that my experience at Apache Springs was a stepping-stone, an advanced-degree program in the challenges of jump-starting a multigenerational project aimed at balancing the aggressive, needlessly destructive aspects of our culture and offering people the personal and professional tools to create lasting, meaningful change. Like Gaudí, Rasa and I had tapped into a source of inspiration that was not the least bit concerned with human concepts of time. Our client was in no hurry.
My horse survived that day, as did the mission she represented. She lived two more years, doing her best work despite an increasingly debilitating arthritic condition that led to her death at age twenty. With Rasa by my side, I felt energized and inspired, but the human element seemed relentlessly problematic. My horse remained blissfully unaware of the organizational challenges and interpersonal dramas I found so incredibly tedious. Even so, her strong, supportive presence helped me endure the elations and frustrations of blazing a new trail — with groups of people who fully expected me to know the way, no less.
In the beginning, all I had was curiosity, an adventurous spirit, a potent yet incomplete vision, and an ability to write about it. But that was enough to attract others who had an expanded view of human potential. However, while the majority of my students, colleagues, and employees were eager to step into their own power and experiment, some of them wanted me to psychically sense their needs and answer questions they didn’t know how to voice. A few came looking for the perfect parent they never had, expecting me to protect them from the same interpersonal challenges I had initially found so shocking and perplexing. Still others resented my success and couldn’t wait for me to fail. For years, I rode a roller coaster of inspiration, admiration, confusion, disappointment, pain — and ever deepening insight.
Over time, through much trial and error, my colleagues and I developed some leadership and authentic community-building skills to make the ordeal more manageable, and eventually more enjoyable, for everyone involved. Oddly enough, while I employed the valuable services of an executive coach, read every leadership book I could get my hands on — and learned a lot in the process — the most innovative tools came from working with the horses, from translating their highly adaptable, intensely social, nonpredatory perspective on power into a human context. In becoming more horselike, my students too began to thrive, finding the courage to follow their dreams and honing the skills to manifest them.
As newspaperman Walter Winchell observed, “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” Working with horses taught me how to move fluidly between practical, earthly existence and that strange, amorphous other-world where the as-yet-unimagined hovers, waiting, always waiting, for someone with the nerve, endurance, ingenuity, and charisma to coax the formless into form. This is how we change the world. By the time Rasa left me in 2011, I had learned to manage the stress, confusion, and significant emotional distress that anyone saddled with a vision is bound to encounter. In fact, if I were to mythologize the trajectory of Rasa’s life, I would have to conclude that she hung around, quietly tutoring me, even carrying me at times, until I gained a more sophisticated view of leadership and could be trusted to walk the path without her. In this sense, I was lucky to have a horse to not just hold me up but cheer me up too.
Artists and innovators invariably suffer for their visions, a cliché we’ve all heard before. But recognition of that classic pattern doesn’t lessen the impact of feeling misunderstood, used, hurt, shamed, blamed, degraded, and betrayed along the way. Knowing the sacrifices and intrigue involved, who would sign up to live the life of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, or Martin Luther King Jr., regardless of the colossal shifts they set in motion? In long-term projects, inspiration all too easily gives birth to a rowdy set of twins: obsession and depression. The energy of the first can carry you through any havoc wreaked by the second, it’s true. But I know the price this kind of power exacts on a human body. Pushing yourself year after year, stretching the limits of personal health and well-being in service to a demanding vision, is like plugging your living room lamp into a 220-volt industrial socket, day after day, and blaming the lamp for burning out. Without any previous training, innovators must learn to negotiate their own individual human needs within the supercharged agenda of inspiration and calling.
In myriad sanity-saving ways, my horses taught me how to deal with the drama and exhaustion. They exercised the courage, compassion, patience, and equanimity I needed in order to face the next round of challenges. They showed me how a herd could be a source of strength and creativity, not compliance, disempowerment, and suppression. And they exemplified a mind-set capable of navigating change, even tragedy.
Deep Peace
Many people assume that prey animals live in a state of constant fear and hypervigilance. Spend enough time around horses, especially those who haven’t been traumatized by abusive handling, and you realize this isn’t at all the case. Horses don’t stay up all night worrying about lions, and they certainly don’t manufacture trouble in order to control the ensuing drama. Secure, well-adjusted horses collaborate with fate. Instead of fixating on what should or shouldn’t happen, they sense what is happening and what wants to happen. Then they decide whether the developing situation is in their best interest, and they either go with the flow or get out of the way.
Horses don’t try to alter the environment, spending much of their time in a relaxed yet heightened state of awareness, ready for anything. As a result, they’re masters at assessing the evolving nuances of reality, deftly avoiding that human tendency to distort reality by engaging in wishful thinking or focusing on the worst possible outcome. For leaders, adopting this expanded, nonpredatory perspective creates an advanced capacity for risk management: paying attention to the subtle dynamics of a situation gives people a leg up in evaluating what they can control or change — and what they can’t — early enough to grasp an unexpected opportunity or avoid being eaten.
No matter what happens, horses exhibit exceptional emotional agility: They experience each moment openly and authentically, blazing through fear, power, pain, excitement, loss, playfulness, and unmitigated joy. And then they go back to grazing, spending a significant portion of each day milling languidly about in a state of deep peace that arises naturally when you’re not afraid of life.
Sitting quietly with Rasa, breathing in sync with her mindful acceptance of each and every moment, entrained by the beat of her massive heart, I always felt a sense of calm engulf me, no matter what trials I might otherwise be enduring. This in itself was a daily miracle. Her presence, however, was powerful, not passive. Horses, she taught me early on, actively respond to how people show up each day, highlighting our hidden gifts, our wounds, our vulnerabilities, and our worn-out worldly habits. And yet somehow they manage to be discerning without a hint of judgment, communicating that, at the core, we too are beautiful, powerful, and wise, capable of endless renewal.
Looking through the eyes of my horse Rasa, I came to see human dysfunctions as surface scintillations, dramatic and sometimes irritating to be sure, but certainly not set in stone. Whenever I managed, through grace or sheer stubborn will, to let go of an old pattern and embody a fresh perspective, Rasa would mirror the transformation, welcoming me home to an even deeper understanding of who I really was. And without the slightest hint of ambition, she would continually up the ante, stretching, relentlessly, my own limited ideas about my place in the world, my calling, and my untapped potential, helping me become a more effective human, one capable not only of dreaming big dreams but of riding a vision with a destiny of its own — and encouraging it to outlive me.
The view from eternity, after all, is clear: Pleasures and obstacles come and go, but the call to build something of lasting value cannot be denied. If people are “made in the image of their creator,” then human beings are designed to create. And those who accept the challenge of creating something truly remarkable, something imbued with a touch of the divine, aren’t given mortal excuses, reasonable timelines, and voluminous bank accounts. I can’t think of a single visionary who won the lottery to support a brilliant, socially significant idea.
Struggle
