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Horse
My daughter and I take
riding lessons.Toward the end of
summer, we entered a school show, a competition among students at the barn we
go to.The morning of the show, the sky
darkened and rain came and went.Horses
in their stalls nickered at the smells of damp wood, steamy blacktop. The
riding ground glowed wetly.
Our teacher, Chelsea, says
learning to ride means learning to feel the horse.Learning to feel the horse seems like good practice for learning
about fear, and what lies beyond fear, and what it feels like to go there.
We live with what seems like
a surplus of fear just now, and, surely, a surfeit of false-bravado (“Bring it
on.”) Best-selling books include End-Times fiction, and many
end-of-the-worlders track the forecasts on the world wide web.Meanwhile, like a wind farmer cranking air,
the President fixates on terror, scaring the dissent out of people.“It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark!”
moans the sign in front of a neighborhood church.
I was talking in the spring
about some of this with my friend, Jack, and our teacher, Bill Tremblay.Visiting them in Fort Collins, we went for a
hike in the foothills. “Once,” Tremblay said, “I was pack-tripping in the
Ray-wahs.My horse spooked—at a white
grocery bag.Next thing I knew, I was
standin’ six feet away.How did I get
here? I says to myself.It must have
been a quantum tunnel.”
With Tremblay, nothing is
only itself.Explaining filmscripts
that day, he talked about characters who have a hidden trait, a secret
wound.They cover their vulnerability
with reactions, making a mask. All the energy goes into the mask, he said.They don’t want to be seen as weak.They are afraid of their vulnerability.
Being Tremblay, he was
talking about us, too.He was saying we
have to go to that weakness to find bravery, the fearlessness Terry Tempest
Williams describes, that lets us “step forward in times of terror with a
confounding calm.” Plus I love how my daughter loves horses.
So here’s what happened at
the school show.As time came for my
class to ride, it was pouring rain.The
horses were skittish from the umbrellas.I was nervous, afraid of embarrassing myself in front of everyone, of
being seen as not knowing what I’m doing.(Some help, my son was cracking wise about how bad a butt-slapping ride
I was in for.) Then I got on my horse, and we came nicely over the first jump,
then the second, then my horse went and threw me.He just vaporized.On
instinct I pushed off him, landed, looked around—Where’s my horse? There he
was, looking back, cut-eyed, trotting away.Following his line of sight, it took a while to see what spooked
him.It was a riding crop, lying on the
ground.
The horse’s name is Toby.He’s a tobiano.The word refers
to a white horse with brown spots.His
patchwork of cream-white and pinto-bean brown makes him hard to see all in
one.The eye keeps trying to separate
him, one or the other. Fear and fearlessness, he looks like two horses living
in one skin.He looks like cloud
shadows.He scares me, when I’m not
sending praise his way.“You are such a
smart horse,” I whisper in his ear.
But he’s youngish, which in
a horse means he lacks discernment, which means he gets carried away.The littlest things spook him.To “face the fact that fear is lurking in
our lives, always, in everything we do,” Chogyam Trungpa writes,“we should look at how we move, how we talk,
how we conduct ourselves, how we chew our nails, how we sometimes put our hands
in our pockets uselessly.”But whereas
fear, manifesting as nervousness or restlessness, is a cover, we find sadness
underneath.Terry Tempest Williams
says when we open beyond fear to experience, a chasm opens in our hearts.Yet this spaciousness allows our lungs to
breathe.Breathing, “we remember fear
for what it is—a resistance to the unknown.”
“You
need to breathe up there,” Chelsea called out when I got back on the
horse.“You look like you’re getting
mad.”
When we were sitting on the
side of the mountain, Tremblay and Jack and me, the bank, so far away downtown,
didn’t look so big.Backs to the rock,
we squinted like bears at the strangely awakening world, and gathered strength
from the warmth of our friendship.On
the hogbacks, in a week, strengthening summer would reach the deep-nesting
snakes.In the rocky coves, from their
sleeps, the rattlers would melt to life again.Once more like a breath nursed on shadows, they would ease into the
sunny places.
“You
gotta watch out for the snakes, ” Tremblay said.
“Horses can tell you’re afraid,” I said.
“When did animals get to be
psychic?” Jack said.
I don’t know the fear of combat, nor the fear that
seams the lives of so many who remain on vigil through lengthening nights, praying for the well-being of their daughters, sons, moms or dads who are
serving in Iraq. I don’t know the fear of being mistreated because of the color of my skin or the content of my
religion. But I start with where I am.
“Put a little give in your hands,” Chelsea said that day.“It will loosen the reins, so he’ll go easy
over the cross-rail.”I looked at
Toby, patted his neck.In his beautiful
skewbald coat, his colors swirl each other’s borders.Eye-popping, they seem to extend him beyond himself.When she rode that day, my daughter’s face
looked so calm. She has a good seat, as they say.Graceful but strong, she floats with the horse.I want to ride like her someday. “You make
it look so easy,” I told her as we walked from the barn.
“Yeah,”
chimed my son.“And, Dad, you make it
look so hard.”
Ted Lardner
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