Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, The Sun by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. In the image, a baby is sitting on a white horse. Their arms and feet are out, starfish-style. They’re naked. The horse is not wearing reins or a saddle. There is a red flag flowing, a field of sunflowers behind them and the sun is looking over it all with a neutral facial expression.
I didn’t get to the barn much this summer and finally made it back on Friday. A few weeks ago after deferring yet another opportunity to ride I finally came clean to my teacher/friend that I hadn’t been feeling too good in my body, and was scared.
I did want to ride but suggested we take it way back to basics. No forward trots, no canters, no leaving the ring. And that’s what we did. I got on. We focused on transitions up—from walking to a light trot—and back down to a halt. And on the tools I’ve gathered these last years for requesting what I want or need. Voice, reins, leg, gaze, seat.
There’ve been quite a few times since I started riding that I’ve wanted to quit. I didn’t grow up around horses, I get scared easily, and like a lot of things in life the more you know how to do the more’s expected.
A canter with Ret through an overgrown meadow is mentally challenging for me even when I’m really well-resourced. It’s bliss when it goes well, but I know going in he’s more likely to spook or kick out in tall grass and I have to really work hard to trust. It’s risky worlding, which is a phrase Donna Haraway uses to describe relational intimacy and “how worlds come into being.”1 And I’m a lot less likely to take risks when I’m not feeling that sturdy to start.
In the Daily Cards email this past week (did you read them?!) I included The Sun because I keep pulling it. In Pamela Colman Smith’s depiction, a baby’s riding a white horse with no reins, no saddle, and no clothes on. I wrote about Haraway’s description of relationship as becoming available to each other in risky worldings. I love the language of becoming available, too. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
Back when I believed in the concept of a core, true self I sometimes wrote about The Sun card in those terms. Now that I imagine both truth and the self as always unfurling in relationship, Colman Smith’s image makes even more sense. Whatever a truth is or a self is, it’s on the way. And it never comes alone, hence the horse.
In the little piece I wrote on the card, I said that a good way to understand what people mean when they say that “the self is relational” is to lose someone. I was trying to say that to varying degrees, and depending on how comfortable we are being braided in with others, we do risk our very selves in relationships. But we gain ourselves too. Which is the bright side. Hence the sun.
Whether you call it relationship, intimacy, availability, risky worlding or riding a horse, we wager our selves in our involvements with others. I could literally die riding a horse. When we canter, “I” do die a little. And I don’t think it’s possible to become available to others securely, or remain unchanged by the encounter. We have wildly varying levels of risk tolerance around this too, plus different degrees of attachment to who we are. Not everyone’s trying get re-arranged, and that’s sensible, understandable, and fair.
As usual I think about the quote from philosopher Kelly Oliver which is that “love is an ethics of otherness that thrives on the adventure of otherness.”2 Typically when I’m reciting this sentence to whoever’s willing to listen I’m thinking about otherness in terms of the literal other. But right now I’m wondering if it’s also about how, when we avail ourselves to others, we our selves become other in the process.
That might be the hardest part of it all when you lose. If the beings I’m in deep with are making me up—nudging me in this direction or that, nurturing some capacities and not others—and I really give my self over to that process, what happens when I wake up one day and they’re gone? How do I find “my” way back to the shore if my whole notion of shore involved them? If we’re lucky, we get good at treading water until we can figure out which way to swim. But it’s risky worlding, for sure.