My Word of the Week: Listening

Circling back to what my horses still have to say

Aloha and welcome! For those of you who are new to They Keep Telling Me They Should Write My Memoir, it might seem like the “memoir” part has come to mean “what happened last week”. I really did start this Substack writing for over a year about my personal growth journey from 1992-1997¹, and then continued with lessons I had learned from horses starting a few years later². In between I sometimes wrote a seemingly random essay - but “memoir in essay” is itself a genre, I have been told. Intrigued? If you have not yet subscribed to get future installments by email, you can do so with the link below.

I still have a bit of a New York City hangover from my visit. I cannot quite bring myself to delete it from the locations on my Weather app. Daily highs are still in the mid-60s. In November. I imagine myself there on Saturday night as I was three weeks ago. And realize now I missed recreating an old ritual. One of the great joys of life in Manhattan - recall I lived there prior to the Internet becoming our regular source of news - was buying the Sunday New York Times on Saturday night.

Returning to Saint Lukes Place from a late Saturday night out, I would stop at the nearest Korean fruit market for a quart of fresh squeezed orange juice to enjoy with breakfast, and a two-inch thick Sunday Times from the tall stack at the entrance. If I indulged in a quiet Saturday night at home, I would throw a trench coat over my sweat pants and venture down to the corner before getting ready for bed. I always left the paper whole on the dining room table overnight. Others I know would carefully separate sections upon bringing it home, restacking them in their preferred order of reading for the next morning. No one I knew actually read it at night.

Many - myself included - saved the Magazine insert, with its long, well-researched feature stories, to savor over the course of the following week.

Someone please tell me - does anyone do that any more? Does the Sunday New York Times Magazine even exist in physical form? I regret that I neglected to check while I was there.

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I still read the New York Times, of course. Imagine my surprise on Tuesday of this week when I woke up to find multiple text messages from friends, from Pawcatuck to Paauilo, sending me an article published that day but ostensibly from the The New York Times Magazine, marked with the distinctive logo that once graced the cover of the glossy section of the Sunday New York Times. "He Thought He Knew Horses. Then He Learned To Really Listen,” it read.

I responded variously with some version of “OMG, thatʻs the guy whose new approach helped me so much with Kūkūilama!” After I a few confused exchanges, I realized I was not making sense to the friends on the other end of the text streams, because I stopped writing my horseʻs story last month with this post about starting back at the beginning with his ground work. There was so much more for him to learn - and that means there was so much more for me to learn as old approaches failed us.

Do you ever feel like a puppet whose movements are being coordinated by unseen strings? Like - did I really need to pause where I did just because it would be another six weeks until the Times decided to tell the story of how a trainer named Warwick Schiller stopped being a Horse Whisperer and became a Horse Listener? And then I could tell how one of his videoʻs showed up in the sidebar of my YouTube feed just when I needed it to understand my geldingʻs behavior - in February 2021, nearly four years ago?

So please, I bought the article for you. If you did not already click through to read it, be my guest and then come back to find me here: He Thought He Knew Horses. Then He Learned To Really Listen”.

The Times article attributes Schillerʻs transformation to a horse named Sherlock. As I wrote in describing my relationship with my mare Zara, “when the student is ready, the teacher appears.” I had not paid much attention to Warwick Schillerʻs videos because he fell into the same category as the many natural horsemanship instructors with whom I had already studied, and in some cases befriended. Most of them trace their approaches back to a handful of pioneers: Tom and Bill Dorrance, Ray Hunt.

Many of them became really good with horses without ever allowing the horses to transform them.

Schillerʻs path was the opposite of mine. Someplace deep inside he realized the methods were failing many horses even when the horses were doing the things we ask of them. Pondering the lack of connection he had with Sherlock enabled him to have the insight that Sherlock was his mirror - which set him on a powerful journey of personal growth with humans as teachers.

I did it in reverse. I had taken time off from “work” to follow that path of personal and spiritual growth with unexpected human teachers, as I wrote about here in my memoir. And then when I thought my journey was complete, Zara showed up to let me know that horses could take me (and others) to entirely new levels of growth and consciousness. For me as well, it began with Listening. With learning to listen to Zara.

I am a natural story teller, a natural leader, a natural talker. Listening is something I struggle with. But I am also committed to be a better leader for my herds (communities) and causes - and that means I need learning partners. Next week - back to how both my new young horse - and Ariana, my longtime human mentor in Equine Guided Education - aligned to teach me new lessons in 2021.

In the meantime, I will leave you with some questions. Do you know anyone who stopped talking because no one was listening? When might that have been a dynamic in any of your personal relationships? How does this play out on larger scales in society? This topic can take us a lot of places.

Oh - and speaking of listening. I am really enjoying some poetry at the moment, a form of writing that requires careful attention. Check out a few of the Substacks I recommend. Maya C Popa knocked it out of the park with these Poems for the Full Moon. And Sherman Alexieʻs poem Partisan was the scolding I needed. It will only take a moment to read his 10 Short Poems. But they may take some time to process.

1. Those are listed here: https://bethrobinson.substack.com/t/memoir-19921997

2. Gathered here: https://bethrobinson.substack.com/t/horses. But I canʻt figure out how to ask Substack to order them oldest to newest so you can read sequentially. Sorry.