My Accident (or, Are There Really Any Accidents?)
By Leigh Shambo,
MSW
One of the
pivotal moments in my horse experience came suddenly, on a
spring day in 1988 when a QH mare that I was riding reared high,
throwing herself backward and landing on top of me, breaking my
pelvis. I was lucky; the fractures were not displaced and no
internal organs had been injured. It would be a matter of
several months’ recovery, essentially moving as little as
possible and being very careful to avoid re-injury.
....
I felt grateful… and I was stunned by the
realization that my strong, capable, and altogether reliable
body could have in a moment been forever paralyzed. I
was profoundly astonished to consider that my soul, my identity,
was somehow much greater than the fact of my physical being.
Seven years later, actor Christopher Reeve proved that exact
thing to the world, leading him to articulate what I had only
glimpsed. There are, he said “…powers we all have inside us;
the ability to endure; the ability to love, to carry on, to make
the best of what we have – and you don’t have to be a ‘Superman’
to do it."
In essence, I
suppose you could say I was playing Superman, or trying to, the
day of my accident. I was 28 years old at the time, the main
instructor and barn manager in a busy riding school near
Seattle
called the Kelly Ranch. John Kelly and I had traveled to a
nearby farm to take a look at a candidate for trail horse. From
my post-accident hospital bed, I could recollect all of the
clues that should have told me the horse was not safe to ride;
yet somehow that day, my ego put all of the clues in the wrong
order, leading me to climb on a problem horse with a chip on my
shoulder, intent on proving that I could “fix” the horse with my
good riding skills. Superman, indeed. It certainly was time
for me to glimpse into that bigger soul, and begin to move
beyond the strong ego that had, at least in this case, led me
completely astray.
Kelly Ranch was
a small vibrant community united by affection for the horses and
for the Kellys themselves. Housing for my husband and I was
part of our contract, and I loved the fabric of life on the
Ranch and called the Kellys “my adopted parents”. It was a
bright and enlivened life, and it stood in stark contrast to the
serious emotional and spiritual turmoil that my real parents
struggled with 2000 miles away in
Illinois.
Living across
the country from my parents made it easy to hide the
difficulties in my family of origin from others (except my
husband). My mother had become, over the course of a five year
period, critically depressed and at times psychotic. I could
not understand the disintegration of this woman who had been so
strong and vibrant in my years of growing up. I did not
understand the increasing severity of my dad’s alcoholism.
Both of them were in the grip of a deep and desperate
hopelessness, but they were like strangers to me and I did not
know how to help. At that time in my life, I simply did not
do helplessness, and so I told no one. In fact, in a
classic case of psychosomatic expression, I completely lost my
voice for a period of several months! The same overzealous ego
that urged me onto the horse that injured me, also walled off
with shame and secrecy the fact of my mother’s mental illness
and my father’s addiction.
Perhaps for a
person who does not do helplessness, spending 2 months in a
prone position is not such a bad thing. The Kellys kept me
employed by answering calls and telling other people what to do
with the horses, and more friends flowed in with previously
unimaginable (to me!) affection, support and encouragement. I
was indeed loved, and amply cared for. When I graduated from
the couch to a wheelchair, my riding students would wheel me
from my little house down to the riding arena and park me in the
middle to teach their lessons. Two months after my accident,
long before I was supposed to ride, I went from my wheelchair to
the back of Scotty, a tall white Arabian, King of the Lesson
Horses.
But if the
physical vulnerability and need for help was challenge enough,
immediately following the accident my mother—remember, she’s
crazy now—would not be dissuaded from coming out to “help” me.
Yeah right, like it will help for all of my friends to see that
I have a crazy mother that I don’t know what to do about! But
this event turned out be a particular bit of concentrated grace,
as it cemented my developing friendship with a stable volunteer
named Barb. Barb understood my mother’s mental illness, and
that understanding gave her great compassion and gentleness for
both my mother and I. I was able to bring my pain and shame out
of the shadow and into the light. That autumn, my mother died
by suicide.
My enduring
friendship with Barb is one of the gifts of my lifetime, a gift
that has extended itself many times over. Barb inspired me to
give friendship, as well as receiving it, and showed me that one
could hold many friends in one’s heart. I understood then that
it is not our perfection that induces other people to love us.
While friends may admire our strengths, vulnerabilities and
imperfections are openings that invite trust and understanding,
the fertile ground for true intimacy.
In my months of
contemplation, as I think of it—this longish period of
recovery—I softened a lot. I saw past my ego, even past my
physical self. I learned that I was loved and supported, and to
accept the caring of others both physically and emotionally.
In consciousness, the accident, and its juxtaposition with my
mother’s illness and death, caused me to turn 180 degrees.
Looking inward more than outward now, I went on with life. And
for me, that meant life with horses.
The accident’s
imprint on my body/mind yielded another surprise once I
recovered enough to ride regularly. My then 3 year-old mare,
Frieda, got balky one day on the trail and popped up slightly in
a half-hearted attempt to avoid a water crossing. Fear!
Intense fear! Out of proportion fear! In a blinding flash of
the obvious, I recalled the hundreds of times I had coached
riders to ignore fear. “Just do it anyway,” I would call out
supportively. “Breathe your way through it!” Oh sure! Now
that I felt it, I realized that this was fear of an entirely
different league. It demanded to be listened to, and so I did.
I’ve learned
many things about fear, how to work with it and diminish its
power to rob us of our most precious joys. It was painstaking
work to dissect and then confront my own fear, but it yielded a
huge gift in that it pointed me in the direction of round pen
training and “horse whispering” – learning to build true
relationship prior to riding and maintaining it while riding,
for the physical and emotional safety it offers both the horse
and the person.
How fortunate I
was in this period of my life, to find a really good therapist!
And to be working daily with several horses, with much of
the work being done at liberty! A world opened up within me and
around me as I realized how responsive the horses were to my
emotional energy and my beliefs. As I dismantled parts of my
ego that were rigid, and found new emotional fitness and
flexibility, every horse I worked with would be extra
responsive. As I healed my childhood wounds, I found creativity
and a spirit of free collaboration with the horses that always
yielded good results, sometimes in surprising ways. As if
they read my mind, or my heart.
And so this
accident, this near-tragedy, was a turning point so significant
that I now embrace it as an important part of who I have
become. It was the beginning of an emotional and spiritual
maturity which today is the foundation of my work with people
and horses. The accident was my experience of being “broken
open”—made ready for deeper and more authentic growth that
continues today, 18 years later. Sometimes I joke, “That horse
taught me more in 5 minutes, than other horses that I rode for
years.”
