Riding Horses As a Spiritual Practice
Shelly Taylor on the holy symbiosis between horse and rider
Welcome back to our series of guest posts on contemporary spiritual practices. Today’s author, Shelly Taylor, has been a friend since we got our MFAs together at the University of Arizona nearly 20 (!) years ago. A fellow Southern girl, Shelly is a talented poet, passionate horsewoman, and fierce mama, identities which weave together seamlessly in today’s post. I am grateful to her for sharing about the deeply embodied experience of riding and racing these powerful animals, who have always seemed to me to contain an inscrutable wisdom. The world is full of such wonders! Thank you for being here to witness and share them with me. xoxo, Nishta
I am a second-generation horsewoman: my daughter, a third. We are barrel racers. Most people know my sport as “the event women do” in rodeo—not that women can’t rope, ride broncs, or bulls. We can and do.
World renowned horse trainer and philosopher Ray Hunt offers, “These horses are more sensitive than we can ever imagine. As we go along you’ll see how sensitive they are. You develop this sensitivity. Let them use their keenness to show how sensitive they are—to teach us.”
It’s not just riding a horse, it’s being with them, it’s being in their space.
I am also a poet. So much of what I have written is inundated with horse. So much so that the narrator is often just that herself:
“As a child I tallied my liberties to horses / horses buried inside a little girl ain’t never gonna get old. She is out there in / all kinds of weather in her breastbone hooves.”
You do your best thinking cleaning a stall. There is no better therapy than the mindful tedium of cleaning horse poop out a stall, no better time to pray, think of the divine, your life, while a dusty, full-of-static barn radio plays 80s and 90s country in between all the boys you went to high school with selling used cars every other commercial. Have a problem, take it to the barn. To make a stall fully clean is to make your soul that way too, in part.
From Larry Levis’s “Anastasia and Sandman”: “The brow of a horse in that moment when / The horse is drinking water so deeply from a trough / It seems to inhale the water, is holy. // I refuse to explain.”
I ride mares only. Mares are said to be tougher, grittier, cattier, meaner, more down to business, smarter, cleverer. Of my good mare, our animal communicator/intuitive, said, we, she and I, are two knots on the same rope. And well, Ro, my good mare, you can’t tell her nothing.
By good mare, I mean she does not come to play. She’s born with try and wants to win. We, my mama and I, call her Biggie Champion. Her theme song is most definitely “Turn Down for What” and she’d be full out Katherine Hepburn plus Julia Sugarbaker plus Niki Minaj if in human flesh— that kind of tough.
I’m going to teach my daughter being tough, sometimes even a damn mean mare, is a good thing when called for, amongst all our natural goodness.
I’ve often felt my mind is spastic: this is the human condition. And then this whole gray matter of the brain post-partum thing women go through. Squirrel brain, some say.
There is a reason horses are used in therapy with folks who have dealt with trauma. Your nervous system calms. When it does, you have to. Horses are a heart thing, a salve. Your nervous system may be shot. And then they want to be with you, even when they seemingly don’t, like Ree who doesn’t quite trust anyone; she keeps her ears flattened on her head and once bit my arm through a puffer jacket, sweater, and long sleeve shirt leaving a hematoma that lasted a month. On a heart-level, she needs me most.
When riding colts, I can’t bring spastic energy onto their backs. They know from the time I round the corner of the barn what state I am in. They can match that head on. And that’s not what you want.
There is a reason why some carry the narrative they were taken advantage of by a horse and are now scared. They showed up scared and nervous. The horse being a keen jokester let them have the proverbial bit.
Hunt, again: “They can buck us off and run over us too, and we’ll think ‘Yah, He’s sensitive alright!’ But he still is, you know, it’s US who made the mistake. We’re the humans, we’re supposed to be the smartest.”
And I’ll tell you, some days all of my girls are so on-the-muscle and fractious I don’t even want to try them. But I can, should I feel up to it, receive their fear, anxiety, anger, and I can flatten it out with calmness and goodness. My young mare mentioned above, Ree, she is psychologically caught up in a flight state 92% of the time. In videos when I am training her, you can hear me giving constant verbal affirmations: good girl, easy girl, and sometimes, slow down heifer. She is a lot of girl. She is most of the time just right. I try to set her up for good experiences and not let her get my number.
Ray Hunt said, “You telegraph right down through your body” [into the saddle].
Someone wise once said about pre-run jitters: wiggle your toes.
Hunt again, “The feet are in your hands.” Theirs. You ride with your hands but you ride with your mind first, and you need to be certain.
For me, this definitiveness can be something as simple as turn this big ass ant bed in this pasture—I say it with my mind first, my eyes, and she already knows before my hands and legs go to say it. You can’t be dithering. Be certain; it’s this ant bed; they’re going to know right when you do. No one likes to be confused.
Hunt said, “Have a picture in your mind that you’re going to stop a certain foot. If it doesn’t stop, there was something wrong in your timing. Before a foot leaves the ground you can prepare for it to stop. For instance, if you’re going to stop, slow one foot down and stop the next foot.” If this sounds hard, well it is. It involves total trust from your mind to hers, that she gets you and you her. Trust your horse. Don’t pick on her.
The whole thing is a dance. It is poetry.
There is poetry in Hunt’s “So you reach out, you feel of him, then for him, and then you both feel together.”
This to me is sacred. It’s a job done together, not alone, and it is done with a silent conversation between two minds, with one of those bodies being over 1,000 lbs alone.
My sport is a race of tenths and often hundreds of a second. A lot of what you see is done with seat, legs, and feet versus hands. It’s been said every time you pull on the reins you lose time—and it’s true. Your hands should do very little—your eyes, more—look to where you want to go and go there in your mind and the horse will follow. All of this while in a full out sprint. It’s the best 15 seconds of my life thus far, and at the rate my horse-loving daughter is going, it will be hers too.
Shelly Taylor is the author of three full-length poetry collections, B-Side Girls Knockin’ Sugar in the Gourd (The Magnificent Field, 2021), Lions, Remonstrance (Coconut Books Braddock Book Prize, 2014) and Black-Eyed Heifer (Tarpaulin Sky, 2010). She is the co-editor, with Abraham Smith, of the anthology of rural American poetry and essays, Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press, 2015). Notes from Byzantium (Black Rock Press, 2019), a book arts chapbook with artist-collaborator Eben Goff, is her most recent chapbook publication. Taylor lives in rural southern Georgia with her daughter, Maizie, cattle dog, Willa, and crew of feisty red mares.
Previously in this series:
Research As a Spiritual Practice by Rebecca Clarren
End-of-Life Care As a Spiritual Practice by Laura Stephens
Acts of Service As a Spiritual Practice by Katie Vhay
Sewing As a Spiritual Practice by Burke Butler
Dreaming As a Spiritual Practice by Amber Ambrose