Love is about bottomless empathy, born our of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.  And this why love, as I understand it, is always specific.  Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being.  Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.  When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting.  But when you go our and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.  And who knows what might happen to you then?

Jonathan Franzen. “Liking is for Cowards.  Go for What Hurts,” New York Times, Sunday, May 29, 2011.

There is nothing “just” about real animals.  They are the doorway, the path to finding out about love. They help to unblock the sticky places, because with them, there is no resistance.  They don’t extrapolate, they don’t hold onto historic, crusty ideas about us.  They are just here, now.

Even with my horse, Amadeo and the many years of stuff between us – a history of deeply imperfect communication – it isn’t Deo who is holding the anthology of woes.  It is me.  The proof of that was that when I came back from working with Mark Rashid, with my new understanding of softness and breath, Deo opened to it all as if we had just met, as if it was all possible.  No resistance, no baggage.

Since the workshop with Mark Rashid, I have been breathing.  It is becoming a reminder to stay connected to now, to myself.  When I feel myself tighten, I use that as a cue to breathe.  I have been breathing my whole life, but something about that day when Mark asked me to breathe in rhythm with the horse’s walk has stayed with me, put down roots and is blooming out into all of the parts of my life.

Amadeo noticed.  Today when I rode him for the first time in a week, I started with the breath.  I let it sluice down the reins into the contact with him, and used it to connect the inside of me with the inside of him.  I have struggled with Deo’s forwardness, with getting him to move off easily and softly.  Not today.  His walk was fluid, and when I whispered go with my leg, he sprang forward.

All the transitions were there.  Easily.  Walk to trot to walk to trot to canter, to halt.  No fight, no hesitation.  He was jazzy, even a little wild, so I kept coming back to breathing, steadying myself, steadying him. He felt a lot like the photo above of him with his trainer Brandi.

I don’t know why we get things when we do.  Well, actually I do.  Abraham says that we cannot receive something that we want until we are a vibrational match to that thing.  To be a vibrational match means that we are emotionally lined up with it, that we are open to it without doubt.  That is what happened to me in Savannah.  I knew that this teacher was going to unlock some things for me that I had been looking for.  And that is what happened.