One of the aspects I love most about horses is how I feel when I just hang out with them.  My life is busy, because I think I like to be busy, and I don't realize how intensely focused I have been until I step into the presence of the horses.  There often seems to be a huge difference between the busy life I lead and the peaceful now that pervades the herd.  The first indication I have is my entire body sighs.  I feel muscles release and tendons loosen.  I take a deep breath and my shoulders drop a bit as I begin to let go.  My world seems richer in that moment.  Without doing a thing, I am having a good time.

I often ask myself  what lies between me and having a good time, me and what I call the State of Play.  Having just listened to Leonard Mlodinow, who recently coauthored The Grand Design with Stephen Hawking, I am inspired to consider that question in depth.  Mlodinow spoke about the answers derived from science as being superior to those provided by God, not that it takes the right away from others to consider God for answers, but in his words, "The idea of God is not necessary...".  However, those words are indicative of the same misconception or flawed premise as can be held by philosophers and theologians; that there is a "right" answer.  Perhaps there is no right answer and there is no wrong answer.  There are only ideas, the present moment, and our own personal response to them which can vary from absolute despondency to bliss or play.  

From a very early age it seems I have been driven by one primary thing; the desire to prove myself right.  Distilling this even further, I believe this endeavor was in an effort to feel happy, as if happy was not possible unless I was right.  I tried to prove to my father that I was right, and to all self-appointed authority figures, as well as to friends, colleagues, and perceived opponents.  One conversation I had with my mother years ago was particularly poignant in regards to this journey about getting it right.  We were discussing my long career with horses and her close association with it in the way of support.  I laughed and said to her that I was completely comfortable changing my mind about something when I discovered a better way.  I said I just proceeded as if that was the way I had always done it.  It became the new "right" way.  She agreed and said she found it difficult to keep up with me because just about the time she had settled into doing things "my way" I changed it.  I have always felt that whatever I was doing was the ONLY way to do it.  Whereas the pursuit of happiness is innate, I believe I innocently acquired this need to be right.  It was given to me by my family, my community, society, and culture.  I learned it very well.

Right and wrong and the importance of recognizing which is which was made clear to me from a very early age.  As a young child, I was a free spirit, especially in regards to my relationship with horses.  I hung out with them in the pasture.  I clambered onto their backs steering with my weight and tugs on their mane.  I fell asleep to the rhythmic walk of my horse on the way home after a long journey into the hills of what is now the Rancho San Antonio Preserve, and was completely comfortable emoting in the moment when with them.  I was Mowgli of Los Altos Hills.  This went on until the day my mother determined it was time for me to take lessons when I was about eight years old.  I was hauled off to an arena where a few other young children around my age were gathered.  We were all assigned a horse; mine was Charlie.  He was older and slow.  He was compliant and someone to whom I could easily to convey an idea such as "whoa" without ever speaking a word or even touching the reins.  Our teacher was an older man, gruff and "right".  We were intrinsically "wrong" and he set out to prove this to us all.  Somehow I became his greatest challenge, though.  My mother was asked to bring me to him privately so he could focus entirely on me. 

I remember the day so vividly, it is hard to believe this happened 45 years ago.  I was in the arena, but this time I was not riding Charlie.  My teacher had given me a spirited dapple grey mare and she was not interested in pleasing me.  I could do none of the tasks my teacher asked of me and so burst into tears at last, fully aware that I was "wrong".  As I sat sobbing in the saddle, my teacher, who was on his own steed, rode right up to me and swatted me on my butt.  I suppose I was shocked, really.  I probably stopped crying and "bucked up', as the old saying goes.  He was "right", after all.  Teachers in my era were always right, as were the police, all parents, anyone older than I, including my contemporaries.  My sisters were incredibly right. 

Since then, I have spent my entire life seeking the rightest of the rightest.  Fortunately, each new mentor has been righter than the last.  This quest had "collapse" or "implode" written all over it, though.  It is contrary to the concept of "right" to believe there is an ever better "right".  That implies that there is no end and the concept of something being right includes an end.  I have yet to find the right answer or an end.  At first glance it looks like it might be comforting to find the right answers and an end, but that is misleading.  There is only one reason I have discovered for living and that is the delight of a moment that inspires yet another; the aliveness of now that leads one into the next now and the next.  I have found that it is the infinite choices of life yet to be realized in our present moment that call us forward and when this is placed next to the pursuit of "right" there is a despair revealed in that pursuit. 

I appreciate the solidarity of horses.  In the face of much disparity throughout the world in the way they are handled by humans, I have observed horses exhibit undeniable presence and an interminable focus upon promising opportunities for improved living. In small mud holes of corrals, confinement alone in stalls with grilled windows, with sore backs and stiff over-worked hocks or knees, you name it and horses still find in their soul a desire to play.  

When I consider that there is really no point to all I do, no right answer, no ending or prize for all my busy-ness, I have at once a thought that perhaps I should just lie down, curl up and die, and the thought that maybe, just maybe, I am at last on the verge of the State of Play.  Perhaps, then, what lies between me and the State of Play is the ability to let go of all that is right and wrong. I am greatful for all my ideas, and yet it is when I enter the presence of a horse that I am at once reminded of what is happening right now, and given the opportunity to allow myself to just feel without judgement.   Like a horse, I aspire to allow each moment to blossom into the next, to flow together like water, to breathe like the wind as it swirls around our planet, to crumble and heave like the earth in its eternal shifting, to swing in orbit with all other moments at once repetitive and unique, chaotic and complete, rhythmic and free. I aspire to play.

Here's Me Dreaming...

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