Respectful Relationship Not Submission

Bringing 20-20 hindsight to my efforts to ride Zara

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Each week I start off like a TV show: “previously on They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir…” Where we left off in the previous installment I was finally successful at riding Zara after her difficult struggle to accept being saddled.

Thoughts about TV shows and struggles reminded me of a television show I recently watched with my housemate as a palate-cleanser after the intensity of scrutinizing three nights of Merrie Monarch competition the first week of April.

I had been hearing people make references to Resident Alien, a title that caught my attention because when I was married to The Swiss Guy, we had a lot of weird inside jokes about his “resident alien” immigration status before he got American citizenship. In the Netflix version, however, the Resident Alien is an actual alien who has crash landed in a small Colorado town. He has the ability to cloak his alien form in the identity of a human (a human he killed, not a big deal in his mind as his mission in coming to Earth was in fact to eliminate the entire human species). As it turns out, one in a million humans has a genetic anomaly that resists the deception and perceives the alienʻs true form. One of the plot lines begins when a nine-year-old boy screams and runs away from the mild mannered man filling in as the town doctor, a “man” who the boy sees is actually a lizard-like killer alien.

The entire town thinks this doctor is weird, socially inept, likely on the spectrum, but harmless. The Boy, therefore, is the one with a problem to be diagnosed and his behavior corrected. Meanwhile, while the Boy cycles through all the responses to a threat that we have seen my mare Zara exhibit in these pages - flight, fight, and freeze - the Alien also moves through a series of responses, beginning with attempts to retaliate and kill the small human blowing his cover. Eventually the Boy gains an ally - a girl who is also an outsider at school, who cannot see what he sees but believes him just the same, and is willing to take action on his behalf. Quickly she negotiates a truce between the Boy and the Alien - and once they stop reactively fighting, the adversaries realize they share a curiosity about one anotherʻs species. We see them at a table in the town coffee shop engaged in a genuine conversation.

It left me wondering about what possibilities will emerge in future episodes now that these two had replaced their adversarial power struggle with the start of a genuine relationship.

It also reminded me of my initial agreement with Zara: I wonʻt shout if you wonʻt. Without the commitment to listen openly to one another and then to reach mutually accepted commitments for our future interactions based on what we hear, the mare and I would not have opened the possibility of a mutually beneficial relationship. The only difference between the process with a horse and with another human (or alien speaking English) is the language.

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Still, in both of these situations, one of the parties has more power than the other. In general, adults have power over children. Aliens with advanced technology have the ability to kill the entire human race, apparently without moral qualms or guilt. Humans, at least in the colonial culture in which I was raised, claim dominion over other terrestrial species [Gen 1:26–28] as well as over some categories of humans.

The alien could have chosen not to allow for a real relationship with any human. Sometimes that choice is only available to the one with greater power.

Although petite for a horse, Zara was larger, stronger and faster than me by far. Despite her physical advantage, I was the one with power in the relationship. Her survival depended on me. I provided her with food and water. She had to go where I asked her to go to get her sustenance. Ultimately, I got to decide unilaterally if we continued in our relationship or not. I could sell her or neglect her or even have her destroyed with little consequence. I could ignore her communications and inflict trauma, knowingly or unknowingly. Humans have developed a variety of physical tools to control these larger, stronger creatures. There is a reason that the process of teaching her to accept tack and carry a rider is usually called “breaking” a horse.

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This is the horse, who when I met her, was six years old and had never allowed her hooves to be handled. Each and every time, she is given the choice and now she is happy to agree, fully present and cooperative without coercion. Riding was always a different story.

Here is the point where I allow my myself 20-20 hindsight as the narrator I am today. Twenty years ago, I never questioned the goal of riding Zara. Twenty years ago, I honestly believed that we were using gentle, respectful methods to “start the horse under saddle.” Twenty-twenty hindsight allows me to ask why, when I gave Zara a chance to communicate and she never gave an unqualified “yes” to the saddle and rider, I never accepted her “no” as a valid response. Picking up her feet - that was a matter of her current and future wellbeing. She eventually came to understood that having her hooves cared for allowed her to move with more comfort. Carrying a saddle with a human on her back? I do not have a single photo of myself on her in which, with the eyes I have today, she is neither anxious nor actually shut down.

I did not finally give myself permission to tell Zara I would no longer ride her until a decade later. In 2012, I took a training with Linda Tellington-Jones to learn her bodywork and techniques for working with horses. One evening at dinner I was telling Zaraʻs story to Linda and another master of natural horsemanship who by then was also a friend, Lester Buckley. Linda listened carefully and simply asked, “What does Zara like to do?” “She loves to play at liberty; sheʻs like a circus horse,” I answered without hesitation. “Then just do that,” was Lindaʻs advice, “Pretend she is your canine companion, you told me you have fun doing dog agility, right?”

Head slap emoji.

How many times do we try to shoehorn our relationships into external expectations (often ones which we have internalized) of what that particular relationship should be? How kids should be taught and behave in a school setting. How partners in a marriage define their interactions and commitments. How bosses and subordinates behave. How often do we miss the brilliance with which a given relationship might shine because one or both participants are less than whole-hearted in their agreements? How often do we consider a relationship as a failure if it does not conform to those expectations when in fact the relationship is full of love and commitment and goodness?

Once I let go of the need for riding to be proof of the value of my relationship with Zara, she would often sidle up to the fence on which I was sitting to invite me to hop on, just to sit on her and enjoy the closeness, without bridle or saddle, just our connection. Once I let go if the need for riding her, and leaned back into my desire to become a practitioner of Equine Guided Education, I realized she was absolutely gifted in that work, and in fact had been spontaneously offering it for years.

Maybe it is maturity. Maybe “maturity” is just another way of saying it took me decades to learn something I hope my younger readers will gift themselves much sooner. The advice I would offer today is to enter into the possibility of each and every relationship as a dignified beginner. Allow yourself to be playful and lighthearted and curious. Let go of your expectations and allow respectful engagement, engagement based upon open listening, to teach you what this particular relationship in this particular moment wants to be. It is probably something more beautiful than you ever could have imagined.