Nature Speaks

Letting go of control and following deeper knowing

I grew up loving horses.

Days spent riding through the mountains, the air alive with heather and stone, the rhythm of hooves carrying me further than my own legs ever could. Sometimes forty of us would ride out together – a long, moving line threading its way into the wild.

One summer, still a teenager, I was asked to lead the trek.

Fear rose immediately: “But I don’t know the way.”

I’d ridden it many times, but never memorised each turn, each crossing.

The stable owner smiled gently.

“You don’t need to know. The horse knows the way. He’ll hesitate twice. The first time, guide him left. The second time, guide him right.”

And so it was. The horse slowed, paused, listened. Twice I gently tugged the reins, just enough to point him onward.

I often return to that memory. How easily we invent problems that aren’t there. How often we complicate the simple paths of life.

Milton Erickson, the great hypnotherapist, told a story much like this. A stray horse wandered into his family’s yard. He climbed onto its back and let the animal choose the road. When it strayed to graze, he gently steered it back. Eventually, the horse found its way home – miles down the track.

“I didn’t know where it belonged,” Erickson explained. “But the horse knew.”

He taught his students to trust in this same quiet wisdom – the deep unconscious, the part of us that remembers the way even when our thinking minds do not.

Perhaps life is less about control than we imagine.

We make plans, yes. We prepare, yes. But sooner or later there comes a moment when the wisest thing we can do is loosen our grip and allow ourselves to be carried by something older, deeper, more knowing.

The horse remembers.

The wild remembers.

And so do we.

As Carl Jung once observed, “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”

The deeper pattern is already there, moving beneath the surface of things. Our task is not to force it into being – but to trust it enough to be carried home.

And when we do, we find that what we were searching for was never really lost.

It was waiting quietly within us, like the horse who already knew the way.

May you listen for the wild wisdom that carries you home.

Picture: Leonardo da Vinci