Barely trained, she was sensitive. Didn't like men, or some women, cow-kicked or nipped them, she was in almost constant flight or its consideration. She was my time and money pit, as they say. And I loved her dearly, absorbed in lessons that even now I'm just understanding. But she was tough. My trainer-friend called her spoiled and there were many times I left her in the barn because she was impossible, a bad horse. I'd gotten a bad horse. Bad. Then I heard myself. When I stopped making up stories about why she was a bad horse, I began to learn about myself, eventually riding her without a bit, which was better for both of us. She was quiet in the woods but not in open land, where I'd struggle to contain her urges to flee by yanking her this way and that, attempting to correct the wild part that altered by something invisible, a trigger I couldn't experience as real.
I'd read of the Horse People who said that a horse's eyes are all over its body, that they see with flank and ear and whisk of tail, experiencing the world through the whole body. Horse People touched the whole body of the wild horse to make him ride-able. Broken, we'd call it. They said to ride a horse is to borrow freedom. Which sounds respectful and something like a truth.
So while this mare had worked so hard against my aids in certain situations, throwing herself and me around, she'd quietly, obediently carried me deep into the woods of Gouldsboro, Maine, unflinching at bear scat or branch-fall, brilliantly gathering herself--with me still riding--up and out of a pond when we'd broken through ice upon crossing one early March afternoon. She'd even allowed me to lead her with one hand while I'd carried a 20 pound snapper turtle that gurgled and hissed under my other arm. It'd been shot in the head by the side of the road while laying eggs. A toothy, moss-covered shell wide as a steering wheel, staggered breaths against my side. We'd walked a whole mile like that. That horse hadn't cared one bit and walked along--slowly, steadily--clopping on the tar beside a dying but powerful prehistoric creature and me. It was one of those feral moments I'd only ever had with her: for who was I with but one of the most embodied teachers of my life--this horse who could also be present and safe and actually, thrillingly, brilliantly helpful.
She'd shown me how fear can manifest as a confusion of behaviors, how helping her regulate those moments of hijacking fear took great patience and, key word, acknowledgment. As when we'd come up and out of the icy pond, she'd stood there on the hillside to shake off the effects of the event, the moment done, though how I'd stayed on, I don't know. I do know that once she'd shaken off that traumatic fall through the ice, she'd been able to carry on, shaken but rightly so. I'd affirmed her with my mittened hand on her neck all the way home. Good girl, good horse. She'd saved us both and would show no future fear of ice.
The invisible forces behind fear response are as complex as those forces that subdue its forms: flight, fight, freeze. The body remembers all through its constellation of eyes, cells, receptors, tissues. Patient noticing, a resolve, an openness to profoundly dumb mistakes without losing it. Maybe approaching befriendment or a radical compassion for being alive in this world. Maybe that pays out in new experiences--like the horse and the snapper--all good, even weirdly triumphant.
