Somehow, I Stumbled

Somehow, I stumbled onto this path without knowing what the trek would require of me. I dipped my toe into the river and found myself pulled around the bend by rushing water. Instinct kicked in—I tried to swim harder, to push forward faster. I thrashed against the current, determined to control my direction.

Little did I know, the only thing required of me was to stop flailing.

When I finally did, the river carried me. The water didn’t stop moving just because I did. It revealed itself instead—twisting trees and straight ones on the banks, fast water and slow, shadows and light. What felt like surrender was actually the first moment of true participation.

Serving the horse asks the same of us-

In the presence of a horse, our flaws surface with startling clarity. Our impatience. Our defensiveness. Our imbalance—mental, emotional, physical. And when this happens, we are faced with a choice.

Will we subject the horse to our inner noise? Will we ask them to carry our unresolved tension, our need to be right, our urgency to fix what we don’t yet understand? Or will we swing the other direction—taking up the cross of self-improvement like a self-righteous crusade, attacking our weaknesses with the same aggression we once defended them?

Both paths keep us trapped in the smallness ourselves.

There is another choice-

To view all of it with interest.

When we stop flailing—whether in defense of our flaws or in self-destructive war against them—we gain access to something rare: openness. We stop performing improvement and start observing reality. We allow the river to show us where we are, rather than insisting it take us where we think we should be.

In that openness, we become transparent to the horse.

Here I am: In my impatience and my patience. My tension and my softness. My strengths and my blind spots. There is no need to hide what is obvious to the horse anyway -

And because I am no longer consumed with myself, I can finally see you.

This is where true help begins—not in control, not in correction, but in the simple honesty that allows another being to feel safe enough to reveal themselves too.