Walking the Edge of an Abyss

While taking a student on a field ride in late February, I found myself teaching a lesson that required few words and demanded much more feeling. Here is an account of how some lessons cannot be taught by mere words, but I will try my best in this written account!

The snow is soft, the wind is low. Glory, my equine partner, and I crunch, step and glide through the drifts. We may be working at a slow walk, but I feel his effort in every floating stride.  He quite happily moves along, happy to be of service, to be joined as one after a long bitter cold February. I feel his sinuous muscle movement that turns a simple walk into a floating feeling, like we are half swimming half walking through the white piles of snow. The light is flat right now, and the pasture has zero tracks, except from a lone fox.  It seems as though we are riding through the sky, surrounded by white, very little horizon to catch the eye. As my brain processes all these feelings, I find that meditative state of letting go of all expectations coming very easily to me.

With no path, no horizon even, we become as one pure thinking, feeling moving being. We move as one efficiently and calmly happy to explore the depths of peace. My muscles are active as stabilizers, making myself as easy to carry as possible, with the snow up to his knees in spots, there is zero need to do anything other than point Glory in a direction. We play with making a few figure eights down at the bottom of the field, playing a game to see how subtly I can ask him for a perfectly round circle, then switch directions and do another, until we start to see an unbroken chain of circles, a string of beads, almost like a rosary of calm, patient loving intention.  I have my young student on Boomer, her good friend and patient equine teacher, follow along, checking up on her to see if she is starting to understand the shape of this sacred moment. I see she does, and we smile, no words necessary.

We come to the top of the small descent to the lower pasture, fairly steep, and in the flat light with no light or shadow, it seems as an abyss of white. My tummy flip flops as my inner eye can’t calculate the distance to the bottom or angle of steepness. I ask Glory to start down it anyway, feeling like we are going to be swallowed into the sea of white nothingness, an abyss of UNCERTAINTY.  He complies, ever the brave compassionate listener, trusting our unspoken of senses that are much deeper than our surface ways of seeing the world instead of the superficial ways of seeing, of depth perception and logic. As he moves down the slope, I lean back and truly deeply TRUST. Trust myself and trust him. There are levels to trust, it’s not just something you turn on and off, blindly. This is a skill, a mental muscle that must be nurtured. I look back at my young student. Boomer has stopped at the edge of the hill. Ever the protector of his young charges, especially sensitive to their nerves and emotions, he says ‘Nope she’s not ready for this yet.’  I stop Glory and talk her through it, telling her to find her breath, find her strength and stability in the saddle, and find her deeper trust and faith in her horse. I see her find the next level, and Boomer promptly feels the invisible change in her and starts down the hill, carefully picking his way down the fluffy drifts. At the bottom we all laugh, even the horses have happy shining eyes, ‘We DID it!’  And the mental muscle of trust gets that much stronger. We peacefully wind back up the hill back to the barn, knowing that we walked on the Edge of the Abyss, and found Joy.