Kindle Notes & Highlights
Go and do your work—and do not expect a reward! It will arrive when the time is ripe. Do not think of the end product, for that will come, too. Only concentrate on the daily interaction with your work and be aware of how you work. Be grateful and devoted, and let all your observations be sincere and appreciative of beauty in all that you do. Do not try to do other things. Just concentrate on the task in hand and treat everything that happens as a gift.
Therefore, my first principle for working with horses is that everything I do must be for and in the sole interests of the animal. This will be my first and most important principle of nature.
If you go against the principles of nature, you go against the very essence of a being. If you go against this essence you will surely build resistance. The resistance will be against the person who caused it. This sort of resistance is commonly met with more violence, which only serves to create stronger resistance. In other words, it is a vicious circle that only has two possible outcomes. One ends in the person being badly hurt, because aggression responds to violence by becoming stronger—and, most probably, also in the death of the horse in the slaughterhouse. The second possible outcome
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One has to work day in and day out to absorb those qualities that horses possess. How can you be worthy of another creature when you are bound hand and foot in a world lacking in dignity? How can you care for the freedom of another creature when you yourself are a prisoner?
“The secret is to leave things be and start always from scratch as though it were the first day of your life.”
Which is more important: that we see or that we do not see the things we sense in another way? The language of so-called reality or the language of the spirit?”
