"With-you-ness"

Rain came in late last night.  I love my trailer but it's not actually designed to have me sleeping in it, and the nights were just a little bit cold.  Okay, that's a bald untruth - I'd been freezing my butt off.  One happy side-effect of shivering is that  I wasn't actually sleeping so I was up at 2:30 a.m. to see the sky ablaze with stars shining so incredibly brightly in the sky.  The rain had cleared out any haze from the day and the indelible black ink sky was the perfect background for the stars  glittering like diamonds against a velvet display like you might see in a fancy jewelry store.

Our jackets were on and off all day  as Day 2 of the Harry Whitney Five Day Intensive Horsemanship Clinic became known  as 'the day that could not make up its mind,' so it settled on being both hot and cold, intermittently. Tessa and Rose had come all the way from Maryland to audit and reunite with friends, and they were our visual thermometer as they alternately looked like they were either vacationing in Cabo or heading off to the slopes of Vermont.  

My Day 2 take-home lesson was something Harry calls "with-you-ness."  You won't find it in Webster's  but it sure stuck with me.  

Withyouness.  

My brain was buzzing as I tried to process just  how on earth to I could achieve with-you-ness in my own time with horses,  cognizant of the fact that my horsemanship tool box is much more limited than Harry's.  

I've been home a month now, and think about  with-you-ness almost daily.  I love coming across just the right word that I feel sums up a complex and profound topic, and I came across the Japanese word shibumi.  I like the word, plus it's fun to say.  Shibumi.  Reading about shibumi was also a quixotic pursuit as it too seems to be rather difficult to describe, but I came across some definitions that I love.  Shibumi was described in one work as authority without domination and as something one does not achieve, but one discovers.  I could see I was already off in the weeds with my thoughts of 'achieving' with-you-ness, as it was beginning to seem like some intangible secret-sauce.

In Broken, Tales of a Titanium Cowgirl I'd written that the pursuit of horsemanship is a life-long journey, not a destination.  The more I saw what was possible during these days of clinic, the more my head spun, and my eyes were continually opened to the potential and the beauty in having withyouness in a relationship.  The first two days of clinic had been filled with discovery and the wonder of  working with a horse who really feels good about what's going on.  As an active participant, a partner; not by coercion and not a by-stander.

A relationship founded on with-you-ness.  

It's not just for horses.

As I was feeding this morning I thought about how the horses had been waiting all night for their morning grub. To them, it wasn't a chore, it was survival.  It struck me how easy it is to fall into patterns of going through the motions. With our chores, our jobs, our relationships.   It's easy to tune out to watch a show, check our phone, watch the clock,  count the day down. I was going through the motions of throwing out hay, but the horses were completely invested in what I was doing.   Our thoughts were asynchronous.  I thought about what Harry had said of horses loving symmetry and how if you watch them, you'll see how they fall into synch with each other and they seek that synchronicity of movement with us too.   They'd rather be physically in synch with us than not.  Physically, which to a horse, translates to mentally.

I thought about those people and those moments where I am so engrossed in the person or the time that our interaction is just seamless and time just flies.  My friend Leslie and I have been best friends almost all our lives and we have a shared history and when we get together it's, well, it's with-you-ness.  

Withyouness, you've got my attention.  I'm still working it out.  Right now I'm seeing it as a body/mind connection where you're so engaged in the well-being of the other partner that you're attuned to the nuance of who they are, and where they are.  You see them, and you are seen in return.  That desire to be in synch with the other partner can be seen in a give and take, in unity.  No my way or the highway kind of stuff.  It reminds me of the blackbirds that gather  in huge groups to flock together in the winter months. They fly in such remarkable synchronicity with each other that I've nicknamed them the ribbon birds, as together they look like one long streaming black ribbon, a vortex of movement in symmetry. Each time I see them fly, my heart fills with the wonder of it all.

  I think I might be getting it Harry.