When I first started working with horses I was given time limits on how long it should take me to do an activity with them. Horses were given a window on how long it should take them to respond to a request. Brushing and tacking up should take ten minutes. Three seconds tops between a cue and the horse obeying. Schedules had to be followed, after all. The next lesson was in an hour. The next feed shift in three. There was no room for dawdling, soaking up precious minutes.
The difficulty in these human time tables is that horses are an animal that stretches time. Their way of looking at the world is in segments of thought, flowing along on sensations and experiences. They don’t recognize hours or minutes. To look at a horse properly I feel I need a long stretch of simply standing with them to get a real impression. Time disappears. Was it an hour, really? Maybe it was only a handful of minutes but seemed an hour. Maybe I stood there an entire afternoon, absorbing the feeling of Horse. A horse is a big gulp of reality that requires a while to savor fully. It requires my full attention, not busyness of the hands and a continuous stream of words in my mouth.
When a horse pauses, it’s inside of that pause that deeper understanding seems to occur. A large constellation of possibility opens up ahead of the action. The horse peers into it, considering. Is it safe? Is it useful? They lick their lips. They sigh. They walk into the space and the constellation collapses into a singular line of motion. If we interrupt it, the expansion never happens. An action is a simple cause and effect without the answers to “Is it safe? Is it useful?” I’m still in the process of learning when to press and when to hold, but in the meantime I’m observing. I’m swishing that reality around, waiting for the Horse to appear.
Standing in a Field With Horses by Maeve Birch will be released as an eBook on Amazon and SmashWords on November 13th. Sign up for blog alerts and book updates!
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