A Centaurs Journey Blog

After we came back from our 2 night preparatory trip, Mary led us in a writing exercise to help get us get something down on paper. We produced words and phrases from our experiences, swapped them, and wrote responses/reflections inspired by those words.

Attending: Bear witness to, pay attention to, be mindful of; without expectation or judgment be fully present and responsive to the horse, the group, the environment, one’s own actions and their repercussions. Perhaps the antithesis of blundering through the world, blinded by ego. Imagine the world is a sick fiend, and we are standing at their bedside, waiting and eager to respond to any request.

Small, but nagging, pain: The kind that slowly drives you mad. The kind that you’d rather were bone shattering, that would break you and be done with it, instead of the kind that eats away at your happiness, your resilience, at the whole world you have built up around yourself, and leaves you crouching like a starved creature in the dark, chewing your fingernails until that moment when your mind tires of self-pity and turns once more to the light and peace that was always there, waiting.

Giant Picnic Table: Like children in a world too big for us, playing house and soldiers in our parent’s basement, surrounded by objects whose value and meaning we could never truly fathom. We claim for ourselves a dusty armchair, not knowing whose tears soaked that dark upholstery, whose grandmother read romantic poetry to them on Saturday nights from its lofty, lamp-lit cushions. As we sit with our toes hovering above the desert dust, we claim for ourselves the world, we claim for ourselves this expedition, we claim for ourselves our own certainty, not knowing that a small rusty can in the bushes, silent and unattended, speaks of lost stories.