English Lit was not high among my favorite classes in high school but I thoroughly enjoyed the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I always intended to have a book of those essays for my own and after many ( many, many) years of procrastination I bought his book of essays not long ago.

I enjoy them as much now as I did then.

Emerson didn't say much about horses. Of course in his day nearly every one was transported from place to place on the back of or behind one. Maybe somewhere in his writings he talkes about horses - I 'm not sure. But, in reading his essay "Compensation", I thought there's much about horsemanship here, even though Emerson doesn't discuss horses at all. Still, it's a good essay for the horseman or horsewoman to read.

In Compensation, Emerson discusses the dualism of nature and the forces of equilibrium that in effect rule our lives. There are basic principles that we are either unaware of or choose to ignore in our daily pursuits. When we "go with the flow" (my words not Emerson's) we tend to be rewarded, when we don't, things come back to bite us.

Horses seem to understand the laws of nature bettter than we do. Being prey animals they aren't risk-takers. They're happier in the herd than being the "individual contributers" that we tend to prize so highly. To be an "average" horse is likely not shameful as far as the horse is concened, where to be satisfied with being "average" implies a bit of the slacker in us.

What comes out of all of this, is the reward granted in learning to live in harmony with the horse. The horse after all instinctively tries to maintain equilibrium. We try to do this when we're first learning horseback riding, but in general we end up doing the opposite.

We haven't yet learned to "go with the flow".

In halter training the foal the best way to get it to initially follow a lead is to put a rope around it's hindquarters and gently tug, pushing the foal towards us. With with gentle pressure applied to its hindquarters, the foal yields to the pressure to restore equilibrium. If we try to pull the foal physically by the lead rope, it thinks it's being forced to heaven only knows where and it doesn't want to go there.

So in training the foal we learn something ourselves - how to achieve equilibrium.

In the saddle we learn that a horse naturally yields to very slight pressure. We're the ones that have to learn that - not the horse. The horse is just trying to reestablish equilibrium by yielding to pressure, be it tension on a rein, pressure by a leg or a subtle shift in body weight.

In the round ring, the horse responds to what I like to think of as visual pressure. Our location and movement in the center of the ring influences the actions of the horse, even though there is no physical force exerted. Again, the horse is responding to this pressure to get the situation to where it "should be" - that is, equilibrium.

In Compensation, Emerson states that if we do something (e.g. train a horse) poorly, we end up with a poor result (e.g., a poorly trained horse) because we've messed up equilibrium and will suffer the consequences as the world seeks to get back in equilibrium. We get our just rewards, our compensation and have to live with it. Deal with the horse harshly and you'll always have to deal with it harshly to get it to do anything. That's the new state of equiibrium and it costs.

Had Emerson devoted an essay or two to the art of horsemanship I'm guessing he'd be regarded as the 19th Century equivalent to Xenophon, Lyons, or Parelli. I could be wrong but I'm guessing that Ralph Waldo Emerson believed his own stuff and he'd have been a pretty effective trainer of horses.

I'd encourage everyone to give Emerson a try. Recommending his writings on my equine oriented website www.your-guide-to-gifts-for-horse-lovers.com probably doesn't make much sense - unless I add a section titled "Other or Misc.". And I don't promise reading his essays would make you a better horseman or horsewoman - but it probably wouldn't hurt any either. You might even get to like Ralph Waldo.

William "Bill" savage lives in Montana. A retired engineer he has a few horses on a few acres. When not spending time with family, horses, or doing chores, Bill works on his equine web site where these articles are created.