The Power of the Herd (27 page)

Late autumn over-cast

raindrops are sprinkling

splotch-necked cows are coming to drink

let us sing of Umaru's daughter….

Gusts of wind in the dusk

lightning at night

make us remember the season of rains

let us sing of Umaru's daughter….

Even the pang of the humming

of herdboys on a trek

does not equal that time when we talk

and we sing of Umaru's daughter….

Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;

And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;

And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,

Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;

Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon

Smooth away trouble

Riesman felt strongly moved by the Fulani women, and he obviously relished his time with the whimsical singing herdsmen who loved them, sometimes from afar, sometimes through clandestine trysts that broke all the rules (and yet were somehow silently tolerated — in traditional Muslim tribes, no less). Ultimately, however, he resisted the charms of these pastoral sirens, not only to remain faithful to his wife but because he was overwhelmed by the intimacy of the culture itself. He believed that he would have reacted in the same way had he been single.

Our relationship with the villagers
was one of friendship, though it was often described by them as a kind of kinship. It is true, older people all felt like parents to me, people my age were brothers and sisters, and younger people were our children. I was living in an atmosphere of warmth and security that I had never experienced in my own culture, and for which I was not prepared by my upbringing. It was like breathing pure oxygen. But the independence and freedom that I believe the Fulani experience in this atmosphere — I was afraid I could not [experience], for the independence that I am used to from my own life consists in being able to
withdraw, separate, and differentiate myself from everyone else. I feared that I didn't have the strength that the Fulani do to maintain my sense of self in such a tumult of feelings, for my defense-mechanisms were designed for an emotional economy of scarcity rather than abundance.

Ironically, Riesman's experience suggests that the sharo ceremony does not shut down the hearts of the tribe's young men, as one might expect from descriptions of its goal to face pain and fear without flinching. Rather, this ritual exercises the willingness to resist the flight-or-fight impulse in favor of embracing something larger, including, as it turns out, the quest for love itself.

Fulani culture offers to its members
a life that is supremely worth living. The individual is a member of the society from the day he is named (seven days after birth), but his adherence to it feels freely given rather than automatic or compelled, as I believe the quest for Woman shows. What this quest means to them cannot be put into words, except through their own poetry, for it is both specific and indefinite, limited and infinite. The important thing is that the Good in life is available to them within their culture and it calls from them the fullest expression of their individual personalities as they strive to obtain it. This quest cannot be mine, however, for there is nothing that calls me forth in the same way.

Riesman hinted at something key as he marveled at the Fulani's ability to cultivate
freedom through relationship.
As he saw it, this combination of power
and
connection created a platform from which an individual might soar and strive, not because he or she felt a nagging emptiness inside, but because the culture itself encouraged its members to love life, nature, and each other while also challenging people to grow beyond their own instincts and limitations. (The relationship between power, innovation, connection, and vulnerability is discussed in Guiding Principle 5 [
chapter 17
] along with strategies to increase tolerance for vulnerability.)

“I think that many Westerners feel that our culture
does not offer anything worth striving for,” Riesman concludes. “For myself and others who share this feeling, then, the search is for something to want, rather than for something we know we want.” The author admitted that his search “begins from a feeling of essential non-relatedness to the rest of the world, while for the Fulani the beginning is in a set of relationships that the person finds himself to be in with other beings.”

During his journeys through Fulani country, this adventurous anthropologist and his equally adventurous wife glimpsed a kind of emotional heroism we could all stand to develop, one that allows people to risk opening their arms
wide to love and beauty with the same courage and strength they need to face fear and pain.

This is not a path for naive idealists, however. It involves developing the feminine arts of caring and nurturing in concert with the masculine energy of courage, power, and protection. It involves men and women who are willing to feel vulnerable, change, and become something greater through the sharos and pleasures of life itself.

H
ooves laced with steel
seemed to come at me from all directions as a coal-black stallion named Midnight Merlin ripped the lead rope out of my hands, bucked, whirled around, and lunged at me, rearing, striking, raging at a ghost. All I could do was hold my ground and pray that I was fierce enough to win his trust.

“I don't want to be this strong person,” I kept saying over and over to myself, fighting the urge to run screaming out of the arena as he attacked me once again for no apparent reason. To contain this violence, I would need to tap a form of power I wasn't even sure existed. But first I had to get over my resistance to the by-then-blatant fact that gentleness, sympathy, and understanding couldn't begin to transform this savage, wounded force. Most important, I had to forgive. Forgive Merlin for threatening to kill me. Forgive myself for taking on such a ridiculously volatile case. And much more difficult, forgive the misguided training techniques, the clumsy, ignorant, unnecessarily aggressive approach that had turned him into such a monster.

And finally, I had to recognize, reluctantly, that it was a
woman,
not a man, who brutalized and betrayed this sensitive, virile horse.

Midnight Merlin was the most dangerous kind of stallion: powerful, agile, intelligent, and angry. His first owner, a New Mexico–based horse breeder named Shawnee Allen, appreciated his flamboyant beauty for its own sake. The horse was rarely ridden or exercised formally, as his black Egyptian Arabian bloodlines and stunning presence made him a valuable sire. His owner had other, much calmer horses to saddle up when she wanted to hit the trails. Most
days, Merlin ran freely through grassy, tree-lined pastures, where he was able to play with some geldings over the fence when he wasn't mating mares.

The problem began when Shawnee sold him at age ten to “Lacey,” a well-respected local trainer, through a deal that involved some cash and some trade in starting one of Shawnee's other colts under saddle. Yet when Shawnee stopped by this woman's stable a few weeks later to see how the younger horse was progressing, she found Merlin standing in the corner of a darkened box stall with his head tied between his legs. The stallion was spoiled and destructive, Lacey insisted; he needed to be taught a lesson.

Shawnee decided then and there to buy Merlin back, but the damage was already done. Her occasionally outlandish, yet good-natured, horse was fearful and aggressive, filled with rage and mistrust of anyone who walked around on two legs. Shawnee had no idea how to coax him out of his increasingly violent and unpredictable state. The horse seemed to have flashbacks similar to the extreme forms of posttraumatic stress that some soldiers experience. Eventually, Shawnee came across a confident, smooth-talking trainer who seemed to have some rapport with Merlin. With promises to safely rehabilitate the horse and market him throughout the Southwest as a stud, the man loaded Merlin onto his trailer and drove off, only to abandon him sometime later at a Tucson boarding stable called The Ranch.

Shawnee felt incredible remorse. More than once she had tried to do right by Merlin, only to have him return worse off than when he left. Though she loved the horse, she knew she couldn't handle him. After talking with The Ranch owners, who had introduced Merlin to me as a possible mate for my black Arabian mare Rasa, Shawnee decided to give it one last try. If I could develop a consistent and constructive rapport with the horse in one year's time, she would turn Merlin's papers over to me. If not, she would trailer him back to New Mexico and let him live out the rest of his life on pasture.

Stallions like Merlin often rebel under our current system of domestication. Mares and geldings commonly live in herds, or at least touch noses over adjoining corrals. Most colts, however, lose any hope of a social life the moment some human deems them worthy of breeding. (To remain intact is to be sentenced to a stall, hence the word
stallion.)
People admire them from afar, yet the vast majority of studs in the United States lead lives incongruent with the passion, freedom, and magnificence they represent. They're worked on a strict schedule, turned out in solitary confinement, relentlessly showed and campaigned to bring in the best breeding price. And when they finally do get to mate, their
every move is choreographed at the end of a chain “for their own safety.” Because when profit is the only motive, it's too inefficient, too risky, too time-
and
imagination-consuming to help young stallions learn how to court mares on their own, let alone form relationships with their handlers other than through the most rudimentary dominance-submission protocols.

Merlin suffered in the clash between two worlds. Shawnee had given the young stallion a life of relative freedom. Sensitive to his needs and moods, she found ways of compromising with him. In part because she appreciated his flash and fire, she found the stallion amiable and, over time, trustworthy. She actually trained him to gallop across the pasture and rear over her to show off his agility and vitality to prospective breeding clients.

Merlin's subsequent trainer, however, read this same ritual as a threat. Seeing Shawnee as a “horse-lover” (a dirty word in some conventional training circles), Lacey decided to “correct” this “spoiled,” presumptuous behavior, and not just by beating Merlin. Far worse for horses (who are naturally claustrophobic), she sentenced him to the most demeaning, blatantly spirit-breaking punishment possible, a trip to the dungeon: a darkened stall where his head, tied between his legs, made him bow down to his mistress, and hold that position, not just in submission but in shame — and no small amount of pain.

Perhaps his spirit would have been broken if Shawnee hadn't recovered him. Knowing Merlin, it's more likely that he would have injured Lacey, or broken one of his own legs in the process, either way invoking an equine version of “Give me liberty or give me death!”

And yet the moment he was given a second chance, Merlin's journey as my teacher began. For with this supremely damaged, vengeful horse, I learned that kindness wasn't enough to heal the wounds of misused power. I had to become powerful myself, yet in a much different way than most people would expect. I had to access the
yang
inside the
yin.
And I couldn't do it on my own.

Though I tried all kinds of conventional and innovative training and therapeutic strategies, my only hope of healing Merlin's traumatized, mal-socialized masculinity involved harnessing the power of an entire herd and finding the right people to help me in this unconventional project. During the decade I worked, played, and lived with Merlin, until his death in 2009, I became something akin to a master herdsman as circumstances forced me to balance the roles of dominant, leader, midwife, nursemaid, and devoted, trusted companion to a growing black-horse family.

Because he was so dangerous to ride, I was forced to relate to this volatile male presence exclusively on the ground, like the Fulani with their cattle. And though Merlin didn't have horns (thank God), his previous trauma made it dicey to even think about letting him live and mate off lead with my beloved
mares Rasa and Comet. After all, he hadn't been raised in a culture that socialized intact males from an early age with the help of an entire interspecies tribe. If anything, the sedentary “civilized” approach to horse breeding and training created the destructive combination of unchecked dominance and disconnection that led to Merlin's insanity.

Most people thought I was equally crazy for even attempting to rehabilitate him and were skeptical of my every move. As a result, I felt renewed and supported when I encountered descriptions of the Fulani through Meg Daley Olmert's pivotal book
Made for Each Other
in 2011, quickly absorbing as much research as I could find on this interspecies society. Lott and Hart's insights helped me better understand the transformative skills I developed with my black-horse family. Socializing Merlin, and later his sons, taught me many of the same lessons about dominance, leadership, and companionship that created a balanced approach to male power in Fulani culture — although my colleagues and I accessed these principles through much confusion, grief, frustration, and, at times, sheer terror. Equally important were Riesman's accounts of the profound intimacy and freedom-through-relationship this lifestyle engendered. (I highly recommend reading his 1974 book,
Freedom in Fulani Social Life,
not only for its detailed descriptions of Fulani life and philosophy, but for the author's perceptive contrasts between the nomadic pastoralist mind-set and his own intrinsically isolated, starkly mechanized modern psyche.)

Ultimately, I was saddened, though not surprised, to find that the Fulani culture Lott, Hart, and Riesman had chronicled forty years earlier was approaching extinction in 2012. Like the Apaches who once roamed freely through southern Arizona, across the very lands where my horses and I recovered a hint of this ancient wisdom, Africa's nomadic tribes were systematically being assimilated into a sedentary life that offered them poverty, disconnection, confusion, and depression (
an emotion that, Riesman noted, the Fulani didn't have a word for
in the 1970s).