07/28/2023
One of my favorite pages/people/writers. Insightful, beautiful thoughts on human and horse. Definitely worth a follow!
Author’s note: warning for length. There was so much I wanted to tell you and I did tell it all. So you will definitely need a nice cup of Yorkshire tea.
An astonishing and beautiful thing happened yesterday. You - yes, you, Dear Reader - let me take out my Mabel, my least lovely self, and let her have a run. And you did not scorn her or mock her or belittle her. (Some of you actually were rather taken with her, which made me laugh and laugh.) There was a late night gremlin who told me someone was going to come along and get upset or take it all the wrong way and I woke up to find that nobody had. Not one person. Let us just pause and think of that, in these days of sound and fury on the internet.
Why is this important? (Apart from the miracle of finding enchanting, grown-up, non-furious people on the social media.) I believe it’s at the heart of how we humans show up for our horses. That’s why it matters.
Those of you who have been with me for a while know that I love to give things names. I inherited this from my dad and it’s one of his legacies I cherish. Mabel is my name for what Jung called the shadow. I’ve loved Jung’s ideas since I was a young woman and he’s always stayed with me. His concept of the shadow self was something that I understood intellectually for a long time, but it took the red mare to show me how to put it into useful action.
His idea was that we all have, within us, a shadow. This is, as I understand it, the place where we hide away all the parts of ourselves of which we are ashamed. I used to call it my internal cupboard of doom. Cram all the unlovely stuff in there and shut the door and just show my best front to the world. Those of you who know horses well will already be yelling, ‘Incongruence!’ This is where our outside affect, the way we present ourselves to the world, is a long way from our inner reality. And horses really don’t like that at all. They can feel the vibrations of it across the field and it unsettles them and disturbs them.
Jung’s idea was that we humans need to embrace and accept and process our shadow so that we live in fragments no longer, as EM Forster once beautifully put it. We are then integrated, not dis-integrated.
He had one more dazzling notion, which I still don’t fully grasp but which I feel is true on an instinctive level. He said that beyond the shadow lies the gold. It is by going into those dark parts of ourselves that we find the light and the brilliance and the wonder within. And that, oddly, can be terrifying.
So, Mabel. She truly does have in her things of which I am not at all proud. She can be furiously funny, but she can get idiotically cross over trifles; she has a touch of self-righteousness and she can tumble into passive-aggression. She judges all over the shop and she has a rather unpleasant expectation that everyone should behave in the way she wants them to behave. She can’t process shame, so when she’s in it, she looks around for someone else to blame. She’s also often flat wrong, because she only sees the world through her own narrow lens. (Yesterday, for instance, she said that there is no joy in Formula 1. I went back last night after letting her have her tango and watched some more of that programme which had stirred me up so much. I saw, because I was back in my sensible, kind grown-up, that there is joy. Mabel, with her narrow vision, had only seen the super-rich breaking things. That’s how reductive she can be, when she’s on a tear.)
And this is the pivotal part: I can accept Mabel and be gentle with Mabel and let her have her stomps and rants where she can do no harm. It’s not that she is wrong or bad or destructive in all those roiling emotions she gets caught up in; it’s that she would be if I let her put them into action. On a most basic level, this would be if I got entitled and impatient and cross with my horses because my own needs were not being met. That’s the wrong action. (And you know I don’t use the word ‘wrong’ very often.) So I need to let Mabel vent in a safe place, where she doesn’t take out her muddle and her misconceptions on other sentient creatures, equine or human.
The more I can integrate her and learn her ways and know what to do with her, the more of a complete, steady, easy human I shall be, and that’s what my mares love. This integration means I won’t ask impossible questions of them. It means I won’t be emotionally unpredictable. It means I won’t be unfair.
This was such a lucid essay in my head. I wrote it in the bathroom this morning, creating the flying sentences in my mind. It hasn’t come out quite as limpid and direct as I had hoped. I feel that I’m nearly there, but not quite. But it’s such a profound realisation, in my middle age, and it has had such a liberating effect on the way I work and play and dance with my horses that I wanted to give it to you, even though it is imperfect. I trust you to dig the bones out of it and take it away and make it your own.
If I were to try and sum it all up, it would go something like this. We all have our Mabels. The more we learn to make them our own and not hide them, the more we find that safe place to put them, where they don’t hurt us or those we love, the more of a complete human we can become. And that complete human being is met with joy when we go down to the field.
Last night, having got all my Mabel out (thank you so much for letting me do that) I went down to the mares in the golden evening light. The big field was empty. No sign of a thoroughbred anywhere. Perhaps they’ve gone into the woods for a little adventure, I thought. I whooped and called, not expecting they would come, ready to be delighted if they did.
They did. There was a distant rustle in the long grass and a sudden, urgent thrum of hoofbeats and there they were, heads up, ears pricked, tails flying like flags, galloping towards me.
I had no food. They’ve got tons of grass at the moment and we are only feeding very occasional snacks, so that they can have all the herbs and stuff that I like to give them. They weren’t coming for their tea. They were coming for me. I, in my humanness, have some value and meaning for them.
For me, that is an extraordinary sentence to be able to write. I spent all my younger years trying to be someone else, because I believed my own, unadorned self was not good enough. The red mare has taught me that I can learn to rest in my true self - that I don’t have to put on bells and whistles, that I don’t have to hide away the less lovely parts of me, that I can stand in the world and be real and true. That’s who she wants to be with. Well, that, and the person who is top-level at scratching her bottom.
