Man and horse in accumulation

Spending some time at the Royal Windsor  show today I’m reminded that the condition of freedom and joy is dependent on not a few factors. Freedom of thought, that many of us know only too well is dependent on many factors, also, but the condition of freedom in thought and action is dependent on a vast multitude. Especially when it is a co-operative activity with an animal. This is  especially apparent, even to a layman like myself, in the spectacle that is the joint venture existing over time between rider and horse, in anything resembling  purposeful and deliberative riding. Like jumping or the co-operation of riders in a group – witness the skill of the mounted games performed by the children of the Pony Club!

It’s apparent that this type of  competitive riding requires not only judgment and a cool head, but also an apprenticeship, probably consisting of years honing skills and refining rough edges.

As any skilled sportsman or musician will tell you, you can never start at this end, where skill rides on this dimensional and more useful, freedom in thought. Though with a trained eye it is discernible, too, that this quality, however admirable in embryonic form -and it was there in some of the younger riders- has a range that further extends its meaning.

How does a horse know where to go? How does the rider know how to make a horse go anywhere? It’s simple, and, (with a licence available only for a layman’s suggestion), I would suggest that they don’t and neither does the horse….. But together, there is a truly fearful multiplier at work – a condition culminating, in the best hands at least, of apparent perfectabillity of freedom, by thought, that has presumably cost little less than a lifetime of trust with not a small dose of courage thrown into the mixture. Just like a giant wave bearing way more amplitude than the combination of its contributors the energy arising out of the collaboration between horse and rider is a potent mixture of two currents leading to a greater charge  that possibly takes  the horse and rider by surprise and on a delicious adrenalin-fuelled journey.

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