My friend Sara says I am “ruled by words” and she is not. She makes up words sometimes and it makes me a little crazy. I’ve always been fascinated by words, and remember my mother reading to me “It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power” out of Reader’s Digest magazine every month when I was a kid. Words are how we communicate, and the words we choose to use say something about the state of our minds. Or not.

Around about 15 years ago I was a subscriber to what was then “The Trail Less Traveled” magazine and a member of one of the very first internet-based horsemanship discussion groups. Even then I was sensitive to the words that horsemanship aficionados used. They were new to me at the time and I remember thinking about them and rolling them over my tongue and around my mind.

Some of these words that were once common parlance for students of horsemanship you just don’t hear any more.

One of the phrases we used to see in horsemanship was “filling in”. “Filling in” is, very simply, when the horse does something correctly even though we’ve done something incorrectly. Filling in is an act of charity on the part of the horse, clearly. It used to be that filling in was seen as something positive that a horseman could get his or her horse prepared to do at some point. It was seen as generally a positive thing to develop between a horse and a person.

I don’t know when the last time was that I heard someone talk about filling in or something like it. Well, actually, I did hear actor Matt Damon talk about it recently, but he didn’t call it that. He said in an interview on the Today show that when he was shooting the movie “True Grit”, if he rode his horse up and missed his mark by a bit, the horse would lean over a bit to get him where he needed to be for the camera. Damon seemed to think this was pretty cool and a mark of how beautifully trained the movie horses were.

But these days, I’m more likely to hear long lists about why our horses WON’T do things. “My horse will only get in the trailer if it’s a step-up”, “I’m sure I wasn’t focused, and that’s why my horse didn’t canter,” “The dog was running around, so my horse couldn’t tie quietly.”

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is truth in all that. I wish all of us could do everything we do with our horses perfectly all the time. But sometimes something is going to be not quite right, and I think it’d be realistic if perhaps our horses could fill in sometimes and do it for us anyway. Don’t good friends and partners (and employees) do that? Maybe when the horse fills in, he’s rewarding OUR try, just as we strive to reward his. It’s a matter of balance and mindfulness.
If we didn’t have horses who could fill in, we would have no kids’ horses or school horses, or handicapped rider assistance horses and many of us would have never learned how to ride, or gotten killed or hurt in the process. Part of learning to ride used to be graduating from horses who filled in a LOT, to horses who filled in less and finally perhaps to horses who didn’t fill in at all.

There’s a practical side to a horse being able to fill in. Say we live in an area that has the possibility of natural disasters – say, forest or wild fires. We may get an evacuation notice and have to shove three horses, four dogs, two unhappy cats, our family and our most prized irreplaceable personal possessions in our trailer and pickup truck in the space of an hour, with sparks and ash falling around, fire engines going by and our cell phone ringing contstantly. If our horse can’t fill in a bit for us there, we might not get out.

It is an honorable quest to strive toward getting as good as we can at this stuff. Maybe a reasonable place to start is to just be mindful of when and if our horse is filling in for us, and being thankful for that if he does. It’s all about balance. Sometimes we fill in for him, and sometimes he fills in for us.

The other term we don’t hear much anymore is a mouthful: anthropomorphizing. This is, in short, the act of attributing human characteristics to something that is not human. Now, as humans, I would say that we don’t really have any other way to see the world than from our own perspective and frame of reference, so this is likely a very natural thing for us to do. We won’t go into the philosophical revolving door on that one. Let’s just look at the horsemanship part of this.

Recently, a student was using one of my horses for a lesson, and she had a bit of trouble catching this horse. Not a lot, just a little. Now, I hadn’t told her that this horse did tend to leave when you went to catch her because I didn’t want to set up that expectation in the person. The horse would walk off when any of us went to get her, and I thought it felt a bit like she’d been chased off in the past and she was just kind of looking for that to happen. She’d leave and then get caught.

I asked my student how catching went, and she said, “Well, I don’t think she feels like working today.”
That’s why a HUMAN would be hard to catch. I know for a fact this horse will work all day and I haven’t found the bottom of her yet. So we run the risk, when we anthropomorphize, of attributing negative character traits to horses who are just doing things that, in their own minds, may have a good reason or a neutral value.

I was working with a horse a while ago who had spent some time tied that day. When I approached him to put him back in his field, he raised his head up high, got kind of tight, and nickered at me. I’m human. I thought, “Awwww….” But I stopped in my tracks. His posture was tight. While the nicker was cute, the posture was not. I turned around and walked away. When I walked away I heard him shake his head, wring his tail and bang his feet on the ground. So did the nicker mean, “I love you,” or “Hurry up and put me away!”? Based on his behavior when I didn’t keep approaching, I’d say it was the latter. I carried on with the approach and retreat, walking away each time he nickered until he could stay quiet as I approached. Interestingly by the time he could let me approach without the nicker, his eye was soft and his body in a relaxed posture.

It’s human to interpret that nicker or whinny as affection. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. People sometimes interpret pushy horses as affectionate. How often do we attribute human emotions and actions to horses? Sometimes we’re right on, and sometimes it doesn’t do any of us any good. It’s balance again, and mindfulness.
As we go along our horsemanship journey, wherever we are in our journey, we can develop our mindfulness. For me, being mindful is about having an open mind. As I become mindful and aware, I do not always discover what I expect or what I already know. Often mindfulness leads me to unexpected discoveries, new truths and perhaps new beliefs. How exciting.