Week 5 with Dakota
What the horse taught me
We were in Fort Valley, Virginia, near the north end of Shenandoah. It was my birthday, and I could think of no other way I wanted to spend it than on a horse. It had been two years since I’ve last ridden, and the last time I’d ridden in the West Bank I barely made it out alive. My horse was a trained racehorse who, like me, had been held inside for too long. So when the rider beside me started to run with his horse, mine let completely loose. The other horse stopped, but mine kept running faster and faster towards a large concrete wall. It stopped right before it, barely touching it. Then, just as I was savoring the fact that we were both safe, the horse turned around and began sprinting towards the road. I could do nothing to stop it, and because it was a racehorse, its speed was beyond anything I could control.
I began to lose my grip. One of the trainers saw us and put himself in the way between the horse and the road. He had a second to get it right, or he’d be trampled by the horse. But then just as the horse approached him, full speed, the trainer pulled the reins and forced it to stop, just as I was beginning to slip. If he hadn’t, I might have fell, or been taken with the horse towards the road he was heading for.
My legs were shaking, but the trainer made me get right back on. He said (and he was right) if you don’t get back on now, you never will again. But I could not get myself to stand up properly, let alone ride a horse. He kept insisting until I did, but it wasn’t the same. I never felt any fear when riding a horse. I would run down mountains, take curves too quickly, be the first on the horse and the last to leave. By then, it was the end of my first year of Palestine. The girl who’d arrived a year ago was no longer the same. I was held together in pieces. I used to not know what it was like to not want to get out of bed, to not want the day, to not want to live. Then, it became all I knew.
But after two years had passed and I’d found my way to a horse again, I was shaken by what happened. For all my fear that this horse would let loose too, this one wouldn’t move. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how well I held the reins, it wouldn't budge. This too was a racehorse. And the trainer let me know that this one was hypersensitive to the rider’s emotions and movements. It must have known. It must have sensed my fear. I found it ironic how the last time I’d ridden the horse wouldn’t stop, and now this one wouldn’t even move. It’s as if somewhere in between I got stuck. In that moment, I realized this was so much more than a rider losing her confidence, this was more than about horses and a dangerous incident. This was about the broader image of my life, where I’d been, where I’d gone.
It was clear I was no longer the one in control. The horse ordered me, and not the other way around. And that is exactly how I’ve been feeling about life, as if it were dragging me on a rope through a dirt road, and I could do nothing but give myself to the one pulling. Somewhere between my pain and all my failed attempts to run from it, I got stuck someplace. One day I was running like crazy, one day, without knowing it, I couldn’t move anymore.
Where do I go now?
I spend so much of time talking and writing about what’s gone wrong and hardly anytime in figuring out how to solve it or what to do next. That’s the part I can’t seem to figure out. Now that I know, well, what’s happened, now that I’ve learned something after riding a horse this past week, what do I do now?
I think the first step lies in untangling all the different chords of pain harbored in me. There are so many sources, some related, some not. There’s 25 years of it, and when I sit down to write, it feels like all of them want to come pouring out of me at once. I want to say everything. Because of that, I end up saying nothing. I want to do everything, and end up with nothing done well.
I think it’s loss that gets us stuck. We lost something we once had. We want it back. We won’t accept something else in its place, something that after all may be better for us. We can’t accept the fleeting nature of things when it tampers with the most precious parts of our lives. Some things we allow life to take from us. We are bitter, but we let it. Other things, we simply can’t. We won’t allow it. Not for anything. And so when it does, as if to punish it, we remove the batteries from our clocks, lock the doors, and put time in our man-made prisons. We won’t let it move. But for all our feelings of vengeful triumph, we are, without knowing it, the ones being punished.
Still, how awful is that phrase, “let it go.” It’s like telling a cancer patient to let go of his cancer, as if it were something voluntary, something visible and within our reach to remove. It sounds absurd when someone says it to me, and my reply always is that if I could I would. Who willingly chooses to suffer when they have the choice not to?
But I know that any reasonable person would say that for all our inability to recover, we are in fact choosing to stay miserable. I think that’s unfair. I think within a certain degree of pain, the choice remains ours. But I think beyond that, the choice not to suffer cannot be made alone. With help, and with more time than is fair, the “letting go” can happen, but not without gathering every ounce of life in you to do this.
For me, I can’t let go until the “it” finds its form, whether its in a poem or a film or a painting. When the “it” finds a road out, it takes it, but the task is to build enough roads for every source of pain. For me, that means many many roads. For me, it means the way out lies in getting the hands to work in service of the pain, to help it deliver itself into the world like a newborn. It means tending to it as it is without attempting to translate, beautify, or change it.
But if pain stays in for too long, it begins to rot. There’s no art then, only rage and rage. That has already begun inside me.
A Sense of Movement
When I look inside me, I see only voids and voids, and the memories of what once stood in their place. I do not think of all that I can fill it with now. I try but often fail to see them as spaces waiting to be filled with something worthy. I don’t see their potential to be, but only what they are, now. And that’s how I got stuck, by focusing only on what was missing, and not what has passed to make room for something greater. I see what I am now, and cannot imagine the future to be any different. If I wake up to a dark morning, I imagine a thousand more to come. If I waste the day away without getting anything done, I imagine many more like it. If I am unheard, I assume the same silence for the rest of my life. I make permanent whatever I am suffering through, though if I’ve learned anything from life it is that everything is impermanent, the bad, the good, the precious goes in the end.
So if it means that life, with time, takes with it the dearest thing to your heart, can’t it also take away the most painful? Maybe I am falling into the same mistake of assuming it is life and not me that does the taking. It reminds me of this past week when I said out loud, My horse won’t move. And another girl on a horse said simply, If you want it to move, it will. At first, I thought, how sly her remark was. But then I realized she didn’t mean it like that at all. She meant it just as she had said it. You want it, you make it. You believe it, and it happens. Simple as that.
As I think of it more truthfully now, what was so precious and lost in my life was something I sensed I’d lose soon enough from the first day it came into my possession. I wanted it badly, though in wanting it and not having had it before, I was more scared than anything else. I could not enjoy what came to me. I did not think I was worthy of it, and because I thought so, I really did make myself unworthy. I expected him to part from my life, sooner or later. Maybe, without meaning to, I played a part in this parting. It doesn’t make sense, how you want something so badly, then it comes, then it shames you, drives you mad, and finally, you go about ruining it.
But beneath it all is fear, so much damn fear. Funny though how fear’s never stopped anything from happening. Life does its thing, whether you’re afraid or not. There’s hardly ever any real need for it. It’s like I’m walking through a forest and I have my ax tipped in the air for the danger that never comes and anyhow doesn’t exist. But you can’t live in that mode for too long or you begin to crumble. There is no life in the fields of fear. Its desolate land, lonely and wretched and far. There’s no riding horses, no writing, no laughter and love, no forgiveness, no kindness and tenderness, no art, no people. Nothing. Just dry, arid land.
“He didn’t know if she would come back to him or not. But she did. And the minute she settled, he forgot to love her in the same way.”
Kate Tempest, The Bricks that Built the Houses
I had everything I wanted, once. And just like that, I lost it all. One day, I’ll find the words and the way to tell my story, truthfully. But now, it feels like I’ve only managed to touch the hem of my pain, just barely, like the horse before the concrete wall. I am so close to my ruin, and, just as close to my salvation. There’s despair, and just as much hope. I am tugged in both directions, one day I am pulled to the right, the next day I’m pulled to the left. Or no, maybe it’s me that does the walking back and forth. I take a step to towards a possibility, then retreat towards a familiar hell. But one day, and soon enough, I’ll have to choose. I cannot remain stuck in this permanent migration between hope and hell, what can be, and what has passed.
a moment in heaven
