A HORSE CAN TEACH YOU THE ART OF LIVING

By Ed Conley

Many of us, old or young, don’t know who we are or what we really want to do. Kimberly Brown, a Kenston Forest 10^th grader, said she “feels blessed” that she sits in the saddle of life at this early age knowing what she wants to do while most young people today are “all muddled up.”

So what happened? Why is Kimberly riding life tall and straight in the saddle? Perhaps it started “when I was growing up,” she said as we settled down on my deck to talk. “We had cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, everything you could image. I got a rabbit and it was my full responsibility. I had to do everything, brush it, feed it.” It sounds like it was like growing up on a farm, I added, but what about the horses? “Across the road was a horse farm and that’s where I started riding Skippy…I loped for the first time on my first lesson,” she said proudly. “I was six. She was a tall thing.” (But to a six year-old everything is tall, I thought)

Now, years later, Kimberly rides Henry, “He’s a big time show horse. He can win some stuff!” Kimberly said she used to rim her room with ribbons she’d won but now, out of space, she just hangs pictures of her shows on the wall.

I stopped writing this story here. This is not what I wanted to discover and share with you, the reader. This interview was not about awards, showing her horse in competition from here to Ohio, or the long hours she put into her horses. No, there is something deeper here. Lets find it, I thought. This story is also about us and our high fence between our thinking mind and our feeling body. This is a story about a girl who is in harmony with herself and animals on a feeling level. Where others are lost, she has found something, something healing. But what did she find? So I left my conventional writing and got to the real point.)

“Are you a horse whisperer?” I asked her, anxious to get to what was happening on the inside with her and horses. Not sure how to answer, as now we were getting a little outside the normal boundaries of horse talk. “I don’t think so…I’m not a fan of horses. It’s just my life. It’s what I do. Go to the barn everyday, feed ‘em, clean the stalls. Sometimes it gets so hot and I wonder why I’m doing this, but I go back everyday.” Now here was something, I thought. Not a fan of horses. It’s what I do….

Are you riding the horse, or is the horse riding you? I brought up an R.W. Emerson quote: “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” We talked about my cat and how I’m at its beck and meow.

“Someday I question that…We try to ride horses.” She was not sure how to answer. But there was something coming out. I could feel we were on the right track. We continued. She began to talk about her mother, Holly Brown, and her passion for animal therapy, first with dogs and cats and now with horses. Go to www.heartlandhorseheroes.org to find out more. We talked about how older people depend on their pets to keep them interested in life. “they love animals as their companions and their best friends.”

What is healing about animals? I asked.“I don’t know,” she said, thinking. “They seem so caring and kind. They give you everything they have, like unconditional love. You don’t see that with most people.”

Have you seen Avatar, I suddenly asked (my favorite movie and one in which I see a great healing message to man) It’s all about bonding with the earth and its animals, how you feel what your horse is feeling and your feeling connection with all life. In the movie the horse is an extension of the rider’s being. (But now I was doing the talking.)

She picked up the thread. “You can really feel what the horse is feeling when you ride it. You can feel it!” she emphasized. “If you are nervous then the horse gets nervous. He will give you visual hints how he feeling. If you put everything together you can feel what (animals) feel.” She was describing how the rider and horse reflected each other’s feelings.

Now I switched topics. Are you going to college? What do you want to study? “Psychology,” she said with a smile. “I want to know how people think. I would love to do animal therapy with people.” We talked about how this desire of her maturing intellect to know more about the interior world was now rising out of her body/mind relationship with her horse.

I held my two palms apart. Most people are like this, waving the hands at each other. The mind is one hand, the body is the other, and neither knows what the other is doing, and usually they fight each other. I brought my hands together and made them wrestle. But you bring your hands together like this. I brought my hands together like praying hands. She smiled and nodded.

Now I found myself making a huge leap. Let’s see if she could follow. Are you familiar with the Greek mythic figure called the Centaur? It’s half man and half horse. Her face smiled in recognition. Well, you are a Centaur. You bonded with animals when you were a child, when the window was open. If you started riding now you probably wouldn’t have the ability to bond with animals because that stage specific window would have been closed long ago.

Now we began talking about how she feels feeling. “I always try to feel one thing at a time. It’s pretty simple. You can move on from there.” Is your mind quiet, I asked.? “When I’m alone or bored my mind just wanders. But when I’m on the horse, I’m REALLY focused on how he’s acting and trying to get him to focus…yes, I’m more focused on the horse,” she said as she seeing something she had not noticed before.

Look, I said, the horse is body, you are mind. When you get on the horse, the horse brings your mind down from the sky and grounds it in the greater feeling body, in this present moment.” I told her the story about the Zen master who when asked by his student how he got enlightened, he said, “By watching my cat.” Kimberly really lit up with that one. She knew exactly what I was saying. So your horse is the master teacher of the art of living and you the student, I said, throwing out a metaphor to bait her mind. She then explained how she learned how to master life by being a student to her horse.

“In the show you’ve got to feel what you want to feel. You must feel confident, feel you can rule the world. And if you don’t, the horse knows and shows that feeling back to you” Kimberly was really lighting up to this new way of seeing what her horse is doing for her.

Yes, I said, suddenly realizing a new metaphor for what the horse was. Your horse is a bio-feedback machine! Since she was going into psychology, I explained what bio-feedback technology was and how it helped people get in touch with their feelings by showing them the connection between thinking and feeling as they were hooked into the machine. Picking up the thought and getting back on her show horse, “I learn to take the good feeling and leave the bad….because the horse will feed it back.” Showing the horse’s best qualities meant that Kimberly must show her best qualities as well. So who is really getting the trophy, I wondered.

She added that she like watching the body language of people. “I can picture what a person is feeling by their body language. I feel blessed” she added. I told her that she was not really special but just normal. Being a centaur is normal. It’s the rest of us who can’t feel our body/mind, who are at war with ourselves that are abnormal. As children we are centaurs, (I held my palms together) but then our hands separate. She liked that. For a teen it’s always good to feel normal.

Then she explained how she helps her friends come down to earth. “They come to me with their problems and I usually tell them ‘It wasn’t THAT bad.’ I tell them to dig deep, feel the situation, and go from there.” As her horse helps her, she helps them focus on their feeling ground of sanity. It sounded to me like Kimberly was herself a feedback machine.

But her best friends are horse people, she said. “Young people today have no idea what they want to do. Their minds are all jumbled up…except horse people. They know what they want to do. They are not looking for anything outside themselves” Ah, that was it, I thought. Feel the situation and go from there. Get grounded in your body/mind unity, then act. You’ll get a trophy!

“Animals know more than we think they do,” Kimberly said, taking us back to the animals and their wisdom. “They know how to live, take each day as it comes, and use it to be productive and happy….IT’S SO SIMPLE!”

I asked her if she had ever seen the old TV show Mr. Ed, about the talking wise horse and the human who was his student. She said she hadn’t. I lent her a copy of Avatar and she said she would watch it for sure.

A Flower in the corn fields

“Where is this church,” I asked myself as I plowed deeper and deeper in the soft green corn field of Dinwiddee County on Whitmore Road past Darvills. Was I on the right road? A thought that always plagues me when a few country miles seems like forever. Then, around a bend the church rose out of the fields and inside when I stopped the car I could hear singing.

It was the church’s 50th anniversary of their brick building and I was to take a portrait picture, just like the one they took 50 years ago when the church was built and their mortgage had 50 years to go. How many were inside, I wondered, thinking about the small congregations I was used to in some town churches.

Inside, standing at the back with my camera hung around my neck to identify me, I watched that remainder of their Sunday service. The sanctuary was packed. Standing room only. I marveled at the warmth and the energy in the room way out here in the middle of the corn fields. It was like a sea shell opening up and revealing the interior of the ocean, a spiritual ocean of fellowship and love. Here, every fish was at home.

Outside, I found the brick church sign to stand on and the minister told everyone to line along the side of the church. Their mortgage was paid off now and the building belonged to them. Generations rise and fall like seasonal plantings of corn and tobacco, but whether one is coming or going, the church holds them in its loving embrace. Here is the field that holds the soul. Here is the flower that calls down God’s grace. Here is the sweetness that is the Manson United Methodist Church.

Just Blackstone Folks by William Clark

The painting Watching Patterson is a painting of a Floyd Patterson figth in the late 50s as told to me by a freind. He told me how his family was the only family for miles around that own a T, V. After a hard day’s work people would vist them just to watch T. V, So many people would come that they would place the T. V. at a opening window so all could see. Not only the weekly fight but the new and local events. If the people that gather in my freind yard could only see today,s version of T.V.with over 200 stations, What in the word would they think .I guess a few of us can recall having onlly 3 station to watch.Each station was off the air by midnight.

The Sat and Fri. night fight was on every weekend along with The Mickey Mouse Show., Amercan Band,The John Daily Show The Lone Ranger and other weeky shows Our first T. V. was a used one with rabbitt ears .You had to move the ears all around to get a clear picture . The tuning and volume knob were small and had to be controlled by hand.(no remote)The picture was black and white and hard to see..We would race home from school to watch T. V.

Grandpa on the proch of a older man relaxing on his porch.Every house just about had a porch on it.The porch was like a additional room. It was a meeting place to greet freind and vistors. It was the wash room to clean laundry. Place to store firewood On the end of a hot day it was the gethering spot. Many tales was told on those old porches.and many pair of pant s torn on those old rusty nails..Those old porches a place to play on a rainy day and the family dog made home. I hope everyone had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. and all your love ones made it home safe. Until next week Blackstone and freinds take care of yourself and each other. May God bless each one of you

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