Sometimes We Need A Horse Like A Fish Needs Water
Another guest post from Eleanor D. Van Natta over at Sage By Nature. You can find more of her writing on her horse blog and be sure to check out the introduction to this post – Hold Your Horses, Your Amygdala Needs Them.
When you are thirsty for love, drink in your horse
“I was born
I was born to be with you
In this space and time
After that and ever after I haven’t had a clue
Only to break rhyme
This foolishness can leave a heart black and blue
Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love can heal such a scar”
U2, “Magnificent”, lyrics from the album “No Line On The Horizon”
U2’s Bono also sang years ago that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”, but I believe his message of love in the above lyrics rings true. Bono says you need love to get you from the scar to the healing.
Sometimes it’s the love of a horse that gets you there. A warm, living, breathing crutch for what ails your black and blue heart.
The Amygdala Enigma
I decided long ago that having Irish genes in me (my father’s parents both immigrated to this country from Ireland), a love of horses is just something I was destined to have. Perhaps with my parents divorcing just before I entered my teens, I was destined to appreciate and crave the bond with horses that much more.
When you create a safe emotional bond, your brain responds and remembers. It counteracts some of the negative effects of the alarms going off in your head from your amygdala, that part of your brain that yells “DANGER” to your body, ”prepare to fight or flee”. My brain was most assuredly screaming alarm when my mother left with my sister, leaving my brothers and me with my father.
My mother first went halfway across the country. When she moved back and lived right down the street, she was just as far away. While the amygdala may help the survival of species, it can wreak havoc on a person under constant, subconscious stress. There are all kinds of physiological changes that go on in your body when the alarm is going off, and over the long term, these can be damaging.
Cavalry To The Rescue
During this critical developmental period in my life, my teen years, I was blessed with the gift of horses. Betty, a friend of my mother’s who had horses, introduced me to them sometime in the year that my mother first separated from my father.
She would tell me years later that when she heard my mother was leaving, she knew that I would need something, something that maybe no other soul could supply as well as horses. Now they call it Equine Assisted Therapy, but back then its name to me was Desi, Calypso, and Gitano, and my E.A.T today lives on in the form of a horse called Sage.
My father had the good fortune of having moved to a house years earlier that was a five minute walk to a horse boarding facility. That place would become a lifeline to me, teaching me about horses, keeping me endlessly entertained and occupied, and even supplying me with my first job at the feed store right next to the barn.
I had good friends from school, confidants that I still have today, but during that time I think that the horses were as critical to my future development as anything else in my life and maybe more.
Horses listen, they don’t judge, and they are experts at bonding.
More to Come
If you haven’t already, go read Eleanor’s introduction and here’s the second part of this article.
About Eleanor
Eleanor Van Natta is a wife, a mother of two little girls, and a caretaker to one dog, one cat, and one horse. She has a Zoology degree from the University of CA, Davis, and prior to becoming a stay at home mom she had a career in environmental and pharmaceutical sales. You can find more of her writing on her website: Sage By Nature.
Image sources, frog on a bike wix, The amygdala–our inner nut cheerful monk & heartstring dev null