I regularly listen to a podcast called The Emerald. It’s one of my favorite animist/spirituality podcasts, part informative, part future-dreaming, meaning searching, trance-inducing journey through cultures and environments both foreign and familiar to me. This latest one, On Clouds and Cosmic Law, held significance because it relates very intimately to what I’m going through now. Thoughts about responsibility and natural law, the ways in which our influence on the natural world inherently changes its influence on us.
I have had such significant questions about why I’m continuing to try and work with horses when it seems that they always come wrapped in human chaos. I find it impossible to experience “horse” right now without also experiencing all the stress and human politics and money woes that come with “horse.” Ideas about what a horse should be clashes harshly with what a horse is. Ideas about what a horse should do crashes into what a horse is doing. Chaos ensues. I want to give up. I want to throw my hands up and walk away and say I’m done with horses. Not because of the horses, but because of the human world they exist within. Sometimes I can hardly bear it.
And then I listen to an episode of The Emerald that talks about the gathering and dispersing of clouds as a natural law, that a cloud has impermanence but the laws behind the cloud’s existence is what is unchanging. That humans have interacted with the natural world in ways that made sense for far longer than our current world of fighting for any amount of resources and control we can get our hands on. We know, deep down, how to ebb and flow. How not to take and take until everything is gone. And at the end of the episode, after having lulled me into a state of trance with the words of elders who know how to give and take in better relationship, a voice speaking of horses. And that was the first and last time it was uttered in the entire podcast. I think the Horse Spirits laughed at me, sitting there swearing at a podcast. “You know you’re not done.” They laughed. “Get up. Get up. There is more dancing yet.”
More about my experiences with horses can be found in my book, Standing in a Field With Horses, available from Amazon, Smashwords, and other book retailers.
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