What If the Horse Came to See You?

What If the Horse Came to See You?

Morning usually starts before we have much to do with it.

The horses are already awake. Some are eating. Some are standing near the shelter doing very little. One mare is still half asleep, her lower lip soft, her weight shifted to one side.

From across the yard, another horse starts walking towards her. Nobody has called her over. The two horses have not been put together for any particular reason. She reaches the sleepy mare, stops beside her, and begins scratching her neck with her teeth. The other mare shifts slightly, offering another place.

After a while, they swap.

The horse who arrived stands still now while the other scratches her. Eventually they stop. One walks towards the hay. The other stays where she is.

That is all.

Their morning carries on.

I have watched horses do this many times, but for a long time I paid more attention to the grooming than to something much simpler.

One horse had gone to the other.

She crossed the space between them. She started the encounter. Had she stayed where she was, that particular exchange would not have happened in the same way.

A little later, a human appears with a brush.

That scene is just as familiar.

The person walks towards a horse and begins grooming her. Maybe the horse enjoys it. Often she seems to. The person may be gentle and careful, someone the horse has known for years.

Humans also take grooming rather seriously. We learn which brush to use, which direction to brush, where a horse may be sensitive, how hard to press. We try to get it right.

There is something rather endearing about all that effort.

But after watching the horses a few minutes earlier, I noticed the direction.

The horse had gone to another horse.

Now the human was going to the horse.

It sounds almost absurdly obvious when written down. Yet we go to horses so often that we barely notice the direction.

We walk across the field to find them. We call them. We bring a halter. We groom them, lead them somewhere, ask them to stand with us, or simply decide that this is the moment we are going to spend together.

Even when what we are offering is pleasant, we are usually the ones who begin.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. The person with the brush may be doing something kind and useful. Much of caring for horses necessarily depends on human initiative.

Still, there is a slight comedy in how hard we work at it.

We prepare. We learn. We arrive with good intentions and the right equipment. When we finish, we may feel that we have done something worthwhile for the horse.

Meanwhile, the horse had already been getting on with her life.

That stayed with me.

I began wondering about the other direction.

What if the horse came to see us?

Not because she had been taught to come when called, or because we had found a more sophisticated way of attracting her attention.

What if she simply came over?

We live with nine Icelandic horses in the Netherlands. They live together as a herd and spend their lives outdoors throughout the year. Because they live where we live, being around them is not something that always has to be arranged.

Sometimes I go outside because I need to check something, move something, or walk from one part of the land to another. A horse notices me and comes over.

The same horse may see me the next day and carry on eating.

Another may walk with me for a while and then drift away towards something else.

I have learned to be cautious about what any of this means.

When you live with the same horses for years, you become slightly suspicious of your own explanations.

A horse walks towards you and it is tempting to say, “She trusts me.”

Perhaps she does.

But perhaps you are standing beside the gate.

Perhaps you have food.

Perhaps you happen to be standing where she intended to go.

The longer I watch horses, the less interested I become in using every small action as evidence that a relationship is good.

It seems more interesting when it does not require constant proof.

There is another part of this that took me longer to notice.

A great deal of horse-human interaction, including very gentle interaction, starts with the human already knowing what should happen next.

We would like the horse to approach, follow, stay, move away, return her attention.

There may be no force involved. There may not even be a rope.

But the answer can still have been chosen before the horse gives it.

That is not quite the same thing as a horse becoming involved on her own.

Of course we sometimes have to ask things of horses. Ordinary care would be impossible otherwise. We manage their land. We make practical decisions. There are moments when human intention is unavoidable.

I am interested in something narrower than that.

Does the relationship itself always have to begin with us?

This becomes surprisingly complicated as soon as we decide we would like the horse to “choose” us.

Then we can start trying to produce the choice.

We can reward the horse for coming. We can make being elsewhere less comfortable and approaching us more comfortable. We can learn very subtle ways of influencing where her attention goes.

Eventually we may become extremely good at producing something that looks voluntary.

But by then we have already decided what the answer ought to be.

So I stopped finding the question “How do I get my horse to come to me?” very interesting.

The more useful question became: what happens if she really does not have to?

Over time, I stopped making myself the one who always began the contact.

I still cared for the horses. Nothing changed about the practical responsibilities. The land still needed managing, and the horses still needed looking after.

What changed was more ordinary.

I stopped crossing the field simply because I wanted to be near a horse.

I stopped calling simply because I felt like company.

Sometimes I saw a horse and carried on with whatever I had gone outside to do.

I was not trying to make anything happen by doing this. In fact, that would rather defeat the point.

But when there is enough ordinary time, something becomes visible that is easy to miss when every encounter has been arranged.

The horses have long stretches of life in which we are irrelevant.

They have friends, disagreements, habits and preferences that have nothing to do with us. They stand together and separate again. They move to another part of the field. They groom one another, as they did that morning. They sleep. Sometimes the whole herd notices something in the distance while the humans nearby have absolutely no idea what they are looking at.

Their life is already full.

We enter it. We do not create it.

Once I was no longer always the one arriving, I became more aware of the occasions when the movement came from the other side.

A horse might see me and walk over.

I had not called.

I was not carrying food.

There was no lesson waiting for her.

She had been somewhere else, and now she was standing beside me.

I don’t know why she came.

These days, I am quite comfortable not knowing.

And then there is the much simpler part of all this.

It is nice when a horse comes to see you.

You open the door because you are going outside for some entirely unrelated reason. Perhaps no horse is nearby at first. Then one notices you and starts walking across the field.

You were not going to collect her.

You have no brush in your hand.

There is nothing she needs to do correctly when she arrives.

Now the two of you are simply standing there.

Perhaps you scratch her.

Perhaps she stays for ten minutes.

Perhaps thirty seconds later she goes somewhere else.

I used to think more about how to keep the horse there.

Now I find it more interesting that I did not bring her there in the first place.

Most of us are very familiar with going to see our horses.

I wonder what changes when we leave some room for the journey to happen in the other direction.

What if, sometimes, the horse came to meet you?