Horsemanship for Health

This summer has been marvellous. Days spending time in the sun with the horses, colours of gold and intense aqua blue. A bell tent for shade and storing all the things we need for our retreats. I complete this series of retreats with feelings of appreciation for all the hard work put in by the volunteer team to make them happen. Their efforts, made with generosity, creative thinking and wicked humour have been part of the magic recipe.

Each retreat is something like a theatre production. We pull out of the store, folding chairs, umbrellas, pop-up compost loos, catering tables, water containers, fire buckets, mats for the dogs. The team know where everything is and often they set up within minutes. It’s beautiful to witness.

The main performers stand by and watch. Their main interest is in making sure they are fed before they start work. With the current shortage of grass, two breakfast meals are in order. Besides their stillness, our human activity seems frantic and energy draining. Horses are masters at conserving energy and when we are relaxing and chatting in our chairs, they make their move. Firstly, they check in with everyone present, scanning to see whether someone in the group might need them to be present. A brief touch of the shoulder, a nose dipped to the crown of the head, like a blessing, a benediction, a prayer may come forth, or may not. Horses make decisions based on internal criteria we cannot fathom.

And therein lies the magic, the offering of a process that is as mysterious as it is healing. Magic is when the unexpected happens, when something out of the ordinary occurs, when we feel something whisper at the edges of what we know.

We contemporary humans are uncomfortable around magic. We want to measure experience, collect data, compare one experience with another, run different tests, eliminate confounding variables as much as possible. Our research methods are robust and reliable. Mostly.

Magic makes its way regardless. Maverick by nature, it breaks all the rules because it operates under and over and above everything we can measure. It appears precisely to confound and confront. To amaze, expand and educate. When magic is in the air, everything sparkles and shimmers. Magic materialises when we drop our scepticism, our cynicism, and our over thinking. Magic is something we cannot see when our vision is obscured by mundane mentality. It shifts our perspective.

It’s hard to wrap words around magic. Slippery by nature, it eludes our rational grasp. It refuses to be caught. Mystery is the ocean in which it swims. All summer it has been present, in our responses to the horses, to the land and to each other.

To be married to amazement is something poet Mary Oliver explored in her work, and it was her intention as much as it was her creative quest. To be amazed, we must be ready to receive marvels, whole golden sun-soaked weeks of wisdom, wonder and well-being. In other words, pure magic.