01 places i've been

A Heroines Journey

I. The Fall of the Hero, The Return of the Heroine 

When I first left on this journey, I never realized how long I’d be gone for. It’s been 3 years since I’ve shared my voice here, 3 years since I've performed with my beloved horses, and 5 years since I’ve taught a clinic.

My absence may have gone unnoticed to most of you; afterall, the posts kept rolling out here, adapted from my longer form teachings and writings over the years. The way “Mustang Maddy” withered and died back to the soil was never shown– she stayed alive here on the internet, frozen in the summer of her bloom. 

Now I am ready to return, but not as the “Mustang Maddy” you once knew; for she has died back to the soil, composted, and given birth to something new, someone you may no longer recognize.  

And so to re-introduce myself in this space, because I cannot tell you who I am - for that is not for me to say- let me tell you of some of the places I have been.

My story begins where it was thought to have ended.

It is about what happens after what our culture tells us is “success.” 

It is about what happens after the medal is won, the crowd claps, the goal is achieved, the hero comes out “on top.”

It is the story of what happens after the happy-ever-after.

It is not the Hero’s Journey, the story so common in our culture, found anywhere from Hollywood to marketing how-to’s: The story of someone who defeats, conquers, overcomes, and rises above against all odds. 

This is not that story. 

This story is about the death of the hero and the birth of the heroine. 

This is a story about the leaving behind of the linear, conquering, world saving trajectory and the entering of the spiraling and folding back on itself, feral path, the deep surrender until you bow so low to a dragon you’re unsure if you’ll come out with your head intact, the relinquishment of trying to “save the world” and instead learning to live more beautifully in the world we have. 

This is a story about the leaving behind of the intensely individualistic and human-centric journey we celebrate and instead the story about not being able to do it on your own, about unlikely helpers, both human and animal. 

This is a story about the great unraveling in a culture that tells us to hold it all together. I had spent the first 23 years of my life holding it all together, but in the next 6 years I would let myself fall apart, unraveling, shattering into pieces, and descending into the murky depths and swampland of my soul, unsure if I would make it out alive but also knowing I had no choice but to descend if I wanted to live. 

And so, this story does not begin with a call to adventure but with a fall from grace, when something goes wrong that causes us to lose our way. When we open the door we were told never to open, when everything goes black and you find yourself in the middle of a dark forest and lose sight of which way is home. 

And circling in this dark wood, even though I had no idea where I was headed and found myself formless and suspended in the murky waters caught somewhere between life and death, after the old story had died but the new story had not yet appeared, some mysterious force within me carried on, following an invisible thread and knowing where to go even when I couldn’t see a path forwards myself, like a salmon who somehow knows to keep swimming 2,000 miles to their place of birth to spawn and lay eggs themselves and keep the great wheel of life forever turning, turning, turning. 

May this small sharing of my story become another tiny trail on the map for someone who finds themselves in similar territory. May it offer a small light to you, reader, in the time of darkness, may it be one small stone on the bridge that returns you to the land of the living.

May it be a reminder that the tomb becomes the womb, that we can die a thousand deaths and live to tell the tale, and in fact this dying to the many illusions of who we thought ourselves to be is the price we pay for a life truly lived. 

II. Beginnings 

I was born in the pre-dawn darkness at the time of the year when the trees had shed all their leaves, flowers had died back to the soil which birthed them, when fox had dug her den and squirrel had collected his nuts to survive the fallow times that lie ahead, when the deer were engaged in the timeless dance with two-legged predators, when the dying Sun led the green beings into the underworld once again, when the late summer grass was now covered in a blanket of freezing tears from Demeter each morning as she mourned for her daughter, Persephone, who was also taken to the underworld once again. It was this time of great turning, dying, thinning of veils, and mourning in which I came into this world. 

When I left the warmth of my mother’s womb and the symphony of her heart beat, I think something in me wanted to go back. The glare of fluorescent lights and beings dressed in blue were too foreign, too cold, too bright, too strange. In my turning and writhing about and wanting to turn back around, my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck until my face turned as blue as the doctor's medical gown. 

But these strange new hands freed me and air rushed into my lungs, creating my first sound, the wailing of grief for having lost the womb that was my home and “its proximity to the Gods and the drumbeat of my mothers heart” in the words of Martín Prechtel. 

This grief was turned to song in the first very sound that echoed from my lungs and from someplace deep inside my own beating heart. I was placed in the cradle of my mother’s arms, and I had crossed the threshold into this new world to which there was no turning back. A lifetime of teachings lay before me now of how to get better and more beautiful at the singing of the song of grief, turning grief into praise, as Martín so eloquently speaks to. 

* * * * *

I was a particularly sensitive child. The world was overstimulating to me–the lights too bright, the cars too fast, the noises too loud. Many sensitives can relate to that feeling: like we are going through life with the volume dialed all the way up. 

Horses became my refuge, my special place where the world fell quiet, like the sanctuary of early mornings when you wake up to find the ground is covered in a silent and muffling blanket of snow for the first time or like diving into water and finding yourself submerged, suspended, and soundless. Everything disappears, you lose sense of time, you merge with another being. This is how horses felt for me. 

The Horse took me back into her own womb, and there I was, weightless, and being rocked to the drumbeat of their 8 lb hearts and their quiet language, a symphony with no sound– just flicking ears, blinking eyes, and skin quivers. 

* * * * *

As I grew, I found horses–even wild ones– to be more predictable than human beings. Human interactions felt overwhelming to me. I never knew what to say or when to say it, when to laugh at a joke or be serious, how much eye contact to hold, and the list goes on and on. It was exhausting to keep up with the rules; especially being conditioned as female with all of the conflicting messages (ie “be thin, but not too thin, don’t be a nerd but stop acting like a dumb blonde, don't be a prude but also don’t be a whore, wear make-up, but make it look natural”). With horses– especially after their initial tests and trials gave way to the connection I’d been seeking– the world just made more sense to me. Relationships with them felt so easy. I could be who I was and they could be who they were. 

Horses didn’t have masks. They felt how they felt and would let you know through a widening of the eye, a tightening of the muscle, or the swish of a tail. They gave you an honest mirror, one that wasn’t so full of warps like the mirrors in a funhouse at a carnival. There was a certain level of trust and grounded-ness in my relationships with horses that came easily and honestly. 

Later on in my journey with horses, they began to teach me more about survival instincts and trauma, and how that trauma lives in our body and can be released. They also showed me what I needed to give to myself for my own healing. It was what they were telling me they needed, too: Deep emotional attunement, validation and response to those emotions, and shared language that could tell me “no” and have choice, thereby empowering them. 

Horses gave me a career and community and a lens through which to see the world, to make sense of it. They gave me a sense of purpose and connection. 

Horses tethered me to this world. Like an umbilical cord. They had kept me alive my whole life, feeding me from their own bodies and giving me air to breathe. Which is why, when that cord seemed to have been severed, I was left disoriented, falling into an abyss with no one to catch me, not even them... 

III. The Crack

But maybe the ground shaking and falling out from beneath me was really the contractions that were beginning to prepare me for my own birth. Maybe when it felt like I was being smashed to pieces, that was really the feeling of being pushed and squeezed out of a birth canal that seemed impassible. And what led to the severing of the umbilical cord between myself and the Horse? 

From the outside, my life appeared perfect. I had just taken a championship title at Mustang Magic, one of the most elite competitions of the Extreme Mustang Makeovers realm. I had my face plastered on 3 different magazines. My online videos had racked up over 15 million views. I was performing at sold out shows. I had people from all over the world wanting me to host me to teach clinics and workshops, from Australia to Dubai. 

Wasn’t this what I’d always wanted? I thought I should feel happy and fulfilled. Other people certainly thought I should be, too. People told me how lucky I was. After all, I was living the dream. 

So I tried to convince myself everything was fine. But on the inside, there was no escaping it: I was dying. 

There were multiple parts of me that motivated me to do the work with horses that I did. And while there were really beautiful, soul-level authentic parts of me who were engaged with it, there were also extremely wounded parts of me engaged with it as well.

“The sprouting tree of my career did not have its roots dug into the deeper desires of soul.” Bill Plotkins, Soulcraft

One of those wounded parts of me was rooted in toxic shame. I had so much toxic shame that deep down, I secretly believed I was evil. Sometimes I believed I was so bad that I wasn’t even deserving of being alive. But with horses, the world seemed to love me. I earned admiration and respect that offset the voice telling me how bad I was. 

But because of this disparity, it almost made things worse... If only they really knew who you were, how terrible and awful and vile you are, that small voice in my head whispered. I felt like a fake, an imposter because the way I saw myself didn’t match with the ways in which others saw me. So I became addicted to feeling this sense of celebration and belonging while at the same time trying to scrub myself clean of all my deficiencies, of all my brokenness, all my badness to make myself worthy of it. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed my skin until I bled. 

The scrubbing was in my constant performing and eyes that were always searching for the next big thing, the big special thing I could do to try to scrub away my stink of badness. It was an exhausting act. Whenever I would achieve one of these feats, the audience would clap and I would be content for a moment, and then I was on to searching for the next thing, because this thing hadn’t quite worked to scrub me clean. Because I believed I was such an evil, awful, flawed person I thought I needed to do good things to offset my badness. This left me in perpetual motion (flight reaction) and drove my perfectionistic behavior as I tried to conflate who I was at my core with what I achieved.

Thanks to Dr. Ingrid Clayton for bringing words to this pattern–and similarly to what she has shared, I am proud of some of what came from that, but it also feels so devastating to see the part of me that was doing that because she genuinely believed she was stupid, evil, horribly bad, and unlovable. This is devastating. 

Alas, though, it wasn’t sustainable. I was starting to crack under the pressure and walked around bleeding from the way I’d rubbed my skin raw. My original love for horses was stressed and tainted by this never ending chase to be perfect, to clean away my badness. No longer were horses my sanctuary; they had become the house that held all of my pain. 

* * * * *

Another wounding inside of me that joined my dance with horses was also growing wider, and this was the part of me that, like so many of us, had to slice parts of myself off in a kind of great splitting and fragmentation in order to exist in this culture. 

Initially, I found freedom with horses in the sense that I could be all of myself with them. All parts of who I was seemed to find expression and acceptance with them and horses gave me a home in that way. 

But where horses had once offered me a taste of freedom and a place to fully be myself, as my business grew I felt increasingly chained by them, or my work with them, or more specifically, the parts of my identity that had formed in relation to my work with horses. 

I remember one night, alone at home, when this feeling all came to a head. I was writhing around on the floor in pain and in a fit of rage bubbling up from some primal place deep inside of me, I threw something at the wall. I can’t remember what I threw, but I do remember what I threw it at– a photo of me, of my face on the front of a magazine cover, held there in a glass frame that my dad had hung on the wall. And watched it shatter. 

This was the beginning of my own shattering, my own unraveling, my escape from the box that had been built for me. Through my work with horses, it felt like I had been whittled down to a 1 dimensional cardboard cutout of who I really was. I had contorted myself into something palatable for people, something easily digestible. There was no room for full self expression here, no room for all the parts of me; only the ones that were pretty, pleasing, and polite. 

And so when the people clapped, I knew they weren’t clapping for me, but for my performance. Everyone saw me but no one saw me. I believe that we will only trust in welcome and belonging to the degree that we let our true selves be known, and who I really was was in hiding, even from myself most of the time as I tried to fit myself into a box.

I was suffocating while wearing pearls, red lipstick, and a smile, trying to convince myself I wasn’t dying inside. With a pretty picture, I tried to make it all look good to convince myself it was good. But inside of me was a silent scream, desperate to escape the prison I found myself in. I don't say I had built my own prison, because the prison had been built for me, and I had walked right in–because when all you’ve ever known is a prison, it looks a lot like home. 

“A woman who is starved for her real soul-life may look cleaned up and combed on the outside, but on the inside she is filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty mouths.” -Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With Wolves 

This moment of shattering is the moment something inside of me cracked, that couldn’t live a moment longer in the cage that was killing her. But the cost of breaking free, widening my very narrow identity, making space for all the parts of me that had been punished and suppressed for so long, and finding wholeness did mean I was first left broken into pieces. Over the next few years the underworld would become my home and like Demeter’s cave of endless tears these tears would dissolve the ice encasing my soul. I would plunge down into the depths, into the swamplands of my soul, retrieving lost parts of myself and putting myself back together again. 

And it would be a while before I realized that in unburying these lost parts of myself and piecing myself back together again, I would also be doing some small part in piecing the Goddess back together again, the Goddess who could not be kept buried. 

* * * * *

These wounded parts of me that became so entangled with horses and whose wounds were widened by my work with them were just a few of the layers that eventually led to the chord between us severing. In the outer world, in the context of western culture, the things I was experiencing were diagnosed as: severe burnout, PTSD, C-PTSD, Major Depressive Disorder, and Bipolar Disorder. 

I found myself in a confusing place, where I couldn’t bear to be around my beloved horses anymore and didn’t understand where that repulsion came from at the time. It just felt like the door between us had slammed shut in my face and I was left shivering on the front porch with nowhere else to call home. Horses became unreachable. This brought up so much pain and grief that merely the act of feeding my horses left me trembling with tears. I was left banging my head against this door between us until I realized that wouldn’t make it re-open, so eventually began the painful process of grieving, letting go, and surrendering to the possibility that horses may no longer be a part of my life anymore. 

With the severing of this chord, I was cut off from the life force energy that had originally fueled my work and connection with horses. This left me with no option but to drastically reduce the size and scale of my business, for reasons no one really understood. I went from working with a team of 5 other women at one point to now just 1. I stopped traveling across the country teaching and performing, I stopped making new online training videos, I shut down our store. I even turned down an invitation to compete at Road to the Horse, a world renown and invitation only colt starting competition, which had been one of my biggest dreams when I started this career. I grappled with the voices criticizing this perceived de-growth saying, you're ruining your career and you’re wasting your talent or you’ll never be good at anything else. But I did it anyway, because all of this didn’t feel like much of a choice; it felt like I had no other option. I had to do it to save my own life. 

(This great pause was also made possible by the online school I created with the help of Baylee & Cassie, The Horse-Human Connection Academy; a special thanks to our students and to Cassie and Baylee for keeping things running smoothly so that I could take such a healing pause and still be able to get my physical needs met while doing so). 

During this period, I took time away from horses and discovered parts of myself that my life hadn’t made room for. The more that I recovered these lost parts of who I was, the more horses once again beckoned to me. Even when they weren’t available to me or as physically present in my life as before, I realized later that they were still guiding me in their absence. It’s kind of like in faerie tales, when the guide appears in your time of need but before they will help you, they present you with an impossible task, like sorting through grain in the story of Psyche and Eros or some versions of Cinderella, when the mother-figure guide comes and drops a bag of seeds that you have to sort through before midnight, to sort through who you are and who you are not, to disentangle yourself from the enmeshment with parents or over-culture, only I was sorting through shards of glass of who I was. 

“Until we are cut to pieces by life trying to follow the one thing we love, we will never leave the world of touching a little of everything, instead of being one of those particular things in the immense whole that is worth touching.” 

“When we are removed from what we love, we become singers of grief and weavers of elegant deception. Appearing to mutate and become smaller in form to survive the hardship of absence, as when Tall Boy becomes hummingbird, actually says that the beloved is gradually forced into its true, original nature, a nature we do not at first always recognize.” 

“The only we way we survive… is for us to be broken down into small, common pieces and reassembled as one small, solid thing by the shiny thing we were following with our heart’s desire.” 

-Martín Prechtel, Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun 

“‘[According to Meade], To info our way back, the post-heroic protagonist must stay constant to what he or she really loves and endure long and difficult labours without the aid of magical interventions. Such are the soulful quests of the second half of life,’ mead suggests: ‘they takes us through the wilderness that lies beyond ‘happily ever after’ to a place of strong, compassionate, maturity where we have found our calling and have learned to be true to what really matters in life rather than obey the dictates of others or the voices of our egos telling us how we ought to behave.’” 

-Sharron Blackie, The Enchanted Life 

 IV. In Through the Crack Swims the Salmon  

Photo by Kelly Moody

When I had been pushed out of the Mother Horse’s womb, when the umbilical cord had been cut, my world had been turned upside down. All the rules seemed to change. What had worked before didn’t work here. I found myself in a new and a strange world wobbling and off balance, having to re-learn how to walk again. Perhaps the world I was in wasn’t so new, I was just seeing it with new eyes. 

Here’s the thing about shattering: as you piece yourself back together again, the pieces can never fit back into the same small shape they once were. 

For one, some of the pieces you realize were never yours to begin with. You have to let those go. With each piece you let go of, the pieces that were never really yours, you must grieve. If not for losing the pieces themselves, then for the way you carried them around thinking they were you, the way they kept you from being you, the way they left gashes in your skin, the way they left wounds in others’ skin.

For two, somehow you can never get all the pieces to fit so tight and tidy as before which is a good thing. You find yourself with a widened identity, one that doesn’t fit together so neatly.

In through the cracks swims, in the words of Francis Weller, the “shimmer of a salmon gliding under the surface of the water, the startling arc of the swift, the wonder of Mozart, and the sheer beauty of the sunrise.”

And then your edges begin to blur. Your identity becomes permeable, receptive, exchangeable, like a pond surfaces Francis has said, rather than rigid glass. 

“I’ve been circling the earth for a thousand years and I am still not sure if I am a falcon, a storm, or a great song.” -Rilke 

You find your identity widening, and in that, your circle of care begins to widen. And now, with a bigger lap, you are able to hold so much more of not just your pain, but the collective pain, of others pain. With roots dug deeper into the Earth, you are able to rise up and hold more in your branches. And those branches make fruit that nourishes the land that nourished you. 

This is what happens when we begin the work of recovering Soul in our own personal lives. And by recovering Soul in our own personal lives, we recover the Soul of the world, helping to piece Her back together again. Through this process, we move from Self-centered to Soul-centered, Francis says, which is when we move from adolescence into adulthood, initiated into a broader sense of identity than just “my, me, i.” Crossing this threshold from adolescence and self-centeredness into adulthood, soul-centric and fully ripened human beings involves the crossing of a threshold. Francis describes it this way:

“Questions on this side of the gate are: “Am I good enough? Do I belong here? Am I lovable? Am I smart enough? Do I have anything to offer? Ninety-nine percent of us are on this side of the gate, circulating around these questions. All of us have caught glimpses of the other side of the gate. There, the questions are, “How are the children doing? How is the community fairing? Are the salmon coming back? The questions are no longer self-referencing.” -Francis Weller

Most of our culture is stuck in adolescence, stuck on the first side of the gate. I can assure you I still find myself here often; but I’ve found myself spending more time on the other side lately. 

And, so, this is how I found myself becoming the one who slows down, who no longer looks away. This is how I found myself pulling over on the side of the road, weeping for a mother deer just hit so hard by a car that her unborn babies flung out of her womb and onto the asphalt. This is how I found myself knocking on our neighboring rancher’s door and asking if I could gather the dead bodies of the prairie dogs he just shot, and came across a half dead matriarch slowly dying in the baking sun, unable to climb back into her den, never to return to her pups, her sisters, her lover. This is how I found myself grieving over the Colorado River, the river that has not reached the ocean in years and is predicted to completely dry up in the next few years–The river that is my watershed.

Once you really see the horrors of this world, you can never close your eyes again. The grocery store becomes a place of grief and anxiety and flushing the toilet full of clean water, something we learned to do as toddlers, suddenly feels inexplicably wrong. 

I found myself confronting perhaps the very deepest source of shame I felt, that went beyond the personal wounding and into territory of collective wounding. I confronted the part of me that believed I was terrible because I was a human, the belief that human beings are ruining this world, are a “cancer to the earth.” Even the phrase, “leave no trace,” echoes this belief, that human disturbance is only harmful and that we should leave no trace of our existence. That it is impossible for us to live in a good way, a reciprocal way, here on Earth, that we can only make choices around the lesser of two evils. 

But why on earth would humans be the only species who cannot live in reciprocity with the Earth? I began unpacking these beliefs and this layer of shame and found that humans are not innately harmful, it’s this culture that is–This culture that has declared a war on the Earth, on original peoples of place, and on life itself. There are humans who have been living in reciprocity on this Earth for time immemorial, who are still trying despite the horrors of colonization and their life-ways being made illegal.. not to say mistakes aren’t made, but they are properly digested and lessons are learned… it’s the process of colonization that has stripped us all of those life-ways.

And so this is how I found myself embarking on another journey, determined to find another path of what it means to be human in this world, one that isn’t simply about choosing between two lesser evils (can we really call choosing between two poisons a choice?), but one that is beneficial, experiencing what it’s like to be a human who reciprocates with the earth, who is needed as a keystone species, whose disturbances can be helpful and not just harmful,  re-membering who I am as inextricable from the land that birthed me, remembering the olde ways of my own ancestors before colonization. 

I learned how to make fire with no matches, how to track coyotes and learn their stories, how to build shelter from the oh-so-generous fern. 

I experienced healing in the ways my hands dug up roots to eat from the soil beneath my feet, and in one motion, both cultivated roots for me to eat and replanted them in ways the plants couldn’t do on their own. I learned what it felt like in my body to have these moments of reciprocity, of me having the chance to be in reciprocal relationship with the Earth, to feed those who feed me. To not just say thank you, but show it. 

I learned that I was never separate from nature to begin with, that even the word “wild” implies such a thing is possible, that such a line can be drawn. And that this illusion of separation, not knowing the beings offering themselves to us as food and not knowing where our water really comes from is the source of so much harm in this world. 

I learned about all the gifts endowed to humans through the Earth Mother and all of our more-than-human-kin, and how when we shape clay into pots, weave willow into baskets, and tan and smoke and sew animal skins into clothes, we weave ourselves back into the web of this life.

And nature mirrored back to me the sacred death-life-rebirth cycle that was happening within my own soul. I found myself being initiated into sacred Death mysteries and in doing so, found myself more and more alive. Animals came into my life teaching me about the gift of life and the preciousness of death, and helped me build the capacity to stop looking away, to give thanks to those who give their lives so that we may live. 

Through this journey, I began to see not only the pain of this world but the beauty of it, the way grief and gratitude become twins dancing together, the way gratitude and beauty become not some frivolous extracurricular thing but an absolute necessity to help you survive the pain of this world.

I marveled at the flowers of grass for the first time, walking through fields I had walked through for years. I began listening to the symphony of birdsong each morning and got to know Magpie more intimately than I’d ever imagined possible. I learned about the Beaver family living in the creek that runs through our lower pasture. I began to experience the world I had been a part of in a completely new way as my eyes opened to all the beauty and pain I’d been previously blind to.

In all of this, I began to put a soothing balm on the Original Wound coming from this split from our Mother, who nourishes us, shelters us, clothes us, and holds us. I brought the shadow into the light, realizing how much harm this disconnection causes – to both Her and to ourselves. 

As I processed this Original Wound, confronted with difficult honesty all the ways I had been taking and not being in reciprocity, as I grieved over the truly sustainable life-ways that have been punished, taken, lost, and beaten out of peoples trying to live in reciprocal ways, this all impacted my relationship with horses. 

I realized that the shame I’d been carrying around this wounding had been coloring my work with horses. Another layer of my “burnout”, or another piece leading to the severance of the chord between us was the way I had put so much pressure on myself to be Good, to be The Most Ethical. 

For a while, I truly believed I had only brought horses harm and believed my entire work with them was a lie. I felt shame for haltering a horse and putting the slightest bit of pressure on them. I found myself in another prison, but this time one made of plastic clickers, targets, food rewards, science, and ethics, all the time whipping myself. I came to think that even training or riding horses was bad (because, leave no trace). 

But as I shone light on the true source of this shame, it wasn’t coming from the ways I was being in connection with horses, but the ways I was in relationship with the Earth. The shame I felt around training horses and the impossible standards of Goodness I set for myself was really a displacement of the deeper shame I felt for the ways I had unconsciously been contributing to harming the earth, doing my own extracting and exploitation of both peoples + place, even myself turned into a product on a shelf…and the belief I’d absorbed through various cultural and religious narratives that as a human, I was inherently bad. 

But as I began healing and embodying my connection to land and taking responsibility for ways I had been causing harm and trying to make amends, as I shone light on the darkness, it began to loosen its grip on me. And the more I learned about what it means to be fully human, the more I wove myself into the tapestry of life with my more-than-human kin surrounding me, the more I could show up fully in the horse-human connection. And once again, horses began to beckon to me. 

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

Mary Oliver

Part V. Where I Find Myself 

I thought Horse had deserted me, but when I began learning how to walk on wobbly legs and my eyes fully opened to take in this world, with all its glory and all its horrors, there she was. There she was, standing ever so patiently, waiting for me to press my little muzzle to her warm udder so she could nourish my tired body with her milk that flowed like rivers. 

And so, even though there is so so much more to this story, so many more layers of pain and healing and of characters and animal helpers to speak of– the the salmon who taught me about what it means to love life so deeply you swim 2,000 miles to create more of it, a white goat who gave his life for me, a mother deer and her unborn twins, the palomino stallion who escaped, and a turkey named White Dawn Youth– it is here I will bring this initial brief telling of my story to a close for now and hope that it was not to brief, for there is so much I’ve left out. I hope in the future to tell more of it, but it is not quite ready to be told. For now, it is all still held closely to my heart. 

In this present moment, I cannot tell you the journey is over, and now here I am, standing in front of you “healed”-- but I can say I am more whole than the last time you saw me, and for me healing was never the “goal,” wholeness was. This journey is a spiral that folds back on itself and not a linear path leading to some ultimate and final destination. The so-called depression may return, the underworld and belly of the Dark Goddess may once again open her mouth wide and pull me under to keep shaping me. But I am now familiar with this territory, I have been there and survived it several times. May I die and be reborn several more times in this lifetime. And may I always remember that the Horse is with me, guiding me. 

* * * * *

Now that I’m back, I’ve received the question: “So, what’s next?” I used to have a 5 year plan, fists clenched tightly around a predetermined map of my life. I don’t care to live that way anymore. I don’t know what’s “next,” I am just following the thread, being present with the way my life is unfolding, trying to understand my small part in the healing of this burning world during a time of great ecocide and genocide, staying in touch with my grief and learning to drink my tears. Trying to do my part in recovering Soul, so that, in the words of Martin Prechtel, the ocean doesn’t have to come to shore to search for us and keep our watery souls from freezing into ice.

I am excited to find myself feeling the pull to re-engage with horses & my work here, integrating all the lessons I’ve learned on this journey over the past several years.. I don’t know exactly how this is going to go. I don’t have a clear cut plan. I do know I want to begin tending more in-person relationships with people and their horses, away from screens. 

I am craving working with folks one-on-one, nurturing longer term relationships than, for example, “a weekend warrior” type of clinic. I want to be able to track students' journeys with their horses over time, to be apart of their process and be there when the territory feels utterly alone and inpassable. Working one-on-one feels connective and intuitive, which is what I am craving right now, versus creating full courses and hours of curriculum; Just feeling what’s needed moment to moment, and co-creating with my students and their horses.

I want to work with others who want to be moved by the Horse, whose souls feel ripe for the journey they are beckoning us to go on so that it is not just a focus on what we can teach the horse but what the horse has to teach us. I am also craving the chance to build community locally and share my gifts with my immediate community. I used to think being “successful” meant going “big” and leaving home, but now I see the importance of staying put, building roots, and bringing our gifts back to our community. So I’ll be announcing more opportunities for this kind of work together soon. 

I am also looking forward to sharing more in a new way– full of stories and musings on the magick of the horse-human connection and the ecosystem surrounding it and in that question, asking what it means to be fully human and how horses beckon us into that journey. More on this soon. 

Thank you all for being here, for reading, and hearing my story.