YOGAJOURNAL.COM 79ATLE RØNNINGEN/STOCKSY
like an oversized duffle bag. Or you could,
however briefly, connect.
The horses I was working with came with
their own complexities. Most of the year,
they ran wild across the treeless, volcanic
expanse—loving, fighting, helping, constantly
establishing their position within the herd.
But when the farmers tracked them down,
corralled them into a fenced field and saddled
them up, they became, like their riders, part of
a unit committed to following and carrying.
The step, step, step of the tolt focused
my attention on the horses’ subtler cues:
eyes open or half-closed, tails high or
lackluster, ears twitched back toward me
or slanted front toward the horse ahead.
Thoughts and emotions, both mine and my
powerful partner’s, flowed in and out of my
consciousness without judgement. Each
time I dismounted and pulled off the saddle,
my temporary companion would vanish into
the sea of brown, black, and white spots,
stripes, thick manes, long, lush tails—back
into the hierarchy of the herd. We had days
and days of this ahead.
After a week, I began to see how
I functioned within my own herd. I realized
that the indignities of the proverbial work
saddle were temporary. The real or imagined
slights against my authority would come and
go, like clouds across the sky.
Back in the office in Boston, where
I live, I found that I’d developed a newer,
healthier sense of time, which made me
more empathetic to those around me; my
perspective had become at once vast—like
the mountains and glaciers of Iceland—
and highly focused, like the twitch of
a horse’s ear.I was a burnt end, a frayed electrical cord, a tea kettle whistling
on the stove just about boiled dry. I’d been working two jobs
for a decade, and I found myself in the paradoxical position of
having a little extra money and zero joy. Snippets of free time that
occasionally landed at my feet only provoked my anxiety. I was too
bound up in every little thing.
How could I heal myself? I’d always chafed at the idea that
travel alone can mend a person. It seems at once too literal and too
extravagant—that a physical escape is the only fix, and, ironically,
that such a cure requires so much money (stress), time (stress!), and
planning (ditto!). But that spring, I began to worry about the damage
this anxiety might be doing to my body. I Googled two things I love:
“horses and Iceland.” Then, in mid-July, I found myself in a van with
a dozen other women watching Iceland’s lunar-like landscape pass us
by through a blur of arctic rain. We were heading to the horses.
Vague memories of a trip to Iceland decades ago had guided
me here. Little did I know that the meditative power of a five-day
camping trip in the saddle was beyond powerful.
As soon as I hit the trail, the incessant rhythm of the swift and
unrelenting tolt—a four-beat trot unique to Icelandic horses—
dominated everything, focusing my mind and body into a kind of
magical clock whose hands only counted seconds instead of minutes
or hours. In the saddle, riding in the tolt, I found myself gently rocked
into the moment. There was no future and no past. Only now.
This deep moving meditation was also shaped by the barren
land itself. Without the scale of trees, distances were impossible
to judge. We traveled over an endless expanse of rock and grass. In
July at that latitude, the sun never sets. Instead, the sky became an
ever-changing study of the vicissitudes of clouds sweeping across in
an eternal afternoon. Lacking the cues of day and night, my world
became intensely focused on the hypnotic rhythm of hooves hitting
the velvety volcanic earth.
Which is why, on the second day of rolling with the tolt, I became
more attuned to my equine partners—the dozen or so horses I’d
bestride over the course of this trip. Riding an animal requires
forming a partnership with a silent, ambivalent teammate. Though
your destinies are bound together, as in any job, there are different
ways of going about it. You could both slog through—the horse
burdened by his cargo, and you, accordingly, feeling a little too muchAlong for the Ride
Five days across Iceland via horseback forced me to slow down and
focus on what was in front of me all along.RACHEL SLADE is a Boston-based journalist and author of Into the Raging Sea, a gripping account of the sinking
of the American cargo ship El Faro. Learn more at rachelslade.net.