27/08/2026
What If Another Being Could Show You Something You Couldn't See?
Twenty years ago, I had an experience with a horse that I didn't fully understand until I watched the video again recently.
Her name was Rasa. She was the horse of Linda Kohanov, author of The Tao of Equus, a book that explores the profound ways horses can transform our understanding of awareness, relationship, and ourselves. I was fortunate enough to spend some time with Rasa, and there is one particular moment I have carried with me ever since.
Rasa was loose in an arena with me. I wasn't calling her, asking her to come over, or trying to get her attention. I was simply standing there, looking out into the distance. She was somewhere else in the arena when she noticed me and began walking toward me. She came casually, sniffing the ground along the way, as horses often do when they're moving through their environment.
She walked up to me, went around me, and then stopped beside me. She didn't touch me. She wasn't asking for anything. She simply stood there, close enough to be together but with comfortable space between us.
What struck me at the time was that she was facing the same direction I was facing. It seemed to me that she had noticed where my attention was and was trying to find what I was looking at.
But when I watched the video again, I noticed something I had completely missed.
First, Rasa looked toward the same place I was looking. Then she raised her head and turned her gaze to the right, looking over me and toward something else.
And suddenly I wondered:
Was she giving me an opportunity to see what she was seeing?
I had been so engrossed in watching her that I completely missed it.
There is something almost humbling about realizing that years later. I had thought the remarkable thing was that this beautiful horse had freely chosen to come stand beside me. I had been captivated by her presence. But perhaps, in that moment, she was doing something more subtle. She may have been noticing my attention, sharing it for a moment, and then offering me an opportunity to follow hers.
I can't know that for certain. I don't want to pretend I can translate Rasa's thoughts or assign human intentions to her. But I can observe what happened. She noticed where I was looking. She came toward me. She looked where I was looking. Then she shifted her attention somewhere else.
And maybe the important thing isn't whether we can know exactly what she meant.
Maybe it's what becomes possible when we're willing to notice.
We tend to think of presence as paying close attention to what is happening right in front of us. But perhaps presence requires something more. We can be intensely focused and still miss what another being is offering us.
I was certainly present with Rasa that day. But my attention had become so captivated by her that I stopped noticing where her attention was going.
Maybe being truly present means being willing to let another being change where we look.
That has made me think about how often we do the opposite in our relationships. We want other people to see what we're seeing. We want our horses to understand our perspective, our children to understand our intentions, our partners to understand why we're right. We want to bring them into our version of reality.
But what if relationship asks us to do something completely different?
What are you seeing that I am not seeing?
That question requires humility. It means accepting that another being may notice something we don't. It means allowing their attention to become information rather than something we need to control. It means becoming curious enough to follow, even when we don't yet understand where they're leading us.
Maybe this is one of the gifts horses offer us.
They don't necessarily need to teach us anything in the way a teacher teaches a student. Sometimes they simply give us another perspective to notice. They invite us to slow down enough to realize that there is a world happening around us that we may not be perceiving.
And perhaps that is part of what relationship really is: not simply sharing the same space, but allowing our awareness to move between two different perspectives.
I see what you're seeing. Now show me what I'm missing.
I don't know whether Rasa was doing that for me that day.
But watching the footage years later, I realized something important:
I had missed the invitation.
And perhaps that is the lesson.
Sometimes another being is trying to show us something, and we're so busy watching them that we don't notice where they're looking.
Maybe real presence isn't simply paying attention.
Maybe it's being willing to let another being change where you look.
O
If these reflections resonate with you, they're explored more deeply in my book, Chosen, Not Obeyed: On Trust, Consent, and Autonomous Horsemanship. It's a journey into seeing horses not as problems to solve, but as individuals whose voices deserve to be heard. https://a.co/d/09GNEwxO
