Trust that the world is good

My horse doesn't always believe me, but it's true

I went on a long trail ride with some new friends the other day. Buzz was his usual not-so-brave self, jittering at bugs, scooting forward unexpectedly and jigging in place.

“How old is he?” asked one of my bemused companions, after Buzz had nearly catapulted into her mare over a suspicious-looking tree stump.

“23,” I answered, which made all of us laugh. Horses usually get calmer with age. Spooky, unruly behavior is typical of young or green horses, of which Buzz is neither. But smart horses are often the spookiest, oddly enough, and Buzz has brains in spades. Smart horses know that danger is real and remember every pitfall from the past, in order to keep themselves safe and whole. This knowledge robs them of peace and joy, especially if they don’t the patient guidance of a human friend to help them work it out.

Every spring, Buzz has to be reminded that the world is good. He skitters and shies through the first few trail rides, certain that over the long winter, trolls have infested our trails and yetis are venturing out looking for horsey snacks.

He’s doing his very best - he does not want to throw or hurt me. Inevitably, he realizes the moment after a spook that he shouldn’t have spooked at all, and so looks back at me, chagrined.

But, like me, Buzz does not believe that the world is good or kind. He is too smart for that, like me with my cynicism and hot takes. He knows that bears and cougars exist, that sinkholes open in strange places, that canyons and rock beds loom around the bends in the trail. He knows his limitations, he is just a prey animal, with limited ability to make it back to safe pasture on his own. We are the same: we both imagine ourselves too smart to be taken in by saccharine accounts of goodness, so we stumble along in fear, imagining that our knowledge of badness will keep us safe.

I visited Cindy a couple of weeks ago. She has an incredible green thumb, always has. I walked up to her front yard and she was outside watering, holding a few fresh strawberries in her hand. “Hi honey,” she said, holding out ruby-red gifts. “Eat these.”

There is nothing that will remind you of goodness like the taste of warm, fresh strawberries, glistening wet from the garden hose. The firm sweetness bursts on your tongue. The dangers of mortality and the boogey-men of imagination quail before this simple pleasure.

Her flowers are exploding everywhere in fragrant delight, there are roses climbing the sides of her modest single-wide. I picked rhubarb from her astonishingly voluptouos plant and made a massive, messy, altogether glorious galette which I fed my family with homemade whipped cream and deeply-felt pride. (I’m not much of a baker so this was a triumph.)

I recently finished Mary Karr’s wonderful memoir The Liar’s Club, and it is tragic and funny and honest and beautifully, heartbreakingly good. She sees goodness in the rough oil men of her childhood, her intense, often-suicidal family, the dystopian poverty and dysfunction that surrounds her. Her writing challenges me to believe that the world is good even when evil dogs our steps, when animals are abandoned and war breaks out and kids are mean. If Mary Karr can write with such grace about what one reviewer called “an apocalyptic childhood” what am I grousing about?

Of course my recent visit to Cindy brought this home as well. She had a Mary Karr-esque upbringing and her stories will raise the hair on your head. But she sees all hardship as a chance to learn and all good things as a gift from God. I thought about Buzz on my drive home, how I challenge him with plastic bags and music on my iPhone, because scaring him a little, paradoxically, is how I remind him that the world is good. In horse terms it’s called “sacking out” and typically it’s with young horses: rubbing a flag or a grain sack all over so that they begin to trust you instead of their instinct to run away. Exposure to such things makes a sound, smart ride, a horse you can trust if something dangerous actually does happen in the wilderness.

Unfettered fear creates danger where there is none, while earned trust can make even wild places habitable.

For the last few years, I feel like I’ve been sacked out a good bit. Slowly, I’m learning to trust that the world is good and that running will not save me. I’m learning that my spooks and shies at tree stumps and suspicious rock piles only wear me out and make me miserable, that fear is not the same as caution. The reality of evil and danger does mean the world is inherently bad.

This is the hard-won truth: a world that makes mountain lakes and ripe strawberries, willing horses and trail-side wildflowers, soft nickers and the laughter of safe children, rhubarb galette and storytelling and the smell of fresh-cut hay on summer evenings: this is a good world.

This is what I tell Buzz, and what I tell myself: trust that the world is good, and goodness will show itself to you.

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