Communion with Nature: Horse-Medicine

Nature Notes - February 2024

The ability of a horse to know freedom while part of a tribe – particularly by serving that tribe – embodies the concept of Horse-Medicine, which allows us to be familiar with – part of – the Earth.

- by James Inabinet

“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence, we could rise up rooted, like trees [Rilke].”
 
How do we surrender to Earth’s intelligence? How can we even know what that is? Rilke seems to make it simple: just surrender. I don’t think it’s that easy, and I’m sure he doesn’t, either. Though available to everyone, earth’s intelligence has become obscure, hidden. We get at it through connection, from being deeply connected to the living earth, to earth processes, to living beings and ecosystems, and the physical processes that support life. Most of us don’t live in a place or a way that’s conducive to such connection, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to attain. I have found that with a bit of effort, anyone can do it. I have also found that along with the experience of deep connection to Earth and its intelligence comes a feeling of wanting to surrender to it. And that leads to what I think the world needs right now: human beings rising up, rooted like trees, feeling, being, and acting like Earthlings, as integral parts of nature (i.e., necessary to the whole).
 

 
Communion is the secret pathway by which Earth’s intelligence is mysteriously known. I’ve written several essays about states of communion with Earth, with place, and about dreaming earth dreams, the kind that help elicit communion. Horse-Medicine is the final piece of that puzzle. Horse-Medicine is a way of looking out at a place but isn’t “seeing” in the normal sense of the word, as in seeing something physical, like a tree. Horse-Medicine “sees through” physical reality by penetrating the veil of appearance. It takes us deeper than seeing to get at something spiritual.

 
The world teems with physical energies in flux, swirling, chaotic. To the eyes alone, entities like trees are actually patterns of energy within this chaos. Our eyes look towards a tree and “see” a chaos of meaningless color splotches–our eyes detect only splotches of color! To actually see a tree requires a mind to get at the order there. It’s the mind that renders these “meaningless splotches of color” into a tree. Spiritual energies abound, too, underlying and interpenetrating physical energy. These are also in flux, swirling, chaotic. There is order there, too, patterns of spiritual energy that can be detected, discerned – and known. This “spiritual order” is rarely seen (as in a vision) but can often be felt as numinous emotion (i.e., holy, rarefied, sacred – the tingling at the back of the neck). Somewhat analogous to eye and mind joining to see a tree, body and soul jointly detect order within spiritual energy patterns. That order is felt as instances of profound spiritual meaning. Horse-Medicine helps one penetrate through the physical to get at that spiritual order.
 

 
Why is it “Horse Medicine?” Horses are noble creatures. When free, she embodies freedom, running wild, following her predilections, going where she will. When living among other horses, she embodies the tribe, living free together in a herd. Among humans, horses are perhaps at their most noble, carrying the burdens of her “new tribe,” selflessly, for the good of the whole. If the most noble act is to give one’s life for her friends, her tribe, her people, then horses have been known to do just that. She will carry her burdens selflessly to the point of exhaustion, even to faltering, even to death in an act of love of the purest kind. Empathy is the horse’s gift to seeing.
 
I picture myself a horse in this way, giving a love look as I outwardly project love energy to the Other. Love energy washes over what I see. We both emerge changed. With Horse-Medicine we feel deeply what we see and know, all around, in all ways, without discrimination, neutralizing the distance between self and Other. Through sympathy, the deeds and sufferings of the one become the deeds and sufferings of the other: I can feel it! In this way, love can help us to get at raw, pre-reflective nature that includes the spiritual, and preconceived notions of the other fall away, become unimportant. In communion, soul mingles with soul – we become one thing.
 

 
There’s an airiness, too, about Horse-Medicine. I watch the wind – moving air – animate things. To animate means to “make alive.” With Horse-Medicine, a living connection forms; something of me is carried about by the wind as spiritual energies dance around me, through me, listening to me, watching me, carrying me, as I struggle for discernment, for enlightenment. Horse-Medicine clears space in me for coalescing spiritual energies to make themselves known. This is a secret of mystics and holy men throughout the ages who invariably went into nature to seek solitude, to seek communion with nature, to seek resonance with the holy spirit: that-which-moves-through-all-things.
 
Be that as it may, Horse-Medicine doesn’t so much make anything happen as it helps us to be aware when it does, tuning our awareness as we gaze into the deeper, spiritual realities normally missed because we’re too caught up in what we see. Finally, Horse-Medicine isn’t easy. Achieving such depth doesn’t happen overnight. All spiritual endeavors are like this; they require perseverance and focus, but they’re always worth it. In this case, the products are communion and fleeting glimpses of earth’s intelligence, which, if Rilke is right, might lead to human beings rising up, rooted like trees, feeling, being, and acting like integral, necessary parts of our host ecosystems.

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