Chevalia, The Way of the Horse, Book One, Chapter Six

The Veil Between Worlds

Every culture that has contemplated the mystery of life eventually arrives at the same question: What lies beyond the threshold of physical life? Is the boundary between the visible and invisible absolute, or does consciousness continue in ways the waking mind struggles to perceive?

Ancient traditions did not avoid this question. Many built their understanding of existence around it, regarding death not necessarily as the end of consciousness, but as a transformation in the way consciousness expresses itself.

One of the clearest statements appears in the Katha Upanishad, an ancient dialogue between a young seeker named Nachiketa and Yama, the lord of death:

“The Self is not born, nor does it die.It did not spring from anything, and nothing sprang from it.Unborn, eternal, everlasting, ancient,it is not slain when the body is slain.”

— Katha Upanishad 1.2.18

The Tibetan contemplative traditions also explored the passage between physical life and what may lie beyond it in teachings later known as the Bardo Thodol, often translated as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Across cultures and centuries, human beings have returned to this threshold again and again, sensing that what appears to be an ending may instead be a change in the expression of consciousness.

For most of my life, however, these teachings came after experience. I did not begin with ancient texts and then search for evidence that they were true. Life brought me to the threshold first. The words of the ancients came later, often with the strange familiarity of recognizing something I had already encountered.

The Horse at the Threshold

The horse appears again and again in ancient traditions concerned with consciousness, passage, and the relationship between earthly and spiritual existence. Plato described the soul in the Phaedrus through the image of a charioteer and winged horses. Norse mythology tells of Odin riding Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse capable of traveling between worlds. Across Celtic lands, Epona was associated with horses, protection, and passage.

One of the most extraordinary images appears at the opening of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad. There the horse is contemplated cosmically. Dawn is associated with its head, the sun with its eye, the wind with its breath, the year with its body. Heaven becomes its back, the sky its belly, earth its foundation. The seasons correspond to its limbs, the stars to its bones, clouds to its flesh, rivers to what moves within its body, mountains to its inner organs, and plants and trees to its hair.

When I first encountered imagery such as this, it did not make the horse sacred to me. Living among horses had already done that. The ancient words gave language to something I had felt for years: the horse as a magnificent expression of the Divine, carrying within itself the same Source from which everything arises.

This is how I have come to understand all existence. The Earth, the cosmos, animals, plants, water, forests, oceans, mountains, and human beings are expressions of the same inexhaustible Source. Each comes into being with its own gifts, qualities, individuality, and way of expressing the Divine, while the totality of Source is present within each.

There is a beautiful Sufi teaching that expresses this understanding: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”

The Divine is within and without, and yet we never arrive at the end of it. Source is infinite, and our discovery of it is equally without end. Every relationship reveals another depth, every experience opens another doorway, and every encounter with life offers another way of knowing the Divine within ourselves and throughout the Whole.

This is what Know thyself has come to mean to me. Knowing oneself is an infinite journey into the Divine within and the Divine expressed around us. We discover ourselves through relationship—with one another, with animals, with the trees and forests, with water and earth, with the cosmos, and with the countless forms through which Source continually reveals itself.

Living this way returns awe and wonder to ordinary life. We never arrive at a final answer and declare ourselves finished. There is always another relationship, another mystery, another expression of life inviting us into deeper communion.

The horse has been one of the great doorways into that remembrance for me. Their physical power, sensitivity, presence, individuality, and extraordinary capacity for relationship have continually drawn me out of abstraction and into direct experience.

The Misunderstanding of the Horse

Yet living among horses does not necessarily mean we have truly encountered them.

A horse can be well fed, beautifully groomed, sheltered, and carefully managed while still being subjected to control, forced into submission, denied the freedom to express an opinion, and treated as property whose own will is considered secondary to the desires of the human.

Physical care alone does not create communion. Ownership does not grant us authority over the essential being of another life. The horse has preferences, boundaries, emotions, relationships, desires, and the capacity to say yes or no.

The horse has an opinion. The horse has a will. And the horse has sovereignty.

Much of the human world has been conditioned to approach horses through function. When people learn that we live with horses, one of the first questions is often, “Do you ride them?” Then come questions about discipline, training, performance, breeding, or what the horse does.

Yet the first question that began to matter to me was much simpler:

Who are you?

That question changes relationship.

The horse ceases to be something whose value is determined by usefulness. We begin to encounter an individual whose life has meaning independent of what that life can provide to us.

The Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi told of a great tree considered useless because its twisted wood could not be made into lumber. Because no one could find a profitable use for it, the tree was left alone and lived out its life. The story has stayed with me because it exposes something deeply embedded in human perception: our tendency to measure the worth of life according to what can be extracted from it.

Imagine instead perceiving life as sacred before usefulness ever enters the question.

The horse has taught me that sovereignty begins there.

Every being arrives complete. Worth does not depend upon productivity, obedience, performance, status, ownership, or usefulness. A life does not need to justify its existence.

The same understanding reaches beyond animals. Air, water, food, land, forests, oceans, trees, and the elements are gifts of nature before human beings assign ownership or monetary value to them. We are nature. We belong within the same living system we so often attempt to possess.

Our innate dignity is not something another person or institution grants us. Peace, freedom, love, and the right to exist authentically are not rewards for compliance. Sovereignty carries responsibility because our lives are inseparable from relationship. It asks us to meet other beings with mutual respect, to recognize boundaries, and to live without turning freedom into domination.

We are stewards of the Tao.

Living among horses has made that understanding increasingly tangible for me. Relationship becomes invitation rather than domination. Leadership does not require subjugation. Boundaries can be clear without aggression. Listening becomes as important as asking. Even riding, when it occurs, becomes something shared rather than something automatically taken.

Our horses taught us the depth of this through an experience I never anticipated.

Sovereignty in Conception

When we began breeding horses, we approached it with great reverence. Breeding was sacred to us. We loved our horses deeply, and we believed we were respecting their will. Yet as the years passed, the horses themselves led us into a much deeper understanding of what respect for their sovereignty actually required.

We performed all of the semen collections ourselves, and I personally performed every insemination of the mares on our property. In the beginning, we did not fully consider that our stallions might care where the life they were offering was going. Because the stallion was physically separated from the mare during artificial collection, it was easy from a human perspective to assume that his participation ended with the collection.

Our stallions showed us otherwise.

They knew.

Not one mare outside our farm conceived when the stallion did not approve. Whatever we thought we understood about the mechanics of reproduction, something else appeared to be occurring within the relationships themselves, an awareness and an agreement that we could not initially see.

The mares were equally clear.

As our breeding program progressed, we began to recognize that they, too, seemed to choose whether they would conceive, with whom, and when. They were decisive. Conception began to reveal itself to us as something in which both mare and stallion were participating in ways far deeper than we had understood.

There seemed to be an agreement between them that existed beyond anything we were orchestrating. We could manage timing, collect semen, perform inseminations, and attend to every physical detail, yet the horses continued to show us another level of participation. Gradually we began to recognize it, and it brought us into humility and awe.

Because I performed all of the inseminations of our mares myself, I was intimately present for those moments. We approached each insemination with as much reverence as we knew how to bring. There were times when, within that stillness and complete presence, I simply knew a mare would conceive. I knew there would be a baby. At times, I also knew whether the foal would be a colt or a filly.

I cannot explain that knowing through technique. It arose through communion and relationship, through being completely present within something that felt profoundly sacred. There was a sense that the mare wanted our participation and was welcoming us into an experience that ultimately belonged to her, the stallion, and the life coming into being.

To be welcomed into that was profoundly humbling. We were allowed to participate near the very inception of a life. Later, we would be with the mare as she gave birth and watch that new being take its first breath. Over the years, we would come to know the individual who had entered the world.

One stallion brought the lesson of sovereignty into even sharper focus. He had a chosen mare whom he loved. When she transitioned to spirit, something changed in him. During attempted semen collection afterward, he would no longer offer.

We knew his heart, and because we knew him, we could not dismiss what he was telling us.

By then the pattern was becoming impossible for us to overlook. The stallions were choosing. The mares were choosing. There was communication, preference, relationship, and an awareness moving among them that our breeding practices had not originally accounted for. We had entered the program believing that we were respecting the horses. They taught us how much deeper that respect needed to go.

Sovereignty is sovereignty, wholly and completely.

Their sovereignty extended to their bodies, their relationships, their choices, and the life they participated in creating. Once we understood what they were showing us, continuing the breeding program no longer felt aligned with what they had taught us.

So we stopped.

They said no, and we listened.

I have never regretted that decision.

From Knowledge to Knowing

To be welcomed into the conception and birth of a foal is extraordinarily beautiful and humbling. There is a quality of presence in those moments that is almost impossible to put into words. The physical and the spiritual seem to come together, and for a little while the ordinary world becomes transparent to something far greater.

I have felt Source in those moments, both beyond me and within me. There is such tenderness in being present as a new being enters physical form, such awe in realizing that we have been allowed to participate in something so intimate and sacred. The mind grows quiet before it. There is simply the overwhelming beauty of being there.

I have known that same sacredness at the other threshold, when accompanying a beloved horse through transition.

Those moments ask everything of the heart. There is sorrow because we love the physical presence of those who have shared our lives. We know the sound of them, the feel of them, the particular way they move through the world. Every part of us wants to hold them here.

When I am able to surrender the fear and resistance and become completely present with them, something extraordinary happens.

Beauty enters.

It is a beauty I have never found an adequate word for. It moves through the tenderness and the tears and fills the experience with something so profound that sorrow alone can no longer contain what is happening.

My daughters and I have experienced this through the transitions of the animals who have shared our lives—horses, dogs, and cats. At these times, animals we have loved who have already transitioned have become palpably present to us again.

We feel them.

Their presence seems to permeate the experience so completely that the boundaries I ordinarily feel between one being and another begin to soften. The horse who is transitioning is there. My daughters are there. I am there. And somehow, those beloved beings who have already transitioned are present too.

The experience is almost too intimate for language.

There are moments when I no longer know where my own soul ends and the others begin. I feel immersed in them. The horse transitioning before me seems to merge more deeply into my own being, while the presence of those who have transitioned before seems to gather within the same communion. My daughters are part of it as well. We remain ourselves, yet the separation between us seems to disappear.

For those moments, there is simply us.

It feels like a convergence of souls, as though love has gathered every one of us into a single presence. The individuality of those I love remains unmistakable. I know them. I feel them. Yet the boundaries that once seemed to separate us no longer feel solid.

And through these transitions, the horses have shown me another dimension of sovereignty that I could never have understood without living through it with them.

Sovereignty at the Threshold

The sovereignty we came to recognize in conception did not seem to end at the other threshold of physical life. Again and again, I have experienced something remarkably similar as a horse prepares to transition. There is an awareness in them that is difficult to describe. They do not feel to me like victims of what is happening to them. There is often a sense that they understand something about their transition that I cannot yet understand, as though they know why the time has come even when I cannot comprehend the larger purpose of it.

There may be a physical condition that veterinary medicine can identify and treat, and we have always cared for our horses through the physical realities before us. Yet a diagnosis can describe what is happening within the body without necessarily explaining the totality of what I experience in the being who is preparing to leave it. Living through these passages has repeatedly left me with the feeling that something far greater is taking place, something whose magnitude I can sense without being able to fully comprehend.

The horses themselves often seem to know.

There is a quiet certainty that can enter them. Sometimes I have felt that they knew their transition was approaching before I was able to accept it. They seemed to understand where they were within their own passage and to wait patiently while those of us who loved them struggled to arrive there too.

This has been one of the most humbling experiences of my life.

More than once, I have felt a horse holding on while my daughters and I were still pleading inwardly for more time, still resisting what was happening because we could not imagine life without that physical presence. Then there comes a moment when something within us finally releases. We tell them that we understand. We tell them we love them. We tell them that we will be all right and that they may go.

I have witnessed horses wait for that moment.

Only when we finally gave them our acceptance did they seem able to release their physical form.

I cannot quantify what occurs in those moments, nor can I claim to know everything taking place within another being. I can only tell the truth of what I have experienced repeatedly: their transitions have often felt deeply conscious to me. I have felt a profound sovereignty in them even there, at the threshold where we might most easily imagine a being powerless before circumstance.

Instead, I have witnessed extraordinary dignity, what feels like choice, and above all, love of a depth I still struggle to comprehend.

To feel that a horse might remain a little longer because the humans who love them are not yet able to release them is almost beyond my capacity to describe. Even as their own body is preparing for transition, there can be such tenderness toward us, such patience with our grief. They seem to wait while we find the courage to say what our hearts resist saying.

We will be all right. We love you. You may go.

There is something almost unfathomable in that love.

It has changed the way I understand the lives these horses have shared with us at Chevalia. Their arrival into our family has never felt accidental. Each has entered with an individuality, a presence, and a purpose entirely their own. They have become part of my daughters and me, part of the herd, part of the land, part of Chevalia itself. I cannot pretend to know the full purpose of another soul or reduce the magnitude of a life to the lessons it may have given me. Their lives belong to them.

Yet I cannot escape the feeling that there is meaning in the time we are given together.

When that time reaches its threshold, I have come to feel that they participate in that passage with the same sovereignty I witnessed in every other part of their lives. The being who once showed me that their body, relationships, and choices belonged to them seems to carry that wholeness all the way through transition.

They have shown me sovereignty in choosing relationship, sovereignty in conception, sovereignty in saying yes and in saying no. Through the experiences my daughters and I have shared with them, I have come to recognize what feels like sovereignty even in the relinquishing of physical form.

And once we finally release our grasp upon the physical form we love so desperately, something beautiful begins to reveal itself.

The presence expands.

Take Care of the Living

The transition of one of our animals is never experienced by us alone. The entire farm knows. The horses know. The other animals know. They feel the absence of the one who belonged to their world, and they become part of the sacred passage themselves. Over the years, my daughters and I have learned to remain close to them during these times, because their mourning deserves the same tenderness and presence that we offer one another.

I did not always understand this as deeply as I do now.

When Stary transitioned, I was devastated. I did not yet understand transition through all that the years ahead would eventually teach me. I knew only the enormity of her physical absence, and for a time I moved through the responsibilities of the farm almost like a sleepwalker. I continued feeding and caring for everyone who depended upon me, but grief had made the world feel distant.

One day I went into the forest and sat upon the trunk of a fallen tree. I was mourning her, missing her with an ache I did not know how to carry.

Then a large blow snake appeared.

The snake had long held meaning for me in connection with Stary because she was the horse who first awakened me to energy healing, and the snake is an ancient symbol of healing. This snake moved directly beneath the fallen tree where I sat, passed between my feet, and continued out in front of me.

I knew her.

And then, without an audible voice, I heard Stary within me:

Take care of the living.

Those words have never left me.

They reached me at a time when my grief had become so consuming that I could barely see beyond it. Suddenly my awareness returned to everyone around me. The farm was grieving too. The horses had lost someone who belonged to their world. The animals around me were living through the change in our family alongside my daughters and me. They still needed my presence, my care, my love. They needed me to return to them.

Take care of the living.

I did not experience those words as a rebuke. They felt like Stary. The horse who had taught me so much while she was physically here seemed somehow to be teaching me still.

At that time, I did not yet understand what I would come to experience through the transitions that followed in later years. I did not understand how presence could seem to expand beyond the body, or how those who had transitioned could become palpable again during the transition of another. I had not yet learned how profoundly the bonds among us could remain alive beyond physical form.

But sitting there in the forest, with the snake disappearing into the living world around me and those words moving silently through me, something opened.

There was hope.

And there was responsibility.

I returned more fully to the living.

Over the years, as other beloved animals have transitioned, my daughters and I have learned to recognize that the entire farm enters these passages together. The horses know what is happening. They feel the loss just as we do, although each experiences and expresses it individually.

Some seem to carry a quiet understanding of transition. Others appear bewildered by the physical absence and need more of us—more closeness, more reassurance, more time simply being together. Some seem almost young in their understanding of what has happened, and in those moments they need our love and attention deeply.

So we stay with them.

We care for the living while honoring the one who has transitioned.

We feed, but feeding becomes more than a task. We remain among them. We listen. We allow them their own mourning and give them whatever closeness they seek from us. There is no timetable for it. The farm becomes quieter for a while, and we become quieter with it.

And within that stillness, something extraordinary has revealed itself to us again and again.

The one who transitioned begins to feel expanded rather than absent.

The Presence Expands

As the days pass, my daughters and I often remain very still and present. Within that stillness, the being we loved begins to feel less confined rather than gone. We feel them within ourselves and within one another. We feel them among the horses who remain.

There have been moments when I have looked into the eyes of one of our horses and felt the one who transitioned gleaming through them. The horse before me remains wholly themselves, with their own presence and individuality, yet I can sometimes feel the one who transitioned shining through as well, as though their presence has expanded into those still in physical form.

Then that presence seems to move farther into the living world around us.

I feel them in the trees. In the wind. In birdsong and in the flight of birds. In the sunrise and sunset. In the brilliance of the full day's sun. Nature herself seems to carry them.

The trees carry them.

The wind carries them.

The horses carry them.

And we carry them.

Perhaps this is what Stary was beginning to teach me that day in the forest, long before I had the experience to understand it fully. Take care of the living did not mean leaving her behind. The years would teach me something far more beautiful.

The living were carrying her too.

With each transition, my understanding has deepened. The physical form becomes still, yet the being I love seems to expand beyond the boundaries through which I once knew them. Into us. Into the herd. Into the farm. Into the trees and the wind and the light. Into the living relationships that continue.

The one we loved is no longer located in a single place.

They are everywhere we know how to become still enough to feel them.

There can still be tears. There can still be moments when I ache for the physical being I could touch. The horses mourn too. We do not deny that tenderness or rush ourselves through it. Yet moving through the sorrow is something breathtakingly beautiful.

The body becomes still, and the presence expands.

The oneness I experience in these moments is deeply relational. These are beings we have known and loved, beings with whom we have shared our lives. The horse who is transitioning, the animals who have transitioned before, my daughters, and I seem at times to converge within one presence.

There are moments when I no longer know where my own soul ends and the others begin. I feel as though my soul embodies all of them and they permeate me. The distinction between us softens without erasing who any of us are. It feels like a convergence of souls, a bond so intimate that the word separation no longer seems capable of describing what is happening.

Sometimes those who have transitioned before become as palpable to my daughters and me as anything we can physically touch. We feel them participating in the moment. I cannot tell another person precisely what they are doing there, and I do not need to assign a role to their presence. I know only that we feel them.

They are there.

And the being who is transitioning does not feel farther away. Somehow, they feel closer.

This has been one of the most beautiful revelations of my life. At the very moment when physical perception tells me that someone I love is leaving, my experience can become one of extraordinary closeness. As the body grows quieter, the presence of the being I love seems to become more intimate, more permeating, more deeply woven into me.

There is a point in these moments when words such as physical and spiritual begin to feel too small. I am simply inside something vast and exquisitely intimate at the same time. I can feel it moving through me, through my daughters, through the beloved animal before us, and through the presence of those who have already transitioned.

I cannot quantify it. I can only say that I have known it.

And it has changed me.

This is where philosophy becomes secondary for me. Ancient teachings can give language to these thresholds and remind me that human beings have contemplated them for thousands of years. My knowing came through loving these beings, sharing my life with them, being welcomed into their beginnings, and sometimes being given the sacred privilege of accompanying them through their transition.

The Consequence of Seeing Clearly

Experiences such as these inevitably change the way I live.

When the sacredness and sovereignty of another being are no longer philosophical ideas but something encountered directly, relationship changes. The habit of measuring life through usefulness begins to loosen. We become more attentive to what is before us. We listen more carefully. We begin to recognize that life is continually communicating through relationship.

This kind of seeing has not made life passive for me. It has made participation more intimate.

Authenticity, integrity, compassion, empathy, love, care, and honesty begin to matter differently when we understand ourselves as participants in a living world rather than observers standing outside it. Creativity begins to feel like participation as well. Ideas arise. Movement takes shape. Art, music, relationship, care, and creation become ways in which the life within us meets the life around us.

Nature continually returns me to this understanding.

The Tao Te Ching says:

“The highest good is like water.Water benefits all things and does not contend.”

— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 8

Water moves according to its nature. It sustains without needing recognition. It meets the contours of the Earth and continues.

There is great humility in learning to live this way.

The more I have released the need to force life into the shape I expect, the more I have become aware of relationship everywhere. There are moments of guidance, recognition, synchronicity, and response that I could easily have missed when my attention was elsewhere.

Sometimes that recognition arrives through a horse.

Sometimes through a tree.

Sometimes through a dream.

Sometimes through a deer standing alone in a field, looking into my eyes with a familiarity my heart recognizes before my mind can explain it.

And sometimes it arrives in the quiet days following transition, when someone I believed I had lost begins to feel present everywhere.

The veil, then, has become something very different to me from what it once was. I no longer experience it simply as a boundary dividing one world from another. There are moments when it seems extraordinarily thin, perhaps because love itself does not appear to recognize the boundaries that physical perception insists upon.

Relationship changes its language.

Touch may become presence. A familiar body may become a feeling in the wind, a recognition in another horse's eyes, a sudden closeness in the forest, a dream, a knowing, or a voiceless voice that reaches us when we most need to hear it.

The form of the relationship changes.

The relationship remains alive.

I have come to understand transition through the lives of those I have loved rather than through philosophy alone. Each one has shown me another depth. Each has expanded my understanding of sovereignty, presence, relationship, and what it means to belong to one another without possessing one another.

And still, I do not feel that I have reached the end of the mystery.

I hope I never do.

There is always more of Source to discover, more of life to encounter, more relationship to enter, more wonder to receive. The journey itself is infinite.

Perhaps this is one of the greatest gifts the horses have given my daughters and me: they have taught us to remain within the mystery without needing to close it with an answer.

To listen.

To love.

To care for the living.

To release when the time comes.

And then to become still enough to discover that what we released may have become more present than we ever imagined possible.