Hard Hands On Tender Lives

Espíritu

Veterans Equine Alliance

THE HORSE GUY

COACHING WITH HORSES

STORY #171

HARD HANDS ON TENDER LIVES

? ? ? ? Fierce loving what is true

I never wear gloves when I tend to our plants. I need to feel the dirt and the hard packed roots of last year’s growth. Gloves take this nearness away from me. I’ve pulled up good roots and destroyed them because I couldn’t feel their closeness; I couldn’t hear them with my finger tips. May Sarton (1912-1995), an award winning poet and novelist once observed her mother gardening with open, gnarled hands and concluded:

“…She who could heal plant or friend

With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love…

Showed me we must be hard

To move among the tender with an open hand

And to stay sensitive up to the end

Pay with some toughness for a gentle world…”

I am much the same way with my leadership coaching clients. I want to see and feel their lives and know in my body what it’s like to move through their world. What is ok or not ok to do, what can be spoken publicly and what must be whispered softly, if at all. Before any useful advice can be offered I must understand the advanced alien civilization — my client’s life — into which I have been dropped. I must allow what is real for them to be real and valid for me.

I am unwilling to compromise this stance, unwilling to negotiate. Hard-handed refusal to negotiate.

None of this matters, of course, unless you’re tired of interacting with people who think they know who you are without actually making contact. Or those who see you as a member of a group — one of them — and haven’t the interest or taken the time to find out for themselves who you really are, aside from your group memberships. Most of us light skinned (largely male) people don’t appreciate that we wear many group memberships and that others see the memberships long before they see us. We are, however, very aware of others’ groups.

We seldom see different others as individuals, blinded both by their group memberships and by our own denial that such memberships exist. Wounded vets returning from deployment and those who need partners to walk alongside them for a time often fall into this kind of disenfranchised group. We fail to see them as individual people with their own stories to tell.

Out in pasture with a herd of horses you can bet you are seen first as a member of a group called Predators. It doesn’t matter what your individual history is. It doesn’t matter whether you know anything or nothing about your group membership. The only thing that matters is that you approach with reverence and understanding. The initial task is to distinguish yourself as a non predator individual. This mindset holds open the possibility of a tender partnership between you and horse. Terms will then be worked out between the two of you.

If you agree with these terms you will experience an extraordinary experience with these magnificent creatures. If you disagree, the horse will walk or run away. Or worse. After all, disagreement exposes you as a predator.

Out in pasture with a herd of horses you can bet you are seen first as a member of a group called Predators. It doesn’t matter what your individual history is. It doesn’t matter whether you know anything or nothing about your group membership.

This joining up with a different other is an essential, yet often overlooked, leadership skill and essential stance for anyone who wants to live in the world with greater compassion. What’s true in the horse pasture is true elsewhere.

Come, taste and discover for yourself. In a world fraught by invented division and separation, horses are masters at seeing through us to the wholeness within and helping us move through these times with compassion (for self and others), grace and ease.

VETERANS EQUINE ALLIANCE ?

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ESPíRITU

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