadt in her class, When Women Were the Land, nymphs – such as Liriopie– had a deep relationship to water guardianship and protection in pre-colonial and pre-patriarchal Europe. Nymphs were also connected to the autonomy and legitimacy of female oracles who serve a feminine lineage outside of patriarchal law.

But with the rise of a patriarchal Greek mythology, such nymphs were reduced, through the act of slander and erasure, to nothing more than a false portrayal as a sex-crazed lonely nymph with the sole desire to seduce men to their deaths, and bring them to their ruin. Could this be the collective rape of nymphs, stripping them of their wisdom and water guardianship, that the rape of Liriope, in this myth, is nodding to?

“When you follow the streams, you begin to see a pattern across all of Europe of female spirits as guardians of springs, rivers, streams and wells,” Sylvia says. “Part of this pattern is that you do not approach these holy waters without care. They need to be respected and properly propitiated.. Or they can become vengeful.” Speaking to the story of a different water nymph, Calypso, Sylvia says of her portrayal, “Perhaps Calypso was angry. Perhaps trapping Odysseus was her revenge for the rape of her sister nymphs across the Aegean with the coming of Zeus and the men who worshipped him.”

Who Was the River God Kephissos?

Across Europe, the names of many rivers were once the names of goddesses. But with the rise of patriarchy and by the time of the story of Narcissus, a river God has taken the place of the river Goddess. Instead, we have the River God Kephissos presented in this story, as the one who committed this act of abuse toward Liriope. Who is he?

Kephissos is a river that flows through the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. The "Oracle of Apollo at Delphi" refers to the ancient Greek prophetic oracle located at the sanctuary of Delphi, where a priestess known as the "Pythia" would deliver prophecies believed to be the voice of the god Apollo.

So the River God Kephissos is located in the kingdom of Apollolian consciousness. But just who was Apollo? Well, Apollo is one of Zeus’ two sons. Apollo is the god of the sun, art, plague and disease, of rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity and stands for reason. Dionysus is the god of wine, dance and pleasure, of irrationality and chaos, representing passion, emotions and instincts.

And so, Apollonian consciousness refers to a masculine energy, a hot sun god, who values reason and rationality over emotion and intuition, order over chaos, and so forth. In summary, apollonian consciousness is found at the heart of patriarchal consciousness.

And so, better understanding this river God, Kephissos, we can see that the feminine water protectors, the age of matriarchy, is raped, their power and dignity stripped away, by the rise of the patriachal Appollonian consciousness.

Sylvia connects us to to how this present day raping of Liriope is still taking place today.

“We are all daughters of the Well Maidens, and sons of the Grail King. We are all the ten thousand daughters of Tethys who were silenced and suppressed by the rule of conquering gods, daughters of an unending font of life-giving underground clear-pure water. The Earth is crying out, and the waters run with poison, and violence still reigns supreme.”

Impact on Narcissus: Roots of Narcissism

With this understanding, we can see how the conditions of this kind of rape and abuse could leave a culture of both men and women stripped of the feminine and the qualities she represents, such as emotional attunement, mirroring, validation, and empathy.

What happens when the child looks into the eyes of their caregivers, but their eyes, eyes that were supposed to hold a mirror, reflecting back the child’s face and feeling state and sense of self, are empty?

We have children who cannot know themselves. Because to know oneself you have to have someone who reflects and mirrors your own feelings, own sense of value. The story tells us that Liriope was likely unable to give Narcissus these things.

And so the result is a child who cannot find his own being inside of the Other, either. The mirror is missing. What happens to the child in this case? We can see how the child would be cursed to become trapped in a mirror, his own making of himself to try to falsely and artificially create his own validation, without the loving presence of the Other reflecting back to him. According to Martin S. Bergmann in an article published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, this behavior can be understood as an emergency mechanism which attempts to restore the sense of self, by trying to replace the absent mirroring mother.

Thus, a narcissist doesn’t stare into the mirror out of self-love and admiration, but of self-hate and loathing, masked as grandiosity, endless searching, endless reaching, for the Other that he is cursed to never find lest he begins to grapple with the original wound of what he came into this world expecting, but never received.

There is another feature of the narcissist in his survival mechanism: Because a narcissist is a person who is unable to face the pain of feeling so unlovable, and the pain of needing the Other who is unavailable, he also attempts to reject this need for the Other altogether.

“For all his air of self-sufficiency, the narcissist is full of interpersonal needs. He is more needy than most people who feel they have something good inside of them. If he is to survive, he must find a way to get his needs met without acknowledging the independent existence of the person [or more-than-human kin] off whom he wants to feed. To admit that a person [or more-than-human kin] is necessary to him gets him in touch with feelings of deficiency, which plummet him into intolerable emptiness, jealousy, and rage. To avoid this experience, he inhabits a one-person world. Either he exists and other people are extinguished, or vice versa. In his mind, he is center stage and other people [and more than human kin] are mere shadows beyond the proscenium. This solution creates a new conundrum: ‘How can I get fed without acknowledging the feeder?’ The solution is to dissect people [and more than human kin] and to turn them partially into objects, to make them inanimate. A person comes to represent a need-fulfilling function or an organ like a breast, a vagina, [or I might add a “natural resource”]… There is no overall person to consider.” Elan Golomb, PhD, Trapped in the Mirror

And so, on an individual level, with the development of a narcissist, we end up with a person who rejects the Other out of a deep feeling of being unlovable – it seems less painful to convince ourselves we don’t need the nurturing of the Other than to submit ourselves to the pain of expressing this need and not getting it. And on a cultural level, we end up with people who pretend they do not need the Mother who is Earth and the nourishment she brings us, to not acknowledge her as a living being in need of relationship and reciprocity. Instead we reduce her to “natural resources” and we mine, frack, pollute, and poison her with our never ending demands.

Layer 2: Why Does Narcissus Reject Echo?

Before moving onto the pond, we must take a moment to look more deeply at Echo. Who is she, and what does that tell us about why Narcissus may have rejected her?

Echo is the primary lover that we are told Narcissus turns down. Who is Echo? We are told that Echo is a nymph who was cursed to only be able to echo back others’ words, never able to use her own. The loss of her voice is very significant here.

“Echo could neither start a conversation nor remain silent after another stopped talking. To be

unable to start a conversation is a symbolic way of saying that Echo lacks an independent self.

To be compelled to comment when someone else is speaking is a symbolic way of saying that Echo clings and cannot separate.” Martin S. Bergmann, The Legend of Narcissus

So by losing her voice, we can see how Echo is not able to really be her own person, the Other.

Some point out that Narcissus’ inability to love even this woman, who seems to be the quintessential narcissistic object, who has less demands than a woman who has her own personality, thoughts, wishes, and will, points to just how severe Narcisuss’ narcissism was.

However, if we are looking to myth to offer guidance on the healing of narcissism, not just a story about narcissism, to me it seems like an absolute necessity that Narcissus would not be attracted to Echo; for he is craving the Other, and Echo provides him with only more of himself, an Echo of himself.

And, real mirroring, the mirroring Narcissus likely never had as a child, does not come from just repeating and regurgitating the words of another; it comes through the body. True mirroring is emotional attunement; the other sees you fully, sees what you see, feels what you feel.

In this way, Echo is more of the same - seeing only oneself gazing back, where the Other should have clearly been, the Other that contains and mirrors back the self.

So while many psychologists use this part of the story to show that Narcissus’ rejection of Echo was a step towards his own demise, I believe it was a step towards his healing. There is something different Narcissus needs – not more of himself, but a return to the womb-like, amniotic waters that birthed him, able to reflect back not an Echo of himself, but a reflection of who he really is, his true nature that he has forgotten, a nature that is embedded in ecology beyond the human self.

Layer 3: The Mother Pond

“Now, to the waters. The holy upwelling waters of life, the life-giving waters, the living water, where life began on this earth, coiled up and seeded in the great primordial oceans of the beginning, 3.5 billion years ago when the first little organisms began to quiver and stir in the waters which are nearly as old as our Gaia, our planet, herself. All the water on this earth has never left this earth—it has cycled endlessly through stone and tree and cloud and the bodies of all beings for millions of years, renewed, recleansed, returned to mineralled depths, upwelling once more. Touch water, and you touch the history of life. Touch water and you touch ancestors, and you touch the living consciousness of this holy Earth. Every earth-rooted, earth honoring human culture connected has known this to be true, and has centered water, has listened to water, has revered and respected water, and especially places where springs arise right out of the earth, right out of stone, right out of the unseen realm of the deepest underground, underworld, otherworld. Such places were and are known as holy ground. And across the world, including across the varied lands of Europe, in the old stories and traditions, women guard these waters. Goddesses, nymphs, ancestral women, priestesses, female spirits.”

Syvlia Lindsteadt, When Women Were the Land

Finding the Other

When Narcissus bends down over the pond to get a drink of water, he notices his reflection for the first time, and becomes enamoured. What did he see there? Was it only himself?

Unlike Echo, denied her own Otherness and personhood, the pond is teaming with life, the wild and beautiful Other.

Let us also consider that Narcissus sees his reflection not in a man-made object such as glass, not in a mirror, or even a bowl or pot or vessel shaped by human hands that is holding water, but in a pond that holds nourishing and healing waters. He is thirsty – could it be he had been experiencing a drought of his Soul, and the water was quenching his thirst in more ways than one?

Sophie Strand explores the concept of finding the Other in our reflection in her book, The Flowering Wand. She writes:

“Perhaps the Narcissus myth resonated differently two thousand years ago. But today, simplistic interpretations of the myth seem like a misdirection. What is the beautiful youth really doing as he gazes into the watery depths of a forest pool? The overculture would have us believe he is being vain or lazy. But I'm going to attempt a new interpretation. What if narcissus is showing us what we really need to be doing? The glossy mirror of narcissism is the myth of progress, the flickering screens in our pockets, the idea that nothing we encounter is really real. The pool, scummed by algae, glittering with pollen, a frog eye surfacing like the visual apparatus of the water itself, is the mirror of inclusion. It doesn’t show Narcissus a sterile, anthropcentric reflection. Instead, it offers something much more nutritious: The Animate Everything. The wild multiplicity of the whole world that includes us. Yes, maybe he sees his face. But it is a face rippled by a fish distributing the silt below. It is a face turned iridescent by a dragonfly wing skimming the surface of the water.” Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand (pg 54-55)

With this understanding, perhaps the solution to a culture full of self-absorbed, human-centric, forever adolescents with narcissist tendencies is not removing the mirror; perhaps the solution lies in the mirror, but the problem is what we see being reflected back to us. The curse is only seeing more of ourselves– but not even our true selves, as reflected by the Other, but our own interpretation of ourselves looking back at us, the grandiose image we have built up like armor to safeguard us from the intolerable depths of shame from being denied our full humanity; the medicine, the thwarted response we may be looking to complete, is seeing the strange and beautiful Other, gazing back at us, seeing ourselves and Other inextricably connected. Me, embedded in the You, something more than me.

Mother Mirroring

Not only is the pond teaming with the Other, but also unlike Echo, mirroring that the pond provides Narcissus is through the body, not words: when he’s crying, the pond’s reflection cries back with him. And when he reaches out to touch the reflection, he can see the pond reaching out towards him. This is the kind of healing mirroring, mother mirroring, mirroring of body and soul that Narcissus was denied. The pond’s mirroring is the medicine he was searching for this whole time, but in this moment, he experiences it in a real way, not in an artificial way through the reflection of himself he tried to build on his own, laced with false pride and bravado. No, this reflection is brought to him by the womb of all life.

It is significant that Narcissus’ own mother was a water nymph. But even if that were not the case, water is often associated with the feminine, with the mother.

Kaya Hill, a Haudenosaunee woman from Six Nations of the Grand River territory writes, in regards to the relationship between indigenous women and water on Turtle Island:

“Water is the life blood of Mother Earth. Her waters not only cleanse and nourish her own body, but the bodies of each living being she carries. In this way, water represents the interconnection between all living beings.. As women, we are connected to the earth through a strong relational bond. Not only do we carry responsibilities to the water outside of our physical beings, women also carry water inside of our beings, especially when we are in the process of creating new life. This sacred relationship between women and the earth’s waters has existed since time immemorial.

Our Grandmother, the Moon, has a special relationship with the waters on earth; she controls the ebb and flow of the water according to the cycles of the moon. Women also share a special connection with Grandmother Moon. Some call our menstrual cycle our ‘moon time’. This is because just as the moon regulates the water, she regulates women’s bodies. We have a menstrual cycle that lasts 28 days, just like one cycle of the moon phases. When we are menstruating, this is our most powerful time of the month, when the energy in our body is letting us know that we are ready to create life. This connection to the earth’s water is also related to the birth experience for women who choose to have babies. When a woman is set to give birth and the baby is ready to be born, water comes out first. Water gushes out, and this tells the mother that the baby is ready to come. Mother Earth does the same thing in the springtime when she is ready to give birth to her young; her water starts to gush, spring waters start to flow, and new life emerges (Anderson, 2016). This relationship between Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon, the waters, and women is a feminine relationship that has been maintained for millenia. It is a relationship of life cycles; the earth produces and nourishes life, the moon regulates the water which sustains life, and the women hold the power to create life.

https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/indigenous-women-and-their-connections-to-earth-and-water

This relationship between women and water is found the world over, and in pre-colonial Europe as well. In her class, When Women Were the Land, Sylvia shares,

“Women as guardians of the waters of life makes a lot of sense, from a very practical, biological place— the observation, across generations, of a mother’s waters breaking as she goes into labor. We literally enter this world through the flood of feminine, wombic waters, the waters of life. And then of course there is the nourishment of breast milk— and this imagery, of the waters of rain, and of springs, and also of breasts and breast milk, is often very intertwined in Paleolithic and Neolithic European imagery. The miraculous cold, clear water of springs often rises up right through a cleft in stone— an opening that is like the female anatomy, and very often has healing mineral properties… Earth feeds us waters, like the first nourishment we received from our mother’s bodies, inside the womb, and at her breast. I wonder how early on in our myth-making, in the origins of metaphoric thinking in our species, we connected these flows. Fairly early, it seems.”

When we look at the pond in the story of Narcissus through this lens, water as sacred, water as Mother, we can see that Narcissus is coming home to the feminine that was raped and defiled, that was lost. And he is filled with a yearning, now seeing clearly for the first time what was lost.

But without this lens, with the colonial interpretation where water and hence the pond is reduced to an inanimate “thing” devoid of life, devoid of the Mother, the common interpretation of the story leads to quite a different place. In that kind of interpretation, the pond is referred to as a “non-responsive love object” and we are told that the “image in the water should be seen as a particularly unresponsive type of love-object.” Conclusions are drawn that Narcissus is “gazing in vain” into the “non-responsive mother” emphasizing he must “learn to love himself before he can love another” and that the story represents a “self cure that has failed” (Martin S. Bergmann, The Legend of Narcissus).

I deeply disagree. My interpretation of the story is that Narcissus did not have some failed attempt at healing – Indeed, seeing his reflection in the Pond, the Other, the Mother, mirroring back himself to himself, is the medicine needed for this kind of Narcissism.

In summary, I disagree on two points:

First, I see the pond as not a stand-in for Mother, but pond as Mother. Thus the healing taking place is not one of a failed projection or a stand-in, it is one to be taken literally. While it could offer healing for the relationship with his birth Mother, either way this healing is significant on its own, because water is Mother.

Secondly, with my interpretation, the Pond’s Waters are not a “non-responsive love object” devoid of life and devoid of the Other. Thus, the reflection Narcissus sees staring back is not just more of him; it is him contained in the Other, him seeing his interrelatedness with the natural world. What he needs for his healing is not necessarily to “love himself” as western therapeutic modalities so often tell us; but by falling in love with the Other and then learning to love himself through seeing the Other in himself.

With this lens, when Narcissus comes to terms that what he is seeing is his own reflection in the pond water and says “I am him,” psychologists conclude in their interpretations that from this “crucial phrase,” he knows that it is his own reflection he is in love with. However, understanding the reflection as beyond individual self, but rather reflection within the Other, I hear Narcissus saying “I am him” as “I am pond water. I am the iridescent dragon fly. I am the fish below. I am algae, glittering with pollen and frog eye.”

Could it be that Narcissus, in this moment, is coming to terms with the fullness of his identity – I am nature, and nature is me?

Pond as Oracle

One last layer tucked in the layer of the pond I’d like to softly touch on, resting our finger ever so gently for a moment’s time on the pond’s surface, and examining for a moment the small ripple that emulates forth, is pond as oracle.

Water holds wisdom, and I have no doubt that the pond in the story of Narcissus brought him deep wisdom and healing. I will leave us with this excerpt from Sylvia:

“Tradition seems to suggest that not only otherworldly women but real women across the north of Europe (and beyond) sat in divination at sacred waters, and also acting as guardians of the waters of healing.Great luminary of women’s history and creator of the Suppressed Histories Archives Max Dashu writes of witches and pagans, regarding practices across Britain- p. 25 -- ‘Meditation by the waters was a very old custom. The 8th century penitential of Egbert of York not only forbade making libations and other offerings at wells, but also the custom of sitting out beside a spring’—Because it was well known that people, and especially women, had an old custom of sitting out through the night at wells to watch the waters.

The Gesta Herwardus Saxonis (1068) described how English women held nocturnal dialogues with the spirit guardian of a spring: “In the middle of the night, the women go out in silence to the springs of east-flowing waters; Hereward saw them go out of the house beside the garden; he immediately followed them, and heard them from a distance, conversing with I know not what guardian of the spring, asking questions and waiting for answers.”

The church was very aware of how strong this practice was, especially amongst women, to go sit out at waters all night and ask for vision, offering gifts and lighting a candle or torch— and so made extra effort to forbid these very practices—and this started early, we’re talking 700 AD. So we can say with confidence that this was not just a mythic legacy, this was not just stories told or spirits or goddesses associated with waters— this was also real women going to these sources, springs and wells to commune and ask for healing or vision, and in doing so connecting at the same time to lineages of otherworldly women—female ancestors, goddesses, protectors and generatrixes of life.”

And so, let us consider this for a moment, dear reader: What better way to help create a culture of people who have forgotten the wisdom the water shares with us, and to further defile it, than to say staring in such water is a practice of self-vanity at its greatest, and leads to our own demise?

Layer 4: The Flower

Many interpretations of the myth reference Narcissus’ death and metamorphosis into a flower as evidence of his demise, noting that even when his body takes a flower form, he is still left ever gazing at his own reflection in the pond.

But could it be that Narcissus’ death and rebirth as a flower was actually his ultimate redemption? Could it be that he needed to die to his wounded and narcissistic, life-taking form into his life-making form? Could it be that in order for the story to reach resolution, he needed to be taken down into the soil, and composted in order to germinate, and spring up as new life, taking on the form of the green and shimmering Other? Could it be that his flower form was not bending over to see his own reflection in the pond, but bending over in a bow to the Mother waters who guided him to rediscover his true nature, whose waters led him back to his widened identity, bowing to the pond waters who birthed him? What if the pain that was alchemized into the beauty of a flower is not for Narcissus, but a sacred offering for the creation that birthed him, what if the point of our beauty is to become, in the words of Martin Prechtel, “something god would like to eat for breakfast”?

I think this is possible. I think it is possible if we see death not as linear, not as punishment, but part of the great turning of life, if we see darkness and the underworld not as a place of solely spooks and fright but as a place necessary for a seed to germinate and the place the moon comes back to life.

But don’t take it from me, dear reader. Let us talk to the Narcissus flower. What does she have to tell us?

The narcissus flower, also known by the common name Daffodil, dawns a beautiful, golden trumpet shaped crown surrounded by white petals. She is one of the first flowers to be seen in the early springtime, reminding us of the great green rebirth that takes place after the long dark. She prefers to have her feet wet, living in damp meadows and along the banks of streams and rivers.

She tells us that her medicine will be very different for us, depending on when we gather her. Daffodil bulbs contain an alkaloid, the action of which varies as to whether the alkaloid is extracted from the flowering bulb or from the bulb after flowering. Thus, we must be careful what parts of the flower we harvest and the manner in which we do so.

For one way the narcissus flower has been used is as a narcotic. It is interesting to note that the word "narcissus” shares the same root as the Greek word “narcotic”- narke, which means “to numb.” Also known as “opioids,” the term “narcotic” comes from the Greek word for “stupor” and originally referred to a variety of substances that dulled the senses and relieved pain. Indeed, the narcissus flower is described to have a “stupifying vapor that could induce a death-like sleep (Bunker, 1947).”

Even the common name, Daffodil, has interesting meaning in this territory - it derives from the Greek asphodel, the land of the departed souls, the field of ashes, the realm of ghosts where the majority of ordinary souls were sent to live after death, cut off from the Earth and the land of the living.

But, as well as potential for numbing and inducing a death-like sleep, the narcissus flower also holds healing powers, when harvested in the right way. Traditional Japanese medicine uses the root to treat wounds. But what I find most interesting is the thread this special flower holds back to recovering the feminine, the feminine that was decimated and defiled at the begining of the story with Narcissus’ water guardian mother’s rape.

For this narcissus flower is the flower that Persephone, daughter of Demeter, was said to have been gathering with her friends when she was abducted into the underworld by Hades. Sylvia Lindsteadt explains that this picture of women out gathering flowers is more than a pretty pastoral motif – the flower points to a deeply ancient history of women’s initiation rites around the time of menstruation and puberty. The ritual gathering of gynecological flowers is actually what was happening in this scene, before her abduction by Hades, and before the rise of the patriarchy sent matriarchal practices and ways of life underground. Narcissus, iris, crocus – all of these flower friends have connections to midwifery cults and traditions.

And so, dear reader, the Narcissus flower and the story tells us, that depending on how we harvest her, she can lead us to fall into a deeper sleep, even threatening us to be banished to the realm of ghosts disconnected with the earth, unconscious, and forgetting who we really are as a people; or, she can provide her medicine for the feminine to rise once again, for her ways of ancient guardianship and sacred protection of the Earth and her waters to be restored.

And so, as the telling of this story comes to a close, we see the prophet’s prediction came true in the end: He, and he as in the collective depiction of Narcissus, a Narcissistic Patriarchal, feminine banishing culture, will have a long life, unless he learns to know himself – unless he, unless we, look in the mirror our more-than-human kin are offering to us, helping us to remember all we have lost, remember who we are as not separate from nature, but the reflection of nature, contained in her very waters, as the Mother pond showed Narcissus.

Perhaps Narcissus was demonstrating the process needed for our culture as well; that we must die and be reborn collectively. We must remember who we are with the help of our more-than-human kin and healing waters reflecting back to us; we must allow ourselves to die, enter the long dark, de-compose, germinate in these dark soils, and then bloom to be reborn, drinking the water of our Mother once again. And we can only do that when we see, as Narcissus was shown by Mother Pond, that we are nature, and nature is us. For when we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves.

Finding the Other in the Mirror

“We have no more time for abstraction. And we have no more time for moralizing. Species collapse every day, bringing down other beings they have been mutualistically involved with for millennia. But conversely, the emergency of our situation does not call for the manic techno-narcissistic death of trying to “fix” the world. It calls for slowing down. For sitting next to the pool. And looking into the water. If we are lucky, we will see ourselves. But not as an isolated subject in the abstracted blank space of phenomenological ontology. Or in the metaverse of digital binaries. We will see that we are in the pool. We are not outside of the life forms that are damaging and polluting. We are intimately of them. The real narcissism is to believe we can stand apart philosophically, or morally. And yes, let us, like Narcissus, fall in love with this more complex reflection. A reflection that contextualizes our being inside of, and dependent on, many other modes of being.” Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand, pg 55

Let us now complete our circle, and return to where we began, amongst our beloved horses, musing around horses as mirrors - is it a human-centering, narcissistic practice we need to do away with?

After our long and winding journey through this wood, it seems to me that it depends.

It depends whether or not we are able to see our reflection in the mirror, the pond’s ripples of who we are, a self in relation to other beings beyond our own, or merely our projection of who we are.

It depends whether we are gazing at our own reflection fashioned from a smartphone screen of our own design, a mirror of our own making, or are gazing into the pond-like surface of a horse’s eye.

It depends whether or not we can see the beautiful and strange Other looking back at us in the mirror, in those almond shaped pooling eyes of Horse and the grasslands, rivers, and soil that have shaped their bones and pulse through their veins.

To truly see the Other’s reflection of ourselves requires great humility, and a courage and willingness and soul-ready timing to see the truth, which always exists in relationship to one another. For an honest look in the mirror always asks something of us. This mirror gazing is not about serving our own egos; rather it can question our very foundational and core beliefs of who we really are, which can be a terrifying, as well as rejuvenating process if we are able to receive the gift. But it may require us, like Narcissus, to die and be reborn into some new and unrecognizable, never before seen shape. I believe Horse has both the capacity and oftentimes the desire to bring this gift forwards to us. The question is whether or not we can accept it.

Healing is not just for us - and neither are the mirrors Horse holds up for us. All of this means that the reflection we see is not about our own self-improvement, our own growth, our own benefit, our own enlightenment, our own analysis. Rather, its primary aim is to benefit our wider communities of both human and our more-than-human kin. And I believe they are deeply wanting us to receive that gift, in fact it may be urgent in the times we find ourselves in that we slow down, abandon our strict schedules and personal timelines, and are able to settle in, gaze into our horses eyes and find their glossy reflection, their eyes like like the dark waters of some kind of ancient scrying practice in which we receive visions and messages directly from the Horse, acknowledging she has something to teach us. And not in a demanding way, not in an extractive way, not in an entitled way, but in a manner in which we remain humble, oftentimes falling to our knees weeping, forever bent in a bow like the narcissus flower over the pool in aw, reverence, and gratitude.

For it is only then we will be able to see that when we harm them, we harm ourselves. It is only then we will be able to come back into relation, to accept that we need her and she needs us to return home.

When we look at the mirror from this lens, perhaps we can see that the very notion of separating and fragmenting humans versus horses is impossible. For we exist within the horse, and the horse exists within us. And the very notion such a line of separation can be drawn, is another symptom of colonial fragmentation, a recipe for becoming a species obsessed with talking only with ourselves.

When we look in the horse’s mirror this way, perhaps we will be able to, in the words of Francis Weller, recognize the soul in world and the world in soul. And when we do this, perhaps we awaken to the enchantment of life, we restore the ritual of life, and we return to encounters with the sacred.

The task is to find the thread between what is innermost and what manifests in the world out there, to find “the greater part of the soul lies outside of the body” and remember our wider identities, moving away from a place of rigid identity to a fluid, shapeshifting identity, moving from egocentric to polycentric, going from the “me, my, I” to becoming part wind, part rose, part moon, part night sky, in the words of Francis Weller.

Is this all centering the horse? To me that question now floats away along the babbling brook, and I watch it float for a while, and then be swallowed up by the swirling waters as I come to ask, what if Horse doesn’t want us to “center them?” as if they are something outside of ourselves that can be centered? What if Horse wants us to find them in ourselves, and ourselves in them, to come home to our deep connectedness, inter-being, and relation, recognizing land and horses as the soul of our soul?

For we cannot make it “just about the horse” any less than the horse can make it any less about the grass that makes up their beating hooves and hearts. Horses are a part of us and us a part of horses, and both of us in relation to land. Our heartbeats, and heartbeat of the Earth, are intertwined in a great dancing drumbeat of life pulsing pulsing on.

Audio Recording

Two things to note before you listen:

(1) For the best experience, I recommend listening in a quiet place where you can have your eyes closed at times, especially for the deep story-telling parts: i dream of a whale (10 min 50 sec) & a river of tears (41 min 20 sec).

(2) I did not include the resources in the audio, so if this piece moves you and you are looking to go deeper with the material or are looking for support in terms of grief ceremony & ritual work, make sure to check out the resources at the bottom of this page!

Thanks so much for being here and for your willingness to dive deep with me <3

Maddy

PS I am not currently able to do bi-weekly recordings as I announce in the audio version ~ but the next issue will be coming as soon as I’m able!

Introduction [transcript]

In my last piece, Places I’ve Been, I attempted to give kind of an overview of the journey I’ve been on the past 6 or 7 years that I’ve been largely absent from my work in the world as who many of you have come to know as Mustang Maddy.

I’m going to start releasing some pieces on different chapters of that journey, going more in-depth, zooming in on particular moments of this journey to bring you all along, sprinkled with some real time stories and musings as well as life continues to unfold here.

So, that being said, I will probably be skipping around a little bit and before we get into today’s piece, I wanted to orient you. To give you a sense of where I was during this time, I had already experienced some really big and intense breakthroughs along a healing path I was walking. I had peeled back a lot of layers around personal trauma, familial and relational pieces, doing a lot of work also around recovering the divine feminine in a sort of Jungian approach and deep dive into the history of patriarchy and internalization of patriarchal values and repression of the feminine…

But by the spring of 2022 my low points were once again becoming more sustained. They were taking a toll on my ability to even function day to day and I felt like I was losing stamina. At this time, I was in the process of making plans to go to a long term treatment facility. But at the last minute, I backed out and went on a camel trek and felt better than I had in a long time. And feeling better whenever I was in nature was always a theme for me. So I really held onto this thread. I also felt like I couldn’t leave my horses, and didn’t have things set up to feel okay with being gone at a treatment facility. So I had a little burst from the camel trek, and there were a lot of things needing done at the ranch so I just kind of tried putting my head down and getting to work, keeping my hands busy. And of course that approach didn’t go very well and I started to really spiral downward that summer after the little burst the camel trek brought me.

I wrote about that time,

“But the depression came back, as it always did. Slowly at first, starting with tears like a leaky faucet in the evenings. Soon the leak went from a slow trickle to a full on flood again until I was drowning in my own tears. I couldn’t seem to get out of bed in the mornings, a demonic knawing at my insides so painful it took all my energy just to keep breathing. Depression is not a passive state, preying on those who are self-indulgent, weak and lazy. Depression is an active state of fighting for your life, with one part of yourself trying to push you off a cliff and the other part of yourself trying to get you to hang on just a little longer, with slipping fingers and a tiring grip.”

Around this time, late summer, I was reading a book called Dawn Again by Doniga Markegard (who was recently on Warwick Schillers podcast, actually, for those of you tuning in from the horse world). And in that book she talked about feeling lost, feeling hungry for something missing, and experiencing depression, all of which led her to going to a school called The Wilderness Awareness School in Washington, sharing how life-changing it was for her. And I just knew this was the thread, something in me knew I needed to do this, too.

Here’s something from Doniga’s book I had highlighted. It’s from a section where she’s talking about how, despite growing up with opportunities in childhood camping and backpacking, she was feeling the “call of the wild” even stronger than ever.

“This kind of calling was once something that did not need to be found. It wasn’t even a call; it was a way of life. It was there when a young child would learn the basics of life and survival: shelter, fire, water, and food. Children who were born into a traditional Indigenous tribe or clan would have known the plants, animals, birds, and all life that surrounded them, because it was their home and their survival depended on it…. I yearned to find that deep connection to the earth. Going for hikes and walking on top of the land was not allowing me to truly experience it. Needed immersion, training, and a community of people that would keep me motivated. I no longer believed endless resources for limitless extraction existed. I was questioning everything: the food I ate, the house I lived in, and the clothes I wore. I knew that the apples I picked from our front yard came directly from the earth. The vegetables we grew and the chicken eggs from the coop all came directly from the land and soil. But where did everything else come from? I had never thought to ask that question before. Where was the food that I picked up at the grocery store grown? What about the cotton that was woven into my clothes–how many stops did it make before it was lying against my skin? I started to see I was disconnected—Disconnected in such a way that I was harming the life that I loved, the only thing at the time that felt authentic and important.”

-Doniga Markegard, Dawn Again

When I looked up the school, they were running what’s called an Immersion Program that fall through the following spring, so a 9 month immersion. I went to work filling out my application, which took me a few days – the depression made it really slow going (especially when it got to questions like why do you believe you would be an asset to the program?). I finally got it done, but then felt really disheartened when they were full. It felt like the only thread left to follow, and then to realize it’s not even an option was devastating.

But then a few weeks later, I got an unexpected call. It was admissions at WAS. They said they had a spot open and asked if I would want to take it. The only catch: they would need to know in the next 48 hours. The next immersion program began in just one month.

I knew I didn’t have a choice. I honestly didn’t know if I would make it without some kind of life-changing turn of events. All I knew is that this thread was the only thing bringing me any hope in my life at that time that I could survive this. So I said I’d take it. And got to work moving to Washington with an off the track thoroughbred, a mule, a camel, and a zebra, our 4 dogs, my boyfriend, Beau, and, hilariously, the only animal of his– a cat named Taco. And off we went.

Image: the herd I brought to Washington

After a 27 hour drive and being up all night due to a heat weave (I wanted to haul animals at night because it was so hot) we pulled into where we were to stay in Washington precisely one hour before our first day of class was to begin. I unloaded the horses in a sleep deprived frenzy, left Beau to get fencing set up and drove to school a few miles away.

And so here I am in Washington for the WAS Immersion Program. We had that first day to go over logistics and a little orientation, and then there was a weeklong kind of initiation, opening ceremony for the class, and that’s where I’m at as I’m writing this piece. It’s September of 2022.

So with that, let's dive in to this week’s issue.

i dream of a whale

(*For the best experience, I recommend listening with your eyes closed if possible; this piece is @10 min 50 sec)

I am standing barefoot and blindfolded. My hands rest on the shoulders of the blindfolded stranger in front of me, and I feel unfamiliar hands resting on my own shoulders from behind me. Anticipation builds as the line of blindfolded humans begins to step, ever so slowly, through the cedar and fern filled forest. With every step, I feel the old shell of myself fall further away, left to decay alongside the moss, mushrooms, and decomposing maple leaves that sprinkle the forest floor. I have no idea where I am, or where I am going. All this is kept from me. I only know that I am no longer where— and who— I once was.

The strangers and I begin to smell the welcoming scent of cedar incense and the sound of singing voices. Tears stream down my cheeks like quiet rivers. Part of me doesn’t know why I am crying; part of me knows exactly why I am crying.

Singing stops, blindfolds are untied, the fire is lit. We are asked to state our name and why we have come here.

Voices begin to tell their stories. Grieving voices, describing the loss of a lover, the loss of a dream, the loss of an identity:

“I thought I had life figured out, only to realize I am completely lost.”

“Life is great, it is all great… and incredibly boring. Something is missing.”

“I am trying to reconnect with the child who grew up too soon.”

“I am here to heal.”

“I want to know who I was before the world told me who to be.”

“I am here to not just meet a raccoon, but to become one, to eat like one, explore like one, to smell like one. I am here to return to my wild self, to take life by the teeth.”

“I cringe at the thought of a wild self, so maybe that is what I will explore.”

"I am here to ask questions of the trees and learn how to listen.”

A woman across the circle from me says that a dream has brought her here. She closes her eyes and tells us that in her dream, it is summer and she is at a creek. Everyone is partying and having a good time by the water, but she is concerned when she spots a huge whale floundering in the shallow creek. She knows the whale must get to deeper waters, and she tries to get others’ attention but no one else seems to care about the whale. She watches the majestic animal flop and flail in search of deeper waters as it slowly shrivels up and deflates, and awakes consumed in waves of grief. “This is why I am here,” she whispers, hand over heart, eyes still closed.

Now it is my turn to speak. But tears and a convulsing body are my only language. All I am able to utter is this: “I am here to remember what it means to be fully human.”

Image: art by Jess Hough @MoabJess

strangers and golden arches

We no longer live in a sensuous intimacy with the wind, rivers, rainfall, and birdsong…There are no daily encounters with woods or prairies, with herds of elk or bison, no ongoing connection with manzanita or scrub jays. The myths and stories about the exploits of raven, the courage of mouse, and the cleverness of fox have fallen cold… Often, in my practice I hear someone talk about feeling empty. But what if this emptiness is…a hollowness that comes from a prolonged absence of birdsong, the scent of sweetgrass, the taste of wild huckleberries, the cry of the red-tailed hawk, or the melancholy call of the loon? What if this emptiness is the great echo in our soul of what it is we expected and did not receive?

- Francis Weller, Living a Soulful Life and Why It Matters

The next day of orientation, 38 feeling-less-like-strangers-and-more-like-fellow-adventurers all huddle into Cedar Lodge, the singular indoor classroom on the WAS campus. We settle into our seats and look at the slideshow dancing on the wall in front of us as our program director stands beside the projector. He gives us instructions. “I am going to show you quick glimpses of images of various animal and plant life in the area, and I want you to write down who it is. If you don’t know, write down your best guess.”

Image: Wilderness Awareness School campus

I write down the number one on my paper and wait for the first image. A small black bird with a white chest looks at us from the screen. I have no idea what kind of bird this is, so I leave the first one blank. Second image: A tree with reddish skin and needles like lace. No idea. Leave it blank. Same for the third image. By the fourth, I am defeated and let my pen rest and stop trying. And then, when he gets to number 10, the images change. Now it is a Mercedes logo. Murmurs. I write down the answer without hesitation. Next the golden McDonald’s arches. I write down another answer. They continue, and I have answers for each one of these images.

When the slideshow is over, his point has been made. I feel tears again. This, this is why I am here.

Jon Young, the founder of WAS, has said, “A culture is working when it connects people to people, people to themselves, and people to nature.” But our society is geared towards getting us to connect with things, not people.

If you want proof, ask, why is it we know the name of the golden double arches by heart but can’t identify a western Redcedar? Those golden arches bring up memories of happy meals, indoor playgrounds strewn with slides and plastic balls, the smell of french fries and the promise of a vanilla milkshake. But Redcedar remains a stranger to us. Redcedar, once the warm embrace into the bosom of a loving grandmother, once a source of wisdom and council, of warmth and fire, canoes for travel, spice for eating, and healing salve for the indigenous people who have lived and tended to this land since time immemorial, the Snoqualmie people, is now forgotten by the dominant culture of settlers disconnected from place, chopped up into a million pieces, unrecognizable.

We know those plastic golden arches of McDonald's better than we do the bark of a RedCedar.

We know the Star-wars theme song better than the song of the sparrow.

We do not know where the watershed of our community flows, much less the state that it is in. We do not know the soft petals of the wildflower blowing in the summer breeze and the medicine she carries.

We do not see the importance of the beaver or the way the marshland and estuaries offer a nursery to the salmon before they swim to the sea.

Or at least I didn’t. And I know that not many people around me did, either.

The birds singing the sun up in the morning are a distant backdrop to the words of human speech, and we never consider they might have something important to say. As David Abram has said, we have become a “single species only talking to itself.” Our own language reflects this. Francis Weller, in his Soulful Life lecture series explains that we have long forgotten words like “ammill,” a devon term meaning the sparkle of sunlight through the frost and “pirr,” the light breath of wind such as will make a cats paw on the water. He goes on to add that in the 2007 junior dictionary, terms such as acorn, beach, bluebell, buttercup, dandelion, fern, ivy, heron, lark, mistletoe, nectar, note, otter, pasture, willow were deemed irrelevant to our youth and thus omitted and replaced by the words blog, broadband, bullet point, celebrity, chat room, mp3 player, and voicemail.

There are community, relations, and family all around us but we do not even know the name of our own kin. Is it any wonder we feel lonely, when we stroll through the woods and are surrounded by strangers? Under these conditions of isolation, species arrogance, and disconnection, how is it any wonder that we are sick? Could it be, as Francis Weller has proposed, that we are dying of a great loneliness?

It is well known therapy to go for a walk in the woods, but what about greeting our neighbors, knowing them, and not just by name like a mere handshake, but knowing them with deep intimacy as we learn to recognize the bark of an Alder tree with only fingertips and closed eyes, become grateful for the alarm call of the Robin, are nourished by roots of wild carrot when we are hungry, are soothed by willow bark when in pain, and show our care as we study the track of a coyote to learn his mate has a limp on her back left paw?

something is wrong with this water

The talk in Cedar Lodge continues now with a hum in our hearts and we are introduced to the Pacific-Chorus Frog. We are told, “The Pacific Chorus Frog is a good example of an indicator species. An indicator species is a species that tends to be particularly sensitive and can reveal the health of an ecosystem. If the pH is just a little off, the Pacific Chorus-Frog won’t be present due to the pollution.”

I can’t stop thinking about this frog. Maybe I am like the Pacific-Chorus Frog. I once thought something was desperately wrong with me for not being able to cope like others did, but maybe my sensitivity is actually my strength. Deep down, all of us know something is wrong with the water, but some of us are able to keep swimming in it while others, perhaps with their extra sensitive gills, simply shrivel up. Maybe instead of being called too sensitive, or being scowled at with scorn for not being able to keep up, and dismissed in the name of “good vibes only” policy we should slow down and listen to the sensitivities of the indicator species.

If we listened to such warning signs, warning signs Sioux elder & author Vine Deloria describes as “the shape of the sky, the cry of animals, the changing of seasons” with the same gravity we heed “traffic lights and the wail of the ambulance and police car” I believe we would find that, like the whale in the woman’s dream, our Souls are asking for more depth, deeper blue waters where we are meant to thrive. But so many of us have settled for shallow creeks instead of the ocean that is 36,200 feet deep. And I think this is the enormity of the wound–the wound the size of a whale, the wound that is 36,200 feet deep. We know this somewhere etched deep in our bones, and yet we wonder why we feel deflated, why the life force inside of us has become dry and shriveled up, why we are dying inside a little more everyday, why we are breathing just a little and calling it a life.

Why is it that some of us are screaming for help and dying off like pacific chorus frogs, while others are getting drunk on booze, working away busying themselves, numbing themselves in shopping sprees, or becoming ultra focused on their “personal growth” in denial that the whale is there floundering and numbing out the pain of the shallowness? Is it really that these people are less sensitive? I do believe that there exist people, and always have, who are more sensitive and function as healers, story-tellers, and shamans in tribes the world over, who had and have a place in these cultures. But one doesn’t need to have a deepened gift of sensitivity to sense the depth of pain in the planet and in ourselves (because we are nature, too– another piece on this specific topic coming soon). The whale is impossible not to notice, like the elephant in the room, except bigger. The blue whale is the largest mammal on Earth, larger even than the elephant– in fact their tongues alone weigh as much as an elephant. Their tongues! And the whale specifically chose to show up in the dream, not the smaller but equally important salmon, for example, trying to reach the Ocean and flailing in a shriveling up river. Something more seems to be going on in the whale’s message. The whale seems to be pointing to more depth than the analysis that some people are just less sensitive than others.

Martín Prechtel has said that all wars come from unmetabolized sorrow. Could it be that the war on the earth and the original peoples of place come from grief, trapped and unshed tears, unable to flow in this culture in much the same way rivers are dammed and no longer able to reach the ocean on these lands? Could it be that the pain of the Earth wants to speak through a great many more of us, and does live in us, whether we acknowledge it with awareness or not?

Dr. Sarah A Conn writes,

“When people are unable to grieve personal losses openly and with others, they numb themselves, even constricting their muscles in order not to let the grief show. This can become chronic, leading them to see, hear, feel, and breathe less. The same process of numbing and constriction occurs with our loss of connection to a sense of place in a viable, thriving ecosystem. Many of us have learned to walk, breathe, look, and listen less, to numb our senses to both the pain and the beauty of the natural world, living so-called ‘personal lives,’ suffering in what we feel are ‘merely personal’ ways, keeping our grief even from ourselves. Feeling empty, we then project our feelings onto others, or engage in compulsive, unsatisfactory activities that neither nourish us nor contribute to the healing of the larger context. Perhaps the currently high incidence of depression is in part a signal of our bleeding at the roots, being cut off from the natural world, no longer able to cry at its pain or to thrill at its beauty (Ecopsychology 171).”

In this case, perhaps what is needed to wake the partying people out of their drunken slumber to the whale is not whacking them on the head in punishment, or accuse them of not being “sensitive enough,” for it is indeed their sensitivity that has led them to harden and self-protect and this will likely just cause more hardening, but rather holding space for them to metabolize their sorrows and hardened grief, to let their rivers of tears flow again, so that the rivers may once again reach the ocean, so that the lands may once again turn green and fertile. Perhaps attending to this personal loss is what will open the gates again to the less conscious seemingly invisible suffering whale – the suffering of all our more than human kin.

Now let’s shift our attention back to the indicator species and those who are trying to get the whale back to the ocean, the ones who feel this pain as part of themselves, as if their own lungs are suffocating and gasping for air just as the whale’s are. The screams of the woman, the screams of the whale and the screams of the Pacific-Chorus Frog have not only been ignored, but have been actively silenced because the people who keep partying and the heads of corporations poisoning the waters gaslight the folks able to consciously perceive such suffering and dire danger by telling us in a myriad of different ways and messages that there is nothing wrong with the water, there is something wrong with us.

New Age spirituality, books such as The Secret, toxic positivity, and misused law of attraction frameworks convince us that if we are sick, there is something in ourselves that is causing our suffering instead of acknowledging that we are whales flailing in creeks, responding appropriately to an extremely dire situation.

Conventional therapists hover over the suffocating whale telling her she just needs to develop self-care practices and heal abandonment wounds from her family of origin and she would feel better. Therapy becomes all about me—my stories, my wounds, my history, my dreams, my brain. We’ve colonized the psyche with ownership in our desire to possess it all – the rivers, the mountains, the prairies. But what if emotions aren’t ours, what if they don’t belong to us? William Blake has described emotions as “divine influxes,” movement into something sacred. Rumi has said emotions are ours to tend to, to become a good host of, but not ours to possess.

But when these feelings are said to belong to us and us as humans only, when they are taken out of the context of the surrounding ecosystem, the central question becomes, “How can the whale better adjust to living in the creek?” But the question I believe we need to be asking is, “How do we move the whale back to the ocean?”

Dr. Terrance O’Connor has asked this very question in his practice. “By helping people adapt to a destructive society, are we doing more harm than good? We sit in our offices helping parents raise children, divorcees get their bearings, couples find ways to deepen their relationships, while outside the air gets fouler and the oceans’ ecosystems break down. In a year’s time, if we are successful, the parents and children are doing well, the divorcee is enjoying her independence, the couple has developed a more satisfying relationship. Meanwhile hundreds, perhaps thousands of species, have vanished forever from the Earth. Each hour, five square miles of rainforest are destroyed; by the end of the year, this area of destruction is the size of Pennsylvania… We are facing an unparalleled global crisis… What is the meaning of therapy and what is the responsibility of therapists in such a world (Ecopsychology pg 150)?”

Dr. O’Connor, along with other therapists engaged in the work of ecopsychology, believe that the goal of therapy should not be to help people adapt to a destructive society, to help the whale better adjust to living in the creek. Instead, the aim of therapy should be to discover the place where our personal tributary of tears meets the river of tears coming from our more-than-human kin, such as the whale–to see how our personal grief is intertwined with the Earth’s cry, to see how our own painful personal relationships plagued by control, denial, and abuse are the very relationships that are driving the poisoning of our waters, the disappearance of forests, the depletion of soil, the mass extinction of the condor, the western black rhino, the great auk, the golden toad, the passenger pigeon and so many more who have fallen cold, to recognize that our own survival and the survival of the Earth depend on us healing these patterns.

Dr O’Connor speaks to a moment where he was giving a talk titled “The Mature and Healthy Intimate Relationship” to a group of divorced people. In the book Ecopsychology, Dr. O’Connor writes,

“Midway through the talk a woman asked, ‘Last week we had a speaker who said that some people are satisfied with very limited relationships. So why should we want this mature relationship? Why should we bother?’”

Dr. O’Connor writes that he responded with his thinking that the benefits would speak for themselves, but that the question kept nagging him until he eventually lost all concentration and responded in the following way:

“Let me say something about the status quo. The status quo is that the hole in the ozone layer is as big as the United States. The status quo is that some scientists are predicting that by the middle of the next century global warming will result in most of the coastal cities in the united states being below sea level, and will make the grain belt a wasteland. The status quo is that acid rain, besides destroying the lakes and forests is now considered to be the leading cause of lung cancer after cigarette smoke. The status quo is that thirty-five thousand people die of starvation everyday. Also everyday, two or more species become extinct, not due to natural selection but due to deforestation and pollution. By the year 2000 this is expected to accelerate to one hundred species a day (update in 2025, up to 150 species go extinct daily, so the prediction was pretty spot on). In other words, mass extinction. What does this say to you? To me it says the status quo is that the planet is dying. The planet is dying because we are satisfied with our limited relationships in which control, denial, and abuse are tolerated. The status quo is that we have these petty relationships with eachother, between nations, with ourselves and the natural world. Why should we bother? Because healthy relationships are not an esoteric goal. It is a matter of our very survival and the survival of most life upon this earth (Ecopsychology pg 151).”

Dr. O’Connor continued to write how powerfully the energy in the room had shifted after his ‘outburst.’ A man even stood in the back talking about the destruction of rainforests. He writes, “The greater part of the audience had come in concerned with their own loneliness. As we began to look at all of our personal concerns from a global perspective, we could see that the patterns of control, denial, and projection that sabotage intimate relationships are the very patterns that endanger the world. To change these patterns is to change not just our social lives but our relationship to the planet.”

Dr. Conn adds to this conversation:

“The challenge of an ecologically responsible psychotherapy is to develop ways to work with the ‘purely personal’ problems brought by clients so that they can be seen not only as unique expressions but also as microcosms of the larger whole, of what is happening in the world. The goals of therapy then include not only the ability to find joy in the world, but also to hear the earth speaking in one's own suffering, to participate in and contribute to the healing of the planet by finding one’s niche in the earth’s living system and occupying it actively (Ecopsychology 171).”

But what I share here, what Dr Conn and Dr O’Conner share, is not something reflected in society at large. It took me years and years of digging and traveling to come across such a perspective, one that validated my feelings that something was wrong with the water, one that acknowledges the whale indeed needs to be returned to the Ocean. So instead, exposed to only the dominant narrative that something is wrong with us and not the water, most of us convince ourselves the creek is good enough. After all, it is all we have ever known— for we have never seen the Ocean, we have only dreamed of Her.

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches

by Mary Oliver

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives --

tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging

from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides

with perfect courtesy, to let you in!

Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!

Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint

that something is missing from your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?

Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot

in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself

continually?

Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed

with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left --

fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away

from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is

the mystery, which is death as well as life, and

not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome

with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine

god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,

nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the

present hour,

to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,

to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

The Panther

by Rainer Maria Rilke

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else. It seems to him there are

a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

the movement of his powerful soft strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils

lifts, quietly—

An image enters in,

rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.

a river of tears

(*For the best experience, I recommend listening with your eyes closed if possible; this piece is @ 41 min 20 sec)

When I close my eyes, I am back in the hut on our first day of orientation. The fire is lit, the people are gathered, the blindfolds are lifted. It is my turn to speak.

Tell us, who are you and why are you here?

I answer:

“My name is Madison. I am here not only to learn the names of my neighbors, but to learn the song of the Pacific Wren and the call of the loon, to know what the bark of a cedar tree feels like in the wet toil of a rain storm, to grieve the disappearing salmon and the way their nursery of wild branching estuaries were carved into a singular channel, to care enough to look at the track of the coyote who lives in the field near my home and know that his mate has a limp on her back left paw and whisper that I hope she feels better soon.

I am here because I know this water is poisoning me, and not only me.

I am here because the shallowness of this life is suffocating me and I am hungry to be nourished by deep and wild waters, because I am tired of breathing just a little and calling it living.

I am here to look in the face at all I and my people have lost and let my wailing river of tears help to carry the whale back to the Ocean.

I am here because because I believe in the dream of the Ocean, for I have never met her but I know deep in my bones that she is somewhere out there, arms open wide, waiting to caress my skin with her salty waters and move me to tears with her turquoise waves as she sighs in relief from not having to come to shore searching for my watery soul, as she whispers, welcome home, welcome home.”

Image: Alexandra Blakely’s WAILS book with illustration by @seedsofspells

Resources

Books

Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind

Book Edited by Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D Kanner

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

Book by Francis Weller

The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise

Book by Martín Prechtel

My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization

Book by Chellis Glendinning

A Language Older than Words

Book by Derrick Jensen

Other

Podcast - Emerald Podcast by Joshua Schrei, “For the Intuitives” Part 1 & 2

Podcast - Journey On Podcast with Warwick Schiller Episode 122: Doniga Markegard

Grief rituals and grief work folks - Francis Weller, Laurence Cole, Alexandra Blakely, Holly Truhlar, Siobhan Asgharzadeh

I. The Fall of the Hero, The Return of the Heroine 

When I first left on this journey, I never realized how long I’d be gone for. It’s been 3 years since I’ve shared my voice here, 3 years since I've performed with my beloved horses, and 5 years since I’ve taught a clinic.

My absence may have gone unnoticed to most of you; afterall, the posts kept rolling out here, adapted from my longer form teachings and writings over the years. The way “Mustang Maddy” withered and died back to the soil was never shown– she stayed alive here on the internet, frozen in the summer of her bloom. 

Now I am ready to return, but not as the “Mustang Maddy” you once knew; for she has died back to the soil, composted, and given birth to something new, someone you may no longer recognize.  

And so to re-introduce myself in this space, because I cannot tell you who I am - for that is not for me to say- let me tell you of some of the places I have been.

My story begins where it was thought to have ended.

It is about what happens after what our culture tells us is “success.” 

It is about what happens after the medal is won, the crowd claps, the goal is achieved, the hero comes out “on top.”

It is the story of what happens after the happy-ever-after.

It is not the Hero’s Journey, the story so common in our culture, found anywhere from Hollywood to marketing how-to’s: The story of someone who defeats, conquers, overcomes, and rises above against all odds. 

This is not that story. 

This story is about the death of the hero and the birth of the heroine. 

This is a story about the leaving behind of the linear, conquering, world saving trajectory and the entering of the spiraling and folding back on itself, feral path, the deep surrender until you bow so low to a dragon you’re unsure if you’ll come out with your head intact, the relinquishment of trying to “save the world” and instead learning to live more beautifully in the world we have. 

This is a story about the leaving behind of the intensely individualistic and human-centric journey we celebrate and instead the story about not being able to do it on your own, about unlikely helpers, both human and animal. 

This is a story about the great unraveling in a culture that tells us to hold it all together. I had spent the first 23 years of my life holding it all together, but in the next 6 years I would let myself fall apart, unraveling, shattering into pieces, and descending into the murky depths and swampland of my soul, unsure if I would make it out alive but also knowing I had no choice but to descend if I wanted to live. 

And so, this story does not begin with a call to adventure but with a fall from grace, when something goes wrong that causes us to lose our way. When we open the door we were told never to open, when everything goes black and you find yourself in the middle of a dark forest and lose sight of which way is home. 

And circling in this dark wood, even though I had no idea where I was headed and found myself formless and suspended in the murky waters caught somewhere between life and death, after the old story had died but the new story had not yet appeared, some mysterious force within me carried on, following an invisible thread and knowing where to go even when I couldn’t see a path forwards myself, like a salmon who somehow knows to keep swimming 2,000 miles to their place of birth to spawn and lay eggs themselves and keep the great wheel of life forever turning, turning, turning. 

May this small sharing of my story become another tiny trail on the map for someone who finds themselves in similar territory. May it offer a small light to you, reader, in the time of darkness, may it be one small stone on the bridge that returns you to the land of the living.

May it be a reminder that the tomb becomes the womb, that we can die a thousand deaths and live to tell the tale, and in fact this dying to the many illusions of who we thought ourselves to be is the price we pay for a life truly lived. 

II. Beginnings 

I was born in the pre-dawn darkness at the time of the year when the trees had shed all their leaves, flowers had died back to the soil which birthed them, when fox had dug her den and squirrel had collected his nuts to survive the fallow times that lie ahead, when the deer were engaged in the timeless dance with two-legged predators, when the dying Sun led the green beings into the underworld once again, when the late summer grass was now covered in a blanket of freezing tears from Demeter each morning as she mourned for her daughter, Persephone, who was also taken to the underworld once again. It was this time of great turning, dying, thinning of veils, and mourning in which I came into this world. 

When I left the warmth of my mother’s womb and the symphony of her heart beat, I think something in me wanted to go back. The glare of fluorescent lights and beings dressed in blue were too foreign, too cold, too bright, too strange. In my turning and writhing about and wanting to turn back around, my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck until my face turned as blue as the doctor's medical gown. 

But these strange new hands freed me and air rushed into my lungs, creating my first sound, the wailing of grief for having lost the womb that was my home and “its proximity to the Gods and the drumbeat of my mothers heart” in the words of Martín Prechtel. 

This grief was turned to song in the first very sound that echoed from my lungs and from someplace deep inside my own beating heart. I was placed in the cradle of my mother’s arms, and I had crossed the threshold into this new world to which there was no turning back. A lifetime of teachings lay before me now of how to get better and more beautiful at the singing of the song of grief, turning grief into praise, as Martín so eloquently speaks to. 

* * * * *

I was a particularly sensitive child. The world was overstimulating to me–the lights too bright, the cars too fast, the noises too loud. Many sensitives can relate to that feeling: like we are going through life with the volume dialed all the way up. 

Horses became my refuge, my special place where the world fell quiet, like the sanctuary of early mornings when you wake up to find the ground is covered in a silent and muffling blanket of snow for the first time or like diving into water and finding yourself submerged, suspended, and soundless. Everything disappears, you lose sense of time, you merge with another being. This is how horses felt for me. 

The Horse took me back into her own womb, and there I was, weightless, and being rocked to the drumbeat of their 8 lb hearts and their quiet language, a symphony with no sound– just flicking ears, blinking eyes, and skin quivers. 

* * * * *

As I grew, I found horses–even wild ones– to be more predictable than human beings. Human interactions felt overwhelming to me. I never knew what to say or when to say it, when to laugh at a joke or be serious, how much eye contact to hold, and the list goes on and on. It was exhausting to keep up with the rules; especially being conditioned as female with all of the conflicting messages (ie “be thin, but not too thin, don’t be a nerd but stop acting like a dumb blonde, don't be a prude but also don’t be a whore, wear make-up, but make it look natural”). With horses– especially after their initial tests and trials gave way to the connection I’d been seeking– the world just made more sense to me. Relationships with them felt so easy. I could be who I was and they could be who they were. 

Horses didn’t have masks. They felt how they felt and would let you know through a widening of the eye, a tightening of the muscle, or the swish of a tail. They gave you an honest mirror, one that wasn’t so full of warps like the mirrors in a funhouse at a carnival. There was a certain level of trust and grounded-ness in my relationships with horses that came easily and honestly. 

Later on in my journey with horses, they began to teach me more about survival instincts and trauma, and how that trauma lives in our body and can be released. They also showed me what I needed to give to myself for my own healing. It was what they were telling me they needed, too: Deep emotional attunement, validation and response to those emotions, and shared language that could tell me “no” and have choice, thereby empowering them. 

Horses gave me a career and community and a lens through which to see the world, to make sense of it. They gave me a sense of purpose and connection. 

Horses tethered me to this world. Like an umbilical cord. They had kept me alive my whole life, feeding me from their own bodies and giving me air to breathe. Which is why, when that cord seemed to have been severed, I was left disoriented, falling into an abyss with no one to catch me, not even them... 

III. The Crack

But maybe the ground shaking and falling out from beneath me was really the contractions that were beginning to prepare me for my own birth. Maybe when it felt like I was being smashed to pieces, that was really the feeling of being pushed and squeezed out of a birth canal that seemed impassible. And what led to the severing of the umbilical cord between myself and the Horse? 

From the outside, my life appeared perfect. I had just taken a championship title at Mustang Magic, one of the most elite competitions of the Extreme Mustang Makeovers realm. I had my face plastered on 3 different magazines. My online videos had racked up over 15 million views. I was performing at sold out shows. I had people from all over the world wanting me to host me to teach clinics and workshops, from Australia to Dubai. 

Wasn’t this what I’d always wanted? I thought I should feel happy and fulfilled. Other people certainly thought I should be, too. People told me how lucky I was. After all, I was living the dream. 

So I tried to convince myself everything was fine. But on the inside, there was no escaping it: I was dying. 

There were multiple parts of me that motivated me to do the work with horses that I did. And while there were really beautiful, soul-level authentic parts of me who were engaged with it, there were also extremely wounded parts of me engaged with it as well.

“The sprouting tree of my career did not have its roots dug into the deeper desires of soul.” Bill Plotkins, Soulcraft

One of those wounded parts of me was rooted in toxic shame. I had so much toxic shame that deep down, I secretly believed I was evil. Sometimes I believed I was so bad that I wasn’t even deserving of being alive. But with horses, the world seemed to love me. I earned admiration and respect that offset the voice telling me how bad I was. 

But because of this disparity, it almost made things worse... If only they really knew who you were, how terrible and awful and vile you are, that small voice in my head whispered. I felt like a fake, an imposter because the way I saw myself didn’t match with the ways in which others saw me. So I became addicted to feeling this sense of celebration and belonging while at the same time trying to scrub myself clean of all my deficiencies, of all my brokenness, all my badness to make myself worthy of it. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed my skin until I bled. 

The scrubbing was in my constant performing and eyes that were always searching for the next big thing, the big special thing I could do to try to scrub away my stink of badness. It was an exhausting act. Whenever I would achieve one of these feats, the audience would clap and I would be content for a moment, and then I was on to searching for the next thing, because this thing hadn’t quite worked to scrub me clean. Because I believed I was such an evil, awful, flawed person I thought I needed to do good things to offset my badness. This left me in perpetual motion (flight reaction) and drove my perfectionistic behavior as I tried to conflate who I was at my core with what I achieved.

Thanks to Dr. Ingrid Clayton for bringing words to this pattern–and similarly to what she has shared, I am proud of some of what came from that, but it also feels so devastating to see the part of me that was doing that because she genuinely believed she was stupid, evil, horribly bad, and unlovable. This is devastating. 

Alas, though, it wasn’t sustainable. I was starting to crack under the pressure and walked around bleeding from the way I’d rubbed my skin raw. My original love for horses was stressed and tainted by this never ending chase to be perfect, to clean away my badness. No longer were horses my sanctuary; they had become the house that held all of my pain. 

* * * * *

Another wounding inside of me that joined my dance with horses was also growing wider, and this was the part of me that, like so many of us, had to slice parts of myself off in a kind of great splitting and fragmentation in order to exist in this culture. 

Initially, I found freedom with horses in the sense that I could be all of myself with them. All parts of who I was seemed to find expression and acceptance with them and horses gave me a home in that way. 

But where horses had once offered me a taste of freedom and a place to fully be myself, as my business grew I felt increasingly chained by them, or my work with them, or more specifically, the parts of my identity that had formed in relation to my work with horses. 

I remember one night, alone at home, when this feeling all came to a head. I was writhing around on the floor in pain and in a fit of rage bubbling up from some primal place deep inside of me, I threw something at the wall. I can’t remember what I threw, but I do remember what I threw it at– a photo of me, of my face on the front of a magazine cover, held there in a glass frame that my dad had hung on the wall. And watched it shatter. 

This was the beginning of my own shattering, my own unraveling, my escape from the box that had been built for me. Through my work with horses, it felt like I had been whittled down to a 1 dimensional cardboard cutout of who I really was. I had contorted myself into something palatable for people, something easily digestible. There was no room for full self expression here, no room for all the parts of me; only the ones that were pretty, pleasing, and polite. 

And so when the people clapped, I knew they weren’t clapping for me, but for my performance. Everyone saw me but no one saw me. I believe that we will only trust in welcome and belonging to the degree that we let our true selves be known, and who I really was was in hiding, even from myself most of the time as I tried to fit myself into a box.

I was suffocating while wearing pearls, red lipstick, and a smile, trying to convince myself I wasn’t dying inside. With a pretty picture, I tried to make it all look good to convince myself it was good. But inside of me was a silent scream, desperate to escape the prison I found myself in. I don't say I had built my own prison, because the prison had been built for me, and I had walked right in–because when all you’ve ever known is a prison, it looks a lot like home. 

“A woman who is starved for her real soul-life may look cleaned up and combed on the outside, but on the inside she is filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty mouths.” -Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With Wolves 

This moment of shattering is the moment something inside of me cracked, that couldn’t live a moment longer in the cage that was killing her. But the cost of breaking free, widening my very narrow identity, making space for all the parts of me that had been punished and suppressed for so long, and finding wholeness did mean I was first left broken into pieces. Over the next few years the underworld would become my home and like Demeter’s cave of endless tears these tears would dissolve the ice encasing my soul. I would plunge down into the depths, into the swamplands of my soul, retrieving lost parts of myself and putting myself back together again. 

And it would be a while before I realized that in unburying these lost parts of myself and piecing myself back together again, I would also be doing some small part in piecing the Goddess back together again, the Goddess who could not be kept buried. 

* * * * *

These wounded parts of me that became so entangled with horses and whose wounds were widened by my work with them were just a few of the layers that eventually led to the chord between us severing. In the outer world, in the context of western culture, the things I was experiencing were diagnosed as: severe burnout, PTSD, C-PTSD, Major Depressive Disorder, and Bipolar Disorder. 

I found myself in a confusing place, where I couldn’t bear to be around my beloved horses anymore and didn’t understand where that repulsion came from at the time. It just felt like the door between us had slammed shut in my face and I was left shivering on the front porch with nowhere else to call home. Horses became unreachable. This brought up so much pain and grief that merely the act of feeding my horses left me trembling with tears. I was left banging my head against this door between us until I realized that wouldn’t make it re-open, so eventually began the painful process of grieving, letting go, and surrendering to the possibility that horses may no longer be a part of my life anymore. 

With the severing of this chord, I was cut off from the life force energy that had originally fueled my work and connection with horses. This left me with no option but to drastically reduce the size and scale of my business, for reasons no one really understood. I went from working with a team of 5 other women at one point to now just 1. I stopped traveling across the country teaching and performing, I stopped making new online training videos, I shut down our store. I even turned down an invitation to compete at Road to the Horse, a world renown and invitation only colt starting competition, which had been one of my biggest dreams when I started this career. I grappled with the voices criticizing this perceived de-growth saying, you're ruining your career and you’re wasting your talent or you’ll never be good at anything else. But I did it anyway, because all of this didn’t feel like much of a choice; it felt like I had no other option. I had to do it to save my own life. 

(This great pause was also made possible by the online school I created with the help of Baylee & Cassie, The Horse-Human Connection Academy; a special thanks to our students and to Cassie and Baylee for keeping things running smoothly so that I could take such a healing pause and still be able to get my physical needs met while doing so). 

During this period, I took time away from horses and discovered parts of myself that my life hadn’t made room for. The more that I recovered these lost parts of who I was, the more horses once again beckoned to me. Even when they weren’t available to me or as physically present in my life as before, I realized later that they were still guiding me in their absence. It’s kind of like in faerie tales, when the guide appears in your time of need but before they will help you, they present you with an impossible task, like sorting through grain in the story of Psyche and Eros or some versions of Cinderella, when the mother-figure guide comes and drops a bag of seeds that you have to sort through before midnight, to sort through who you are and who you are not, to disentangle yourself from the enmeshment with parents or over-culture, only I was sorting through shards of glass of who I was. 

“Until we are cut to pieces by life trying to follow the one thing we love, we will never leave the world of touching a little of everything, instead of being one of those particular things in the immense whole that is worth touching.” 

“When we are removed from what we love, we become singers of grief and weavers of elegant deception. Appearing to mutate and become smaller in form to survive the hardship of absence, as when Tall Boy becomes hummingbird, actually says that the beloved is gradually forced into its true, original nature, a nature we do not at first always recognize.” 

“The only we way we survive… is for us to be broken down into small, common pieces and reassembled as one small, solid thing by the shiny thing we were following with our heart’s desire.” 

-Martín Prechtel, Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun 

“‘[According to Meade], To info our way back, the post-heroic protagonist must stay constant to what he or she really loves and endure long and difficult labours without the aid of magical interventions. Such are the soulful quests of the second half of life,’ mead suggests: ‘they takes us through the wilderness that lies beyond ‘happily ever after’ to a place of strong, compassionate, maturity where we have found our calling and have learned to be true to what really matters in life rather than obey the dictates of others or the voices of our egos telling us how we ought to behave.’” 

-Sharron Blackie, The Enchanted Life 

 IV. In Through the Crack Swims the Salmon  

Photo by Kelly Moody

When I had been pushed out of the Mother Horse’s womb, when the umbilical cord had been cut, my world had been turned upside down. All the rules seemed to change. What had worked before didn’t work here. I found myself in a new and a strange world wobbling and off balance, having to re-learn how to walk again. Perhaps the world I was in wasn’t so new, I was just seeing it with new eyes. 

Here’s the thing about shattering: as you piece yourself back together again, the pieces can never fit back into the same small shape they once were. 

For one, some of the pieces you realize were never yours to begin with. You have to let those go. With each piece you let go of, the pieces that were never really yours, you must grieve. If not for losing the pieces themselves, then for the way you carried them around thinking they were you, the way they kept you from being you, the way they left gashes in your skin, the way they left wounds in others’ skin.

For two, somehow you can never get all the pieces to fit so tight and tidy as before which is a good thing. You find yourself with a widened identity, one that doesn’t fit together so neatly.

In through the cracks swims, in the words of Francis Weller, the “shimmer of a salmon gliding under the surface of the water, the startling arc of the swift, the wonder of Mozart, and the sheer beauty of the sunrise.”

And then your edges begin to blur. Your identity becomes permeable, receptive, exchangeable, like a pond surfaces Francis has said, rather than rigid glass. 

“I’ve been circling the earth for a thousand years and I am still not sure if I am a falcon, a storm, or a great song.” -Rilke 

You find your identity widening, and in that, your circle of care begins to widen. And now, with a bigger lap, you are able to hold so much more of not just your pain, but the collective pain, of others pain. With roots dug deeper into the Earth, you are able to rise up and hold more in your branches. And those branches make fruit that nourishes the land that nourished you. 

This is what happens when we begin the work of recovering Soul in our own personal lives. And by recovering Soul in our own personal lives, we recover the Soul of the world, helping to piece Her back together again. Through this process, we move from Self-centered to Soul-centered, Francis says, which is when we move from adolescence into adulthood, initiated into a broader sense of identity than just “my, me, i.” Crossing this threshold from adolescence and self-centeredness into adulthood, soul-centric and fully ripened human beings involves the crossing of a threshold. Francis describes it this way:

“Questions on this side of the gate are: “Am I good enough? Do I belong here? Am I lovable? Am I smart enough? Do I have anything to offer? Ninety-nine percent of us are on this side of the gate, circulating around these questions. All of us have caught glimpses of the other side of the gate. There, the questions are, “How are the children doing? How is the community fairing? Are the salmon coming back? The questions are no longer self-referencing.” -Francis Weller

Most of our culture is stuck in adolescence, stuck on the first side of the gate. I can assure you I still find myself here often; but I’ve found myself spending more time on the other side lately. 

And, so, this is how I found myself becoming the one who slows down, who no longer looks away. This is how I found myself pulling over on the side of the road, weeping for a mother deer just hit so hard by a car that her unborn babies flung out of her womb and onto the asphalt. This is how I found myself knocking on our neighboring rancher’s door and asking if I could gather the dead bodies of the prairie dogs he just shot, and came across a half dead matriarch slowly dying in the baking sun, unable to climb back into her den, never to return to her pups, her sisters, her lover. This is how I found myself grieving over the Colorado River, the river that has not reached the ocean in years and is predicted to completely dry up in the next few years–The river that is my watershed.

Once you really see the horrors of this world, you can never close your eyes again. The grocery store becomes a place of grief and anxiety and flushing the toilet full of clean water, something we learned to do as toddlers, suddenly feels inexplicably wrong. 

I found myself confronting perhaps the very deepest source of shame I felt, that went beyond the personal wounding and into territory of collective wounding. I confronted the part of me that believed I was terrible because I was a human, the belief that human beings are ruining this world, are a “cancer to the earth.” Even the phrase, “leave no trace,” echoes this belief, that human disturbance is only harmful and that we should leave no trace of our existence. That it is impossible for us to live in a good way, a reciprocal way, here on Earth, that we can only make choices around the lesser of two evils. 

But why on earth would humans be the only species who cannot live in reciprocity with the Earth? I began unpacking these beliefs and this layer of shame and found that humans are not innately harmful, it’s this culture that is–This culture that has declared a war on the Earth, on original peoples of place, and on life itself. There are humans who have been living in reciprocity on this Earth for time immemorial, who are still trying despite the horrors of colonization and their life-ways being made illegal.. not to say mistakes aren’t made, but they are properly digested and lessons are learned… it’s the process of colonization that has stripped us all of those life-ways.

And so this is how I found myself embarking on another journey, determined to find another path of what it means to be human in this world, one that isn’t simply about choosing between two lesser evils (can we really call choosing between two poisons a choice?), but one that is beneficial, experiencing what it’s like to be a human who reciprocates with the earth, who is needed as a keystone species, whose disturbances can be helpful and not just harmful,  re-membering who I am as inextricable from the land that birthed me, remembering the olde ways of my own ancestors before colonization. 

I learned how to make fire with no matches, how to track coyotes and learn their stories, how to build shelter from the oh-so-generous fern. 

I experienced healing in the ways my hands dug up roots to eat from the soil beneath my feet, and in one motion, both cultivated roots for me to eat and replanted them in ways the plants couldn’t do on their own. I learned what it felt like in my body to have these moments of reciprocity, of me having the chance to be in reciprocal relationship with the Earth, to feed those who feed me. To not just say thank you, but show it. 

I learned that I was never separate from nature to begin with, that even the word “wild” implies such a thing is possible, that such a line can be drawn. And that this illusion of separation, not knowing the beings offering themselves to us as food and not knowing where our water really comes from is the source of so much harm in this world. 

I learned about all the gifts endowed to humans through the Earth Mother and all of our more-than-human-kin, and how when we shape clay into pots, weave willow into baskets, and tan and smoke and sew animal skins into clothes, we weave ourselves back into the web of this life.

And nature mirrored back to me the sacred death-life-rebirth cycle that was happening within my own soul. I found myself being initiated into sacred Death mysteries and in doing so, found myself more and more alive. Animals came into my life teaching me about the gift of life and the preciousness of death, and helped me build the capacity to stop looking away, to give thanks to those who give their lives so that we may live. 

Through this journey, I began to see not only the pain of this world but the beauty of it, the way grief and gratitude become twins dancing together, the way gratitude and beauty become not some frivolous extracurricular thing but an absolute necessity to help you survive the pain of this world.

I marveled at the flowers of grass for the first time, walking through fields I had walked through for years. I began listening to the symphony of birdsong each morning and got to know Magpie more intimately than I’d ever imagined possible. I learned about the Beaver family living in the creek that runs through our lower pasture. I began to experience the world I had been a part of in a completely new way as my eyes opened to all the beauty and pain I’d been previously blind to.

In all of this, I began to put a soothing balm on the Original Wound coming from this split from our Mother, who nourishes us, shelters us, clothes us, and holds us. I brought the shadow into the light, realizing how much harm this disconnection causes – to both Her and to ourselves. 

As I processed this Original Wound, confronted with difficult honesty all the ways I had been taking and not being in reciprocity, as I grieved over the truly sustainable life-ways that have been punished, taken, lost, and beaten out of peoples trying to live in reciprocal ways, this all impacted my relationship with horses. 

I realized that the shame I’d been carrying around this wounding had been coloring my work with horses. Another layer of my “burnout”, or another piece leading to the severance of the chord between us was the way I had put so much pressure on myself to be Good, to be The Most Ethical. 

For a while, I truly believed I had only brought horses harm and believed my entire work with them was a lie. I felt shame for haltering a horse and putting the slightest bit of pressure on them. I found myself in another prison, but this time one made of plastic clickers, targets, food rewards, science, and ethics, all the time whipping myself. I came to think that even training or riding horses was bad (because, leave no trace). 

But as I shone light on the true source of this shame, it wasn’t coming from the ways I was being in connection with horses, but the ways I was in relationship with the Earth. The shame I felt around training horses and the impossible standards of Goodness I set for myself was really a displacement of the deeper shame I felt for the ways I had unconsciously been contributing to harming the earth, doing my own extracting and exploitation of both peoples + place, even myself turned into a product on a shelf…and the belief I’d absorbed through various cultural and religious narratives that as a human, I was inherently bad. 

But as I began healing and embodying my connection to land and taking responsibility for ways I had been causing harm and trying to make amends, as I shone light on the darkness, it began to loosen its grip on me. And the more I learned about what it means to be fully human, the more I wove myself into the tapestry of life with my more-than-human kin surrounding me, the more I could show up fully in the horse-human connection. And once again, horses began to beckon to me. 

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

Mary Oliver

Part V. Where I Find Myself 

I thought Horse had deserted me, but when I began learning how to walk on wobbly legs and my eyes fully opened to take in this world, with all its glory and all its horrors, there she was. There she was, standing ever so patiently, waiting for me to press my little muzzle to her warm udder so she could nourish my tired body with her milk that flowed like rivers. 

And so, even though there is so so much more to this story, so many more layers of pain and healing and of characters and animal helpers to speak of– the the salmon who taught me about what it means to love life so deeply you swim 2,000 miles to create more of it, a white goat who gave his life for me, a mother deer and her unborn twins, the palomino stallion who escaped, and a turkey named White Dawn Youth– it is here I will bring this initial brief telling of my story to a close for now and hope that it was not to brief, for there is so much I’ve left out. I hope in the future to tell more of it, but it is not quite ready to be told. For now, it is all still held closely to my heart. 

In this present moment, I cannot tell you the journey is over, and now here I am, standing in front of you “healed”-- but I can say I am more whole than the last time you saw me, and for me healing was never the “goal,” wholeness was. This journey is a spiral that folds back on itself and not a linear path leading to some ultimate and final destination. The so-called depression may return, the underworld and belly of the Dark Goddess may once again open her mouth wide and pull me under to keep shaping me. But I am now familiar with this territory, I have been there and survived it several times. May I die and be reborn several more times in this lifetime. And may I always remember that the Horse is with me, guiding me. 

* * * * *

Now that I’m back, I’ve received the question: “So, what’s next?” I used to have a 5 year plan, fists clenched tightly around a predetermined map of my life. I don’t care to live that way anymore. I don’t know what’s “next,” I am just following the thread, being present with the way my life is unfolding, trying to understand my small part in the healing of this burning world during a time of great ecocide and genocide, staying in touch with my grief and learning to drink my tears. Trying to do my part in recovering Soul, so that, in the words of Martin Prechtel, the ocean doesn’t have to come to shore to search for us and keep our watery souls from freezing into ice.

I am excited to find myself feeling the pull to re-engage with horses & my work here, integrating all the lessons I’ve learned on this journey over the past several years.. I don’t know exactly how this is going to go. I don’t have a clear cut plan. I do know I want to begin tending more in-person relationships with people and their horses, away from screens. 

I am craving working with folks one-on-one, nurturing longer term relationships than, for example, “a weekend warrior” type of clinic. I want to be able to track students' journeys with their horses over time, to be apart of their process and be there when the territory feels utterly alone and inpassable. Working one-on-one feels connective and intuitive, which is what I am craving right now, versus creating full courses and hours of curriculum; Just feeling what’s needed moment to moment, and co-creating with my students and their horses.

I want to work with others who want to be moved by the Horse, whose souls feel ripe for the journey they are beckoning us to go on so that it is not just a focus on what we can teach the horse but what the horse has to teach us. I am also craving the chance to build community locally and share my gifts with my immediate community. I used to think being “successful” meant going “big” and leaving home, but now I see the importance of staying put, building roots, and bringing our gifts back to our community. So I’ll be announcing more opportunities for this kind of work together soon. 

I am also looking forward to sharing more in a new way– full of stories and musings on the magick of the horse-human connection and the ecosystem surrounding it and in that question, asking what it means to be fully human and how horses beckon us into that journey. More on this soon. 

Thank you all for being here, for reading, and hearing my story.

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