The longer I spend learning about, interacting with, and letting myself be cracked open by this whole horsemanship journey, the less it is about “point here, go there, heels down, look up”; it’s not that the tangible things are no longer important, it’s just that there is so much MORE behind it.
The horse and rider relationship, at the level of art, is about alchemy. It’s a meditation. I don’t pretend to be nearly at that stage, but the idea of it, the inspiration of riding and operating within that sphere is intoxicating to me.
And I realise to even begin that dance, to even have that as a possibility, we need to consider that a different level of being with our horses exists- and to even begin to have THAT within our line of vision, we need to first and foremost recognize their sentience.
I’ve been reading a lot of books of late on collective consciousness, and interweaved among it are incredible encounters that involve animal communication, stories where the normal boundaries of the day to day have been dropped to allow for something higher, more connected to be experienced.
I got to sharing my thoughts with my husband last night, and he said that when he was in Africa filming with the Baka tribe (a pygmy tribe in Cameroon), he would go out with the hunters on their hunts and the forest was so high, dense and thick, that if you lost sight of the tribesman, you were completely disoriented- you didn’t know which way you came from or where anything was. It was like being in thick fog.
One say he asked them (through the translator), how do you know where to go? We go in different directions every day, how do you know where to go? And they said, We don’t know where to go. We ask the animals.
He said he was confused for a moment and thought that something was lost in translation, so asked again, what do you mean?
And they said, well, they are animals and we are animals, so we ask them where to go and they tell us.
Simple as that.
Maybe it’s true what they say. Maybe it’s not learning we are involved in, but remembering.
How could we ever be bored when there’s so much magnificence yet to be experienced.
xx Jane
