Know What You Know

The last year has been filled with changes and challenges which have forced me to wrestle with how to move forward, even though the path ahead was one I couldn’t see. It still is. Sometimes I’ve felt like I was jumping off a cliff into a swirling abyss. As usual, Dorian’s presence has been both steadying and an incentive to—in my words—“do better.”

That’s one of the things I’ve struggled with—“doing”—which is how most of us live our lives, I’ve noticed. What happens, though, when we stop? Our world rewards hard work, achievement, “success,” progress, and all those other words patriarchy has gifted us with. I’ve been redefining these for myself over the years, but those ingrained habits can be persistent, have many layers, and are pretty sneaky. I find I have to consciously ask myself: What do I mean by “achievement”? What sort of “progress” do I value?

What I’ve found recently is that the answer to “What does achievement look like to me?” is not what I would have thought. As it turns out, it’s meant something even more difficult than what I’d been doing—cultivating letting go, being comfortable with not knowing, being  . . . still? Pretty tough.

“Let ‘doing’ become expression, not hard work.”

 It’s been scary, at times, frightening to open to what rises to the surface when I stop all the bustling around, both physically and mentally. Horses, though, are always completely present in their universe. They don’t hustle about “achieving” things . . .we impose that on them. That’s why there’s that famous (and frustrating!) phrase all horse people know. When you’re with your horse, to get anything done, you must “be on ‘horse’ time.”

 Being present, being still, being open, allowing . . . on the one hand, isn’t it weird that it’s so hard to achieve? And on the other hand, I’ve found it can bring us what we all, I think, long for: release, ease, openness, “being,” freedom, peace. Then “doing” becomes expression, not hard work.

Horses are so good at showing us the way.

Sometimes when I’m riding Dorian through the woods, I feel the trees breathing. I feel their awareness, their life, their individuality, their presence. At first, I thought this was evidence that I am more weird than “sane” folks.

How often do we let ourselves know what we deeply know?

And how often when these sorts of experiences happen, do we notice what comes next? A bit after this “communing with trees” first happened, I became aware of the Canadian scientist, Suzanne Simard, who studies forests. She found that trees are all connected through an intriguing underground network. They communicate. They share resources . . . for example a “mother tree” tree as Simard calls them, shares nutrients with saplings. Older, dying trees, send their nutrients to other trees. They sustain each other, they care for each other. They have a sort of sentience we don’t acknowledge. Feeling their presence and appreciating their individuality suddenly seemed quite “sane” to me.

One of the most wonderful ideas Simard shares is that our former conceptions of forests, where trees compete with each other for resources, couldn’t be further from the truth. That connected so much with me because of the “success,” “achievement,” etc. programming I spoke about earlier. What a grand lesson the trees had for me that day!

I only came across all this because I allowed myself to be present and opened to what I experienced all around me, weird as it seemed to me at the time. And this settling in, this being profoundly aware right where we are, results in real shifts in our experience. I noticed that when I sank into the wonder of trees that day, Dorian didn’t want to go back to the barn or leave the woods. In fact, he chose to continue riding even when we had rounded the pasture and were pointing toward the barn. He would walk on past the turn-off, preferring to be with me and carry me through the beautiful presence of the life he always inhabits. What a gracious, generous soul he is.

 But he only did that because he picked up that I was authentically present, not rushing around in my mind, not trying real hard to achieve anything.

 I’ve written in another post—Shinrin Yoku—how profoundly healing the natural world is. I’m beginning to understand how this happens, why it’s true, how it can lead us into our own innate, unerring knowing. How we can be at one with the world and with each other.

It’s a profoundly altered way of existing. One that I’m committed to practicing. It brings me closer to myself, closer to peace and joy—and, though this isn’t the only way we can be of any real service to those we love, lately this path has made the most sense to me.