03/18/2026
Remember to breathe
You rallied around the mares! I love this so much. Two days ago I gave in to a little bit of a rant about the disobliging things which are routinely said about mares. I confess that I thought I was probably being slightly self-indulgent. This is very, very personal to me, after all.
Except that it turns out it isn’t. I am not alone! Out you came, in your battalions, with your mares and your good hearts and your steady minds. (Minds that don’t fall for cheap labels.) I generally don’t look at numbers, because that’s not what I’m in it for, but that little essay got forty-five thousand views and this very fact warms my heart. The mare-people are legion.
The heart needs warming, because there is so much nonsense about the place just now. I rue the relentless march of the large language models, because they are the very opposite of everything my horses have taught me to aspire to. The AI takeover is devoted to the fake and the gimcrack, whereas horses value the authentic and the real. And the heartfelt, perhaps, too. They can certainly feel our heartbeats, and will regulate themselves according to how we are self-regulating.
I thought of this the other day because I was with someone who was violently unregulated. I could feel their nervous system jangling and tangling from across the room.
In the old days, I would not have the awareness to understand what was happening. I would just have felt constrained and uncomfortable and stretched. I’d have wanted to leave and I’d probably have put that down to tiredness or my own introversion or some kind of social inadequacy.
Now, because of the red mare and everything she has taught me, I could see clearly that the person was unsettled and out of sync and generally jangling, and that all that had nothing to do with the conversation we were having. The conversation had simply become a convenient dumping ground for all the jangles the person could no longer contain.
In the old days, I’d have thought, ‘Was it something I said?’
Now, I just imagined that the person was Tern the Bird, who had seen an unexpected pigeon rustling away in the bottom of the hedge. Consciously and actively, I put my own nervous system into STEADY and REASSURING. (For some reason, those had to go into big capital letters. Nobody quite knows why.)
The person was trying to pick an argument, in the way that children will when they are exhausted and scratchy and don’t know what they want. I breathed and refused to take the bait. I looked around to see if there was some open ground where we could come to rest, together.
And, just as Tern will bring herself down if I can generate the right reassuring energy, so the person did.
It was magic.
We ended up having a lovely time.
I have no idea why I just wrote you all that. Perhaps because it’s the opposite of the AI which makes me cross. Perhaps because this is the work I’m doing with all these horses. I’m giving you my Thirty Days of Recorded Training and I’m saying what I’m doing with each mare - they all have different needs and wants - but the most important thing is that every day I’m working on myself.
Every day won’t be Doris Day. I’m a bit tired just now. (Everyone is a bit tired just now.) There is a lot of work to do. The world is quite nuts. Sometimes, the Place of Peace could fit into a very small bucket.
But the mares remind me to rise. I’m listening to Timothy West read Trollope, for about the fifth time, because I always do that when the world goes extra mad. It’s incredibly heartening. In the first of the Palliser series, there is a character called Alice and Trollope talks of her ‘growing upwards, towards the light.’ Like trees grow upwards.
That’s what these horses get me to do.
They don’t mind if there are lost afternoons where I’m in the mud. They are very patient and forgiving in that way. But they do like me generally to be growing upwards, towards the light. I’ll do that for them. Because they are totally worth it.
PS. I love this picture of Tern. I took it yesterday, when we went out for our big walk. You can tell, from the slight tension in her face, and from the position of her lower lip, that she is a little concerned about something. That is a picture of her Thinking It Through. I stand very still when she does this, being actively beside her. I don't baby her or try to kid her out of it or even really soothe her. If she is concerned, she is concerned. I need to respect that. But at the same time, I don't want her to become a drama queen, so I'm very matter of fact. Yes, it's a bit of a thing. Yes, we can totally deal with it. No, we are not going to fixate on it. We'll give it the time it deserves, and then we'll move on.
We'll grow upward, towards the light.
