Love and Gratitude and a Bit of a Cry.

It’s a Sunday afternoon and everything is quiet and Scotland has been dazzled in sunshine for three straight days. I ran a retreat this weekend for what I call The Place of Peace, which is really all about growing in steadiness and sturdiness and calm and truth and ease and self. It’s about reducing the non-necessary suffering and facing the necessary suffering with resilience and courage. It’s about moving forward into the world, and not apologising for our very presence.

I say ‘our’ meaning: those of us who were taught, by society, by individuals, by the culture, by the zeitgeist to say sorry and to explain and to mind what people think and to care about not looking foolish and generally to be in the fairly constant grip of the Not Good Enough gremlins.

(See also: The Comparison Devils, The Perfection Demons, The Imposter Goblins and The Shoulds, who bust open your door, eat all your snacks, and never know when to leave.)

Anyway, I do groups online for all this and, every so often, members of those groups leap off the Zoom and into their cars and miraculously appear in real life and we do all the heart stuff and all the connection stuff and all the standing tall stuff, and the horses join in and help with it, because they have the biggest hearts of all and that makes all the difference.

And if none of that makes much sense to you, just imagine three happy, brave, brilliant people, in the woods and by the standing stones and under the lime tree and out in the dazzle-light working with horses they did not know and going deep into themselves and writing down the answers to profound questions in two-minute bursts.

Imagine them rising to the occasion, and the horses rising higher still, so that everyone ended up doing The Standing Still Olympics (invented by the red mare, of course) and entering their own dream-space and obviously connecting to the universe at the atomic level.

Because that’s what we do at the magic field.

They’ve gone now and it was a grand success and I went down to the field and returned to my normal jobs of dealing with dung and feeding and grooming and scratching bottoms (probably the most important job) and swatting horseflies with fierce warrior cries.

But as I looked at the little herd, dreaming in the dazzle, I became quite weepy, because they had been so magnificent and so generous and so big-hearted and I have no idea what I did to deserve that and I had no way of thanking them in a way that means something to a horse. They got treats and love and rubs but that doesn’t touch the sides of it.

They make my heart expand so hard I don’t know how it stays in my chest. They make me a better person. They give me confidence to do things I would never have thought I could do. (The P of P retreat sounds a bit funny and woo but actually it’s quite a thing and it does make people hopeful and happy and I’ll take that, every day and twice on Sundays. I got the confidence to do it because of the horses, and that probably sounds funny too, but it’s the truest thing I know, and Hemingway always said: write the truest sentence you know.)

So I had a jolly good cry, out of love and gratitude, because those things do make me cry. They are so precious and I feel I must cherish them as they fly by.

I have really no idea whether this postcard makes any sense but I wanted to write it down. I wanted to send you the love and gratitude, because those things should not be hoarded.

Something like that, anyway. Something like that.