Shakespeare and What Horses Offer the Human Heart

This year in honor of The Shakespeare Effect Series by Peggy Rubin, there will be a thread throughout all of our Saturday events, weaving Shakespeare’s genius into our exploration of the horse/human connection.

This past Saturday, May 20, was entitled Challenging Times Call for New Strategies: What Horses Offer Us.  Exploring the large heartedness of the horse through the four aspects of unconditional love, compassion, perceiving innate harmony in all things, and healing presence, we walked and recited our way into a passage from Love’s Labors Lost, with such lines as:

But love, first learnèd in a lady’s eyes,
Lives not alone immurèd in the brain,
But with the motion of all elements
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye—
A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.
A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound
When the suspicious head of theft is stopped.
Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.

Later, after FINE TUNING OUR SENSES (as horses habitually embody) to what we could see, hear, touch, taste and smell regarding our own personal challenges, STEPPING INTO OUR OWN HEART CENTER for the heart’s messages, exploring the power of COMMUNITY as herd animals like horses know so well, and TRUTH-TELLING which horses feel as congruence in the energy fields around them (through the story “The Czar’s Ears”) – the FOUR GIFTS that horses offered us this day – we performed improvisational explorations of our own new strategies with one of the horses as a fellow actor in our teams.

We were delighted to be hosted for this event by Carol Margulies at the lovely Bella Menagerie, with their five dogs, llamas, goats, alpacas, and horses.

Thursday, June 8, 10am – 3 pm, we are offering a special session for participants in the third session of The Shakespeare Effect which begins that evening, a whole day on what Shakespeare and horses offer the human heart. If you are interested in joining us, contact Trish.

Otherwise, we will be including Shakespeare in our Saturday events on June 17, July 15 and September 16. See Events page to register.