Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, The Sun by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. In the card, a baby is riding a white horse. The baby has their arms and legs out wide, their chest is broad and their face looks at ease. Behind them is a glowing sun with a relaxed human face, a wall and a bunch of sunflowers behind it. Behind the card are a bunch of plants on a shelf by a window.
I’ve thought everyday these last weeks about Barbara Smuts’ words: “Closely interacting bodies tend to tell the truth.1” There are a few reasons for this and one is that the dog trainer told Mango and I to do structured play everyday, but so often I don’t feel like playing.
So I go through the motions. I dangle the fuzzy toy. I flip it around on the ground to entice him. I say “stay with me,” which is a thing I say to keep him engaged that only sometimes works since he struggles with sentences.
Mango loves to play more than anything in this world but he knows when my heart is not in it. In such times, rather than go for the thing I’m dangling he’ll wander off for a stick or to chase after a squirrel. We have two huge oaks and a black walnut tree in our yard, so lots of squirrels. Squirrels whose hearts are in all that they do.
Theologian Catherine Keller has written that “truth seems to be an interaction.2” It’s not so much that I’m telling a truth to Mango or he’s telling one to me, but that a truth is being told by our bodies.
I can sometimes change the dynamic between us by moving in a way that mimics enthusiasm simply because moving that way tends to shift how I feel. But it doesn’t always, which are times the trainer says I should put down the toy and start training. Come, sit, stay, lay down, up, touch. Because there are so few words with shared meaning between us, I’m learning the language of bodies.
I am very fortunate for a lot of reasons and one is that my riding teacher is a Capricorn. In other words, she has kept a meticulous archive of photos and videos from my lessons since I started three falls ago.
Last year I was riding faster and more comfortably than I ever thought I would, as a person in my late thirties who never rode as a kid. Like the clear-seeing princess on the white bear king’s back,3 my seat was solid, shoulders back, hips working like joints as they’re meant to.
And then something happened. My body became much less trusting. I could tell you the tale or you could just see how I ride now: Me on Ret last fall versus me on Ret this one.
With our six legs together we say plainly and truly what so quickly gets mucked up by words. Words which get hijacked by instincts to blame or shame or demand. I don’t even think these truths need that. I think they just need to be witnessed.