Horsemanship for Health

This past week I have stayed on the North Cornish coast where the Atlantic Ocean carves valleys into mountains of dark grey rock, creating a landscape both shifting and solid.

Time away has pulled me into a different rhythm. Slower (I took my laptop which stayed closed all week) and simpler. Early mornings with only one task to complete – boots on over pyjamas and a walk up the lane with the dogs – feeling the mist, the cool of autumn beginning, scenting, sensing, finding my way through torchlight. I wanted to embed this space in my memory for when life becomes cluttered and full again.

I rarely take time out. Like many social entrepreneurs, my work is my life. In the past eight years, I have been away only a handful of times. It is ironic that I can host retreats, time out for others, and not make room for replenishment myself. This week away has been the easiest of weeks because I have not fretted too much about all that I have left undone. In the days leading up to going away, I made arrangements for horse care- thank you to our wonderful volunteer Emma – and settled a few things that were important. As best I could, I cleared the way for time off.

Each day away became a container I could fill with activity – reading, writing, walking, cooking, cleaning and good conversation. Each day felt precious. My sister and I have been away a few times and each time we find our flow and it is nourishing and freeing and beautiful to spend time together. We both lead crazily full lives and taking a week out feels important and vital.

Writer and aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes about spending a week with her sister in a simple beach shack. In Gift from the Sea, her book of luminous essays, she reflects on time and what makes each day so perfect. As it is with our week, the two women set a pattern of freedom, of not being cramped in space or time or limited in activity. The sisters do not lie on the beach doing nothing – their days have a natural balance of physical, intellectual and social life. The rhythm is easy and unforced.

“Work is not deformed by pressure. Relationship is not strangled by claims…we have moved through our day like dancers, not needing to touch more than lightly because we were instinctively moving to the same rhythm.”

Thrown back into the hurly burly of our lives, it is difficult to detect the underlying pattern, and find our natural rhythm. So many of our systems and organisations work against our nature and we lose our balance. Exhausted and depleted, we take time off to recover only to return again and again to the same old cycles. Sometimes, and this has been true of my life, we cannot take the extended rest that would reset our balance, we have to work with where we are.

Anne Morrow asks questions about the intermittent nature of our being. “How can one learn to live through the ebb-tides of one’s existence? How can one learn to take the trough of the wave?”

Watching the sea withdraw and return brings her to understand that ‘each cycle of the tide is valid, each cycle of the wave is valid, each cycle of a relationship is valid.’

Coming home the undone work sits on my desk, still, and I am not dismayed. I see that it is part of the pattern. Inspired and refreshed, I find I am moving in a new rhythm, carrying with me the image of the Atlantic rolling and falling, wave after wave, splitting and reforming, endlessly moving.