Horsemanship for Health

Here I am with my earnest intentions. On beautiful mornings, I will meditate with the horses. I will sit in the sun, take my seat and spruce up my mind. It will be great.

As soon as I arrive, find my mindfulness app with the perfect bell set not too high, not too low, Tinker makes contact. You are absorbed in something, she says, which is of interest to me. You are accessible therefore I will come to keep you company. At the same time you will provide a handy sun shade and provide fly relief when I put my head between your knees. This is great.

I am committed to meditation and distractions are good for working on your commitment. I begin. Tinker lowers her head and breathes with me. We enter into a state of blissful connection. I am at peace. I hear wild geese passing over the stubble field and, in the distance, church bells. This is great. Just what I came for.

Tinker gets restless and pushes her head against my arm. The flies are annoying her again and I am very useful in rubbing them off. Her eyes are itchy and my knees make good bony scratching posts.

I look at my timer. I’m halfway through my meditation and I have achieved about five seconds of settled breathing. The rest of the time my attention has been on Tinker’s antics. This is not so great but in many ways it mirrors my life. How many times have I tried to dedicate quiet time for meditation or reflection? How many times have I failed and given up in frustration?

I wonder what I need to learn here? Do I keep trying or find something else to do with my precious time? I’m working on my inner life here and I have flies in my boots and a pony eating the plastic box upon which I have taken my seat.

The answer is obvious now that I see it. I need to lighten up and let go of the need to find a perfect outcome. My meditation looks and feels like my life. Of course, it does. Why should I be surprised? The very marrow of meditation as I understand it from the Buddhist tradition is not to clean your mind but to really be present to your life and read it for what it is.

Whatever is in my life will also change. After a few moments of unsettled inquisitiveness, Tinker moves off to find something more interesting and Sheranni takes her place.

I take a deep breath. He breathes with me. We stay connected breathing in and out. His presence is strong and tender. You don’t need to get it perfectly right, he says. You just need to breathe.

There is so much to love about Buddhist Philosophy, I keep turning to it every time I get stuck or lost or confused. When I say ‘turn to it,’ that makes it sound as if I spend my spare time leafing through Buddhist texts looking for bright jewels of wisdom to illuminate my day. In reality, it goes something like this:

Question: Will you prepare a workshop on Zen Philosophy for the Sixth Form?

Answer: Sure! (inside voice: when the hell will I find time to do that extra thing in an already crowded week?)

Three days before workshop: I’ve forgotten everything I knew about Zen. I need to read something quick and easily digestible because I don’t have time to read anything slowly and properly. Why did I agree to do this? I’m tired of doing seven things at once. I wish I could just sit down and read some Zen and really find some nourishment in it instead of having to teach stuff all the time. I’m tired of teaching. I’m tired of spending hours preparing material that is eaten up in seconds. I’m tired.

I choose three books on Zen. I light a candle. I sit down with my notebook. My hound lies across my feet and I begin to relax for what feels like the first time in seven months. I take a deep breath. I remind myself that I once fell in love with Zen. This bit of time for research will be like visiting an old friend.

I pick up the weightiest book, the most serious and scholarly book. Just the thought of it makes me want to take a seven year snooze. I put the big book down and turn to the lightest slip of a book. I start to go through it and I see that there are pencil underlinings on almost every page. I start to get excited. I’ve done some work with this little book already. I don’t have to start at the beginning. I’m halfway there.

I read this:

‘In order not to leave any traces, when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. Zen activity is activity which is completely burned out, with nothing remaining but ashes. This is the goal of our practice.’

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Shunryu Suzuki

I feel as if a curtain has parted in my mind, showing me a place I rarely visit. This place is clean, cool, uncluttered. There is nothing in this space except truth. No trace. I’m immediately gripped by the idea. I see that it is the opposite of what most people consider burn out. I see that working at something with full attention is clean work. I also see that when I work, I sometimes leave dirty little traces. The need for acknowledgement, the need for some sort of reward, the need for approval. Like many people, I think a pat on the back for a job well done is a good thing.

Zen doesn’t teach morality. It doesn’t say: don’t work for approval, praise or recognition. It says, in its wonderful Zen-like way, just do your work fully. Leave nothing undone. No loose ends, no corners cut, no nonsense about it being too hard or boring or inconvenient. Sit down and read your book. Take your pencil and make your notes. Write. When you need a mind break, get up and make a cup of tea, finish the job, prepare the workshop and when you have given the workshop, don’t linger waiting for feedback, just move onto the next thing.

I’ve been playing with the Zen way of work for a couple of weeks now, and I already I feel the difference in how I approach tasks. I do them with a lot less effort because I’m not so focused on the outcome. I’m not looking at what comes next. Whether it’s approaching a horse to put on a halter, playing games with a pony, or planning our sessions and long-term curriculum, I’m enjoying the feeling of complete burn-out. I’m also more aware of the signs that I’m starting to smoke a bit, usually around Zoom meetings that I let creep into creative time, and I’m stoking up the fire, which means making guilt-free decisions to switch off, knowing that I don’t have to stay for pointless meetings. What a relief it is to work like this.

It strikes me that horses know how to practise Zen. Watching the herd freely graze and move around together, they do things completely without trace. They have no preconceived idea of how to act. If you allow a horse enough time there is nothing to get in the way of their activity. When Sheranni makes a decision, whether or not to come back into the yard, after I have supposedly turned him free for the morning, he may take a moment to weigh up the situation and may run through a few options. When he has made his mind up, though, he moves with commitment. He is not thinking: I should have stayed in the field where the grass is greener. Naturally, I can’t know this for sure, but observing him and other intelligent thinking animals, I sense a greater connection to what Zen calls the ‘big mind’ of pure consciousness and less attachment to the ‘small mind’ of personal thinking.

Our personal thinking and ideas of what should occur in any given activity means we are often not free to act without trace. We are weighed down by notions. We create intricate, multi-layered stories of how we must be in the world. Suzuki puts it like this:

‘When we practice Zazen our mind is calm and quite simple. But usually our mind is very busy and complicated, and it is difficult to be concentrated on what we are doing. This is because before we act, we think, and this thinking leaves some trace. Our activity is shadowed by some preconceived idea, the thinking not only leaves some trace or shadow, but also gives us many other notions about other activities and things. These traces and notions make our minds very complicated. When we do something with a quite simple, clear mind, we have no notion or shadows, and our activity is strong and straightforward. But when we do something with a complicated mind, in relation to other things or people, or society, our activity becomes very complex.’

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

I love this. I love the way it lets me drop my complex thinking and yet still offers a strong and straightforward way of operating intelligently. I love the freedom it presents. It takes away the doubting, the second-guessing, the deliberation. This summer I’m dedicating to true burn-out.

I found the bench of no regrets on a walk a short while ago. Here as I took a break to breathe in the warmth of the sun and tune in to the birds, I remembered my friend’s observation that if we were lucky we had ‘twenty springs left to live.’

Twenty springs is a finite amount of time. A stretch of seasons that will take me to my final years. If I must live these years with no regrets, I must make every spring count. The question of how I might do this has preoccupied my thinking on my walks.

Twenty springs will age everything I love. My brother would have been 55 this May Day had he lived to see this spring. Inevitably, there will be other losses, sadness and grief flowing through my springs. The bench of no regrets will remind me to keep living each spring with surprise and equanimity no matter what arrives.

The blossom will remind me to keep things fresh. To resist becoming stale or so stuck I cannot move. The blossom will remind me that all beauty fades and all life decays. The blossom falling into the water from the cherry tree reminds me to capture the moment. To resist closing my heart or mind and look more closely instead.

I wonder whether the horses will travel with me through twenty more springs? As spring foals, they mark their 20th spring next year. They could both live until they are 40. What a privilege and joy it would be to share more time with them. To grow old together.

Of course I cannot know that I will have the gift of this time, yet simply imagining it has inspired me to view this spring differently. I’m counting it as the first spring. The first spring I have dedicated to the start of something intentional.

Small wonders are happening. As I’m slowing down to savour the spring mornings, animals and birds are less inclined to leave. A young heron stood near my knee fishing, ducks slept in the early morning sun, beaks tucked under wings and stayed asleep as I tiptoed around them with the hound. A robin stood above my head and looked in my eyes and sang. This morning the seagulls were silent and from the cool quiet, I heard the call of a cuckoo.

I’m reading Carl Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life and this short passage leapt from the page like a silver fish. Here Jung has retreated to a sanctuary he built from stone by hand and reflecting on his life.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilisations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

Carl Jung: Prologue to Memories, Dreams and Reflections.

In a few weeks, my first ephemeral spring will give way to summer and I will remember it like a friend. There has been so much to take care of this spring to prepare for groups to visit the horses and it would be so easy to get caught up in the details. The horses are ready, though. And in knowing this spring, so am I.

Like many of us, I have missed the pub, the picnics, the public gatherings and events that punctuated previous years. Nevertheless, there are some compensations for a year of social distancing. The beach has become my back yard, a place of reflection, imagination and connection.

On my beach walks I collect small treasures that have no worth to anyone but me: a few polished sea glass stones in greens and blues; an oyster shell; slender driftwood sculpted into suggestive shapes. I keep these treasures in a jar to look at while I wash the dishes. This small ritual creates a sense of space in a day where I am necessarily attached to a screen.

Because I haven’t been able to travel far, I have travelled small instead. Small things have always delighted me. As a child I used to take long meandering walks around the lanes and across fields, and collect things along the way. Insects, leaves, feathers. Small pieces of the outside that made me feel connected to the inside. Some leaves I held onto for years. Not long ago a found a dusty fragment from a tree of life I visited in an Arabian desert thirty years ago.

I am not systematic in my collecting or my classification. I often find things that seem significant, and then store them somewhere only to come across them unexpectedly. I enjoy the surprise this brings, the joy of rediscovering a mood, a feeling or a moment lost in time.

All life is made of such moments, of the smallest movements that link together to create a chain of being. When I look back over the past year, I see how richly textured it has been even in the bleakest moments. Under the surface of flatness, of sameness, of ordinary routine there have been moments of rare delight and connection.

The sea has been a constant in a turbulent year. Each day the sea offers something new and unexpected. A school of dolphins bouncing through sparkling waves; foam whipped dry by the wind; a pause by the steps to listen to a sea shanty spontaneously offered at the end of a dog walk. The sea keeps me going through difficult times. It reminds me that light and movement are constants of change as much as darkness and stagnation.

Sometimes it’s hard to see through the darkness. It’s hard to keep going when discouraged or disheartened by forces beyond your control. The sea is powerful and beside it I often feel small. Walking by the sea, I am reminded each time of how vulnerable we all are. The sea also, paradoxically, brings me a surge of strength to keep finding my way home.

Those times when I step onto an empty stretch of sand with my hound and find a space to breathe, those times are real and true and those times are when I feel a rising sense of hope.

We all want to be loved in our shining magnificence, in our unflawed glory, but true love waits until we are low and exhausted and confused. It beams right through the humble heart and lights us up. It reminds us to be soft and tender and raw. It lets us know that the quiet space of no hope can often be transformed into a new understanding. Love lets us know that we are never alone.

I have learned about love in the unlikeliest of places and from unlikely people and beings. Love often shows up when I am least expecting it. When I am low and close to giving up, it will announce its presence quietly: a shift in the way the light falls over a row of frozen benches looking out over the estuary one early morning; a new note in the tone of someone’s voice; a drop in the wind. All of a sudden there is understanding, a fresh way of apprehending what was previously obscured. Like many of us, I set things up so that my life runs smoothly, rolling on oiled wheels. Love likes to stop me mid-track. Here take a look at this, it says. If I ignore it, it is patient, which is the mark of a great disrupter; love takes its time to surprise you.

Shell fish featured in my first love story. Whelks and cockles, to be precise, which now I think of it are prized as aphrodisiacs. I collected them in a bucket with a boy who couldn’t look at me. I wondered all that day and the next day and for a long time after why he would not meet my eyes. I wanted to find him to ask him – what? Nothing had occurred. We had simply hunched next to each other on a barnacle covered rock and he had told me my future. He told me what he could see, that I was blind to boys like him. I would go after the other kind of boy, which I did. I wonder how he knew this at 12? What I would give to go back in time and take the bucket from his hand and look directly into his eyes and tell him he was wrong.

I went to buy shell fish this morning because I have been dreaming of fresh scallops. I took an old French cook book to bed and read with relish how to make béchamel sauce from scratch. I love this battered old book. I’m enchanted by every recipe created by the cook whose first name is the mysterious initial X. Marcel Boulestin was a food writer from the 1920s and 1930s who inspired many cooks including Elizabeth David. His cooking is plain, elegant and simple. As much as I enjoy imagining creating epinards florentine, spinach in a creamy sauce, I admire Boulestin’s spiky writing. I love the way he tells you precisely what to do.

Clean the spinach well and, having washed it in several waters, drain and dry it. Put it in a thick saucepan with a good piece of butter, and cook, stirring well on a fairly quick fire.

This is how I learned to cook spinach. I love the poetry of washing it in several waters and the good piece of butter, the generosity to the cook with the conviction that this way of cooking spinach and stirring in other ingredients, each carefully picked and prepared, will result in a simple meal of deliciousness. Boulestin’s cooking is probably considered old-fashioned now; there is a lot of cream and butter, I mean a lot, although for me this is part of the charm because it reminds me that cooking creatively means looking at the foundations of good recipes and essential elements and assembling them in the way I would like to eat now.

There were no scallops at the farm shop because the boats had not been able to go out to sea in these high winds. Half expecting this, I had already planned to buy mushrooms instead. Forest fungi packed into a brown box; I chose the oyster mushrooms because they were the closest to the sea theme I had in mind. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with the mushrooms. They are pearly and precious and I want to do them justice. Boulestin has several mouth-watering concoctions involving oil and butter, garlic and parsley. I will perhaps saute them with fresh coriander and lemon because bright flavours are singing to me right now.

Thinking about food is a simple form of love especially when the world outside is complicated and still so uncertain. There is comfort and reassurance in knowing that my outing to the supermarket or farm shop or greengrocer will yield some small pleasure. I find I’m savouring food more than ever because life is precarious and food is one of the loveliest ways to say to yourself or someone you love: here, eat this, I care. It might be wild outside, but this will delight your heart.

The small, simple and humble ways we care matter. Philosopher Alain de Botton says that we need to consider the mundane when practising love. We need to make room for love in our daily domestic lives. When we think of love as some operatic performance we forget how most of us live our lives – in quiet symphonies of small duties. Feeding children, feeding animals, feeding ourselves and those we love with words and actions that leave us either feeling nourished or depleted.

Love has the capacity to illuminate the mundane. When I think of moments when love appeared in this week alone, I recall swift and sudden tears, laughter, gestures of surprise, gratitude, hope, compassion, connection, warmth, imagination and shared understanding: all rich ingredients of love.

You see me as I am and as I have always been. Clear, honest and full of love. I hold all of my life in my heart and if you ask me in the right way, I will give it in service to you.

You who know the ache of being separated from your own kind, the hours when you feel the heaviness of your own singular presence. No other to lighten your way. No other to enter your life and make it into something shared. No other at night when you lie with your heart open and awake. Waiting.

I feel you. I feel you want to come closer and I lower my neck to you. You ask permission to caress and I soften. I caress you in turn with my breath and I feel you open the space in you that was shuttered. Years, you say. You tell me you have not hugged anyone in years. Nor has anyone touched you. I feel your sadness like gravity.

I hold you here. Your hand rests on my neck. I am still for you. Quiet. I listen to your words of love. I hold your longing. I hold your kindness and willingness to share with me your secrets. I hold them sacred for you. I see you. I see how you have touched the place you do not speak of to those of your own.

Look into my eyes and tell me how you are and do not pretend. I will listen. I will see you.

Written for Maggie (not her real name) and for all those who are lonely for touch, love and deeper understanding. A recent survey shows more than 1.7 million people in Britain will be spending Christmas alone this year. This is twice the usual number.

I have always admired people who can make music. To be able to play a clarinet or piano fluently seems to me like the most gorgeous gift. My musical talent fits into a matchbox. At school I was in awe of those musical geniuses who had the facility I lacked. I remember once picking up a guitar with a fluttering feeling of finding my instrument and being told by the teacher that I was holding it back to front.

I resigned myself to becoming a listener rather than a player. I was an ardent onlooker and observer and remained in awe of those who had the secret knowledge. Last week, I realised the true point of music is to connect.

We set up in the barn with an array of hand pans, exquisitely crafted by Lyndon Forster, who offers music workshops through his community enterprise PanKind.

We had invited Lyndon to visit in the summer and we were all entranced by the reaction of the horses to the melodic sound of the pans. As soon as Lyndon started playing, the herd, who were some distance away grazing lifted their heads. Then, as if drawn by a magnet, they came to investigate. Dragonfly, our most sensitive Arabian, seemed to connect most intensely, exploring the pan with his whiskers as we experimented with different touches to lift the sound from the metal.

The barn which is a combination of tractor garage and night shelter to two Dartmoor ponies Evie and Rose became transformed into a music studio to which we had invited a group of patients from Langdon Hospital.

One of the patients, a talented musician, was instantly gripped by the guitar and provided background accompaniment to the ripples of sound from the rest of the group. Another patient gently moved his fingers down a dulcimer while Evie breathed over his hands. Someone else touch played a pan. At one moment I realised that all the beings in the barn were utterly absorbed in the process. No words were needed. We were connected as one.

No division between animal or human, patient or staff, teacher or farmer. Just us. Playing. In a big draughty barn. It felt completely natural and also humbling.

When we allow things to unfold with a harmony and rhythm all of their own, we make music. The spontaneous music of being as we are.

We are poised for a new era in leadership with Joe Biden’s election as President of the United States. Among many there is hope that one of the world’s most influential super-powers will regain balance, perspective and return to a quieter, more dignified style of governance. In the words of one BBC commentator: ‘The wildness is over.’

Kamala Harris is preparing to step into her role as vice-president, the first time a woman has been elected to this position. She has said the election is about so much more than the candidates. ‘It is about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it.’

Overnight, the rhetoric of power has shifted, from angry defence and threats, to calls for patience, hope and healing as the knotty details are worked through. There is a change in the atmosphere. At a time when the world needs it most, there is at last some breathing space.

In parallel to following the US election, I have been reading Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth, which makes a case for radically changing the way countries are financed. Her Doughnut model, which has been welcomed as a new vision for humanity by academics, business leaders and entrepreneurs is also a reason to hope.

I never knew economics could be so gripping until I started the Doughnut and what I have learned is that current financial models are clunky, crude and misaligned with how most people want to live. They are straight pipelines that facilitate basic input and output of money without considering the well-being of the community which both supplies and needs the money. I recommend reading the book to get a sense of the scope of the Doughnut, which if adopted by governments as the way to move beyond the obsessively narrow focus on growth as the measure of economic success, could sweetly change the world.

The Doughnut is a series of circles that considers critical planetary degradation; the safe and just space for humanity and critical human deprivation. The model places the safe and just space for humanity between two rings: one of ecology, the other social. We can most comfortably thrive in this buffered zone where we are no longer pushing the earth’s resources past its capacity to keep us in the manner to which we have become accustomed.

“The last two hundred years of industrial activity have been based on a linear industrial system whose design is inherently degenerative. the essence of that industrial system is the cradle-to-grave manufacturing supply chain of take, make, use, lose: extract Earth’s minerals, metals, biomass and fossil fuels; manufacture them into products; sell those on to consumers who -probably sooner rather than later – will throw them ‘away,’ When drawn in its simplest from, it looks something like an industrial caterpillar, ingesting food at one end, chewing it through, and excreting the waste out of the other end.”

Kate Raworth Doughnut Economics 2017 (p212)

These ideas pose challenges to business leaders of the 21st century in the form of the corporate to do list. There are five options to choose from and working through them requires overcoming a tendency to stick with what we can do, rather than what we could do to not only boost our businesses and enterprises, but to add benevolent value to the world in which we do business. I love Kate Raworth’s breadth of vision, her clarity and her belief that making a difference in the broadest sense is possible no matter how small your enterprise.

Top of the list is generosity. A generous mindset looks to nature as a model. Nature gives bountifully, she takes usefully and she wastes nothing; she’s also a creative genius. She makes works of staggering complexity and beauty from a handful of dust. Poppy seeds flung into hard ground by winds need disturbance, light and air to germinate and bloom. Blobs of jelly become fish, elephants and human beings. Caterpillars emerge from silk duvets transformed into winged jewels.

It is hard for some companies to be generous because stuck at number two – do what pays – means viewing your business through the narrowest of lens. There are plenty of examples of number two: some universities charging exorbitantly high prices for food parcels delivered to students in quarantine or ill with Corona Virus springs to mind. Universities, such as Reading, are right at the top with their home-grown boxes of wholesome food. It may cost more to feed young people well, but the benefits of doing so are worth so much more than the savings gained by offering value packets of pasta or cereal, or in some cases, no food at all.

Regenerative design invites us to learn from nature’s 3.8 billion years of experimentation. It invites us to think of nature as our source of inspiration and our teacher. Generous designers such as Janine Benyus, whose innovative work is featured in the book as an example of thinking beyond the usual boundaries, creates cities that act like ecosystems. Imagine ‘rooftops that grow food, gather the sun’s energy, and welcome wildlife.’ Imagine ‘pavements that absorb storm water then slowly release it into aquifers. Buildings that sequester carbon dioxide, cleanse the air, treat their own wastewater, and turn sewage back into rich soil nutrients.’ Cities as generous as forests.

The world feels new today. There’s talk of new possibility, of unity, of ecology not as a political issue, but a universal one. Nature holds the key to solving the problem of her own destruction, if only we would pay proper attention to those who want to show us. Raworth says that ‘today’s most innovative enterprises are inspired by the idea that the business of business is to contribute to a thriving world.’ These ideas shine a light on a new way of waking up in the world, a way to feed our organisations and enterprises so that we all might thrive. Nature lead the way!