I’ve not noticed many horsemen speak of intimacy. For the most part it's a subject rarely touched upon, even though there is hardly anything more intimate than putting a piece of iron attached to reins in a horse's mouth and climbing on his back. Most of us do this without a thought of how the horse might feel about this. We just think he ought to do what we ask, when we ask, under whatever circumstances we ask, no questions asked. But, we miss out on a large part of the picture when we never consider what it means to be intimate with a horse.

Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines the verb intimate as communicating delicately and indirectly and the noun intimate as being marked by a warm friendship developed through long association. Neither love nor sex is mentioned, although that seems to be the modern context in which intimacy is understood. Intimacy has come to be quite the buzzword among therapists. Anyone who visits a therapist is likely to find himself working on issues surrounding a fear of intimacy - the assumption being the vast majority of people suffer from some degree of intimacy phobia. It is accepted as one of those diseases of the personality that afflict us poor, screwed-up, modern humans. What is rarely questioned is the idea of fear of intimacy itself. Why should we be afraid of intimacy? What an absolutely ridiculous thing! Are we really afraid of communicating delicately and indirectly or developing warm friendships through long association? No. What we really fear is the unknown, and we humans have lost our familiarity with intimacy.

Our modern culture, in its worship of competition and domination and survival of the fittest, taught us that intimacy had no real value. We learned to wall ourselves off from nature completely. We set ourselves on an imaginary pedestal far above the rest of creation. God, after all, had granted us dominion over every living thing. We had some sort of special divine dispensation that our fellow creatures had been deprived of and somehow we took that to mean we could use them however we saw fit. That psychological stance, the requirement to use, abuse and dispose of another sacred being in service to our own survival required a very profound change in our being. It required that we not identify with the creatures we abused. We had to distance ourselves from nature in order to lord it over her and beat her into submission. It would have been impossible for us to treat the rest of nature with such utter disregard if we experienced everything as an extension of ourselves. We had to learn how not to be intimate. We had to become the opposite of intimate. We had to give up delicate and indirect communication and forget about developing warm friendships.

We have nearly lost ourselves down this trail of separation and the technological bending of nature to our will. We don't understand that the virtue of cooperation is fundamental to the survival of every living thing. Competition is secondary. Sure, it exists, but it is minor. We have convinced ourselves by the repetition of the lie, that this world is dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest, kill-or-be-killed. It's become a game of king of the hill for us humans. Our whole culture reflects this, yet we are loathe to see it in ourselves. Even if we recognize and acknowledge that this mistake of perception exists, it is extremely difficult to give it up and see things from a different perspective.

When we try to elicit the cooperation of a horse and we want to do it without coercion or competition we often swing to the other extreme and refuse to do what is required to get willing cooperation. We think that changing our viewpoint means being all nice with sugar and spice and we give up asserting ourselves. But that is not it either. Cooperation is give and take. It is about understanding the other being and what their needs are. It is about fulfilling another's needs in exchange for having needs of our own fulfilled. It is about intimacy - which brings us back to what we know so little about.

Ray Hunt and Tom Dorrance have been instrumental in bringing a new approach, or rekindling an ancient approach to horsemanship into the limelight. But there was something that Tom was trying to pass on that Ray fears he didn't, and may never get. To people that knew Tom he was an extraordinary individual. He had an understanding of the horse that was unsurpassed by any modern day horseman. He talked about getting to the inside of the horse - acquiring this feel that came from the inside of the person to the inside of the horse and back again. Well, wouldn't that be intimacy? It certainly seems that way. Of course, talking intimacy with cowboys is like a wife telling her husband she wants to talk about feelings. Most men cringe at the thought. Is this because men are naturally averse to intimacy or feelings? No, it's because of what we have learned. Like Ray says, the horse lives what he's learned - so do we - men and women alike.

We have been carefully and methodically domesticated and civilized. The process took a severe toll on our ability to be intimate. For some reason, whether religious, scientific, or social we were taught to disconnect from the heart of our own wild being in order to become domesticated, civilized humans. That wild part of our being was deemed evil by religious thought, dumb and inanimate and unfeeling by scientific thought, and detrimental to human survival in social thought. For these reasons humans were carefully, methodically, and often cruelly domesticated. Cultures that maintained a sacred connection to the earth and refused the onslaught of domestic civilization were slaughtered. Intimacy with the earth was oft considered sexual perversion. Women with knowledge of herbs and natural healing processes were called witches and burned at the stake. The accusation of riding flying broomsticks, an obvious reference to promiscuity, secured their fate as whores in league in with the devil. Any hint of intimacy was systematically removed from our beings as it was ruthlessly removed from our culture.

My point is that we are unable to be intimate with others, with nature, and even with ourselves because we have been taught that intimacy is a bad thing. We cannot trust nature in our own beings, much less trust nature around us. We have been taught to believe that we are in a life and death struggle against a cruel world. We have to be saved from our struggle by an angry and jealous god who can tolerate neither our human mistakes, nor our sinful desire to enjoy the fruits of a natural world that he created. It's no wonder we have such problems in our modern societies. Virtually all our social problems stem from the simple fact that we are unable to truly experience intimacy with another person, with ourselves, or with the marvelous creation we are a part of. Our sanity is measured by how well we adjust to a social structure that is itself insane.

We are not naturally afraid of intimacy. We are taught to be so. Intimacy with the world is our birthright as human beings. Intimacy with the natural world and the creatures we share it with is what we are born to experience. It is the ultimate gift of a benevolent creator. It is only we who have refused it.

So, how do we learn to be intimate? We don’t. We have to unlearn the habits of competition and domination that we have learned. We have to give up our arrogance. Intimacy is natural. It does not have to be learned. It need only be experienced by giving up our place on the pedestal, by realizing that we are no better or worse than our horses, and that we are all strands in the web of life. As Chief Seattle said, “The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth.”