Orion Sings the Body Electric:
Riding Between the Worlds...Again
Photos by Sue Smades and Lani Ackerman-Kalla
Comet's Promise
Epona mare Comet’s Promise and stallion Midnight Merlin welcomed a healthy foal into the world Sunday April 13. The handsome colt, Orion’s New Moon—“Orion” for short—arrived some time between 4 and 6 a.m. and was first witnessed standing next to his mother, quietly nursing, at around 6:30 a.m. by workshop participant Brad Jopp, who got up early to head back to Mississippi after attending Steve Roach’s weeklong electronic music master class.
“Someone must have sent Comet the workshop schedule,” laughs Linda Kohanov, “because she managed to have her foal during the brief window of time between two major seminars. Steve’s group was in the nearby conference room until 2 a.m., finishing the CD they had been working on all week. As they closed their music circle and headed back to their rooms, they saw Comet running around her foaling corral. I checked on her around 3 a.m. and she was grazing peacefully with no signs of going into labor. Our ranch manager, Shelley Rosenberg, checked on her at 3:30, and there were no changes.
“The last time she foaled, Comet was leaking milk and refusing to eat for a good eight hours before the birth. This time, she had barely begun waxing and looked to be several days away from the blessed event, so no one was particularly concerned. Then at 7 a.m. we got the call from our barn assistant/resident photographer Sue Smades who was just about to start her morning feed rounds. ‘It’s a boy,’ was all she had to say, and we were heading toward the barn.”
Orion arrived a few hours before the Riding between the Worlds pre-workshop started up that afternoon. And while participants kept a respectful distance from the new mother and her baby, they watched the foal literally grow by leaps and bounds during his first week.
“Orion has unusually long legs compared to anyone else born in this herd,” Linda says. “Truly, he looks more like a Thoroughbred baby than an Arab. And it seems he’s made it his mission to understand all the possible nuances of how to use these powerful legs of his. By the first evening, he was cantering on the left lead around and around his mother. The second day, he learned to canter on the right lead when we let him out on the pasture next to his father. And by the third day, he was rearing, bucking, leaping into mid-air, and doing flying lead changes in figure eights moving around and between Comet and me. He is a real adventurer, hiding from his mother in the bushes, seeming to delight in her frantic attempts to find him. He splashes his nose in the water tank, samples hay, and assertively demands more and more milk. He pretty much mimics 
everything Comet does. He’s already figured out to point his nose to a specific spot on his body for a good scratching. I was casually doing this with Comet during an extended massage/grooming session, and the colt quickly moved to join in. And it almost seems like the rearing he does as he follows us around is an attempt to figure out how, and quite possibly why, the humans in his life prefer to stand on their back two legs. Needless to say, he’s a precocious little character. The need for some simple training in manners and self control is already apparent.”
Celestial Body Language
The constellation Orion was a significant spectacle in the weeks leading up to the foal’s arrival. “I spent many evenings sitting with Comet in her foaling corral,” Linda says, “making sure she was comfortable with my presence in that space in case she needed assistance during the birth. I would watch the constellation Orion slowly set into Mt. Wrightson, a mountain that looks like a pregnant meditating medicine woman from our perspective here at the ranch. One night, the constellation had these streaming, fluorescent clouds running through it that had somehow managed to hang on to the luminescence of twilight two hours after sunset. I have a touch of synaesthesia (the ability to hear sounds when you see visuals and vice versa), so I heard huge chords of sound, and the outline of a chorus singing “Orion!” in 
response to the spectacle. That’s when it first occurred to me that Orion would be a great name for a colt.”
The fact that Orion was a celebrated archer was also intriguing. During the Pioneering Spirit leadership workshop the month before, Linda was demonstrating how body sensations often give rise to visionary material—when the mind attempts to communicate with, rather than suppress or relax out of, tension. “I was doing a body scan in front of the group, which is one of the foundations of the Epona Approach. The feeling that stood out to me the most that day was a mild stinging sensation in my left shoulder. When I ‘breathed into’ the tension, sending it oxygen and awareness, asking what information it held, I received the image of a bow and arrow. As I spoke this out loud to the group, the sensation released completely. This release, I always explain, means that the body is satisfied that the mind received the message. I advise people to trust this somatic language, emphasizing that the body speaks more like an artist or poet than a scientist.
“To create a mind-body dialogue, it’s important to acknowledge the body’s visual or symbolic messages without striving to over-interpret them, even if they don’t make logical sense right away. Quite often the meaning unfolds through time, through personal reflection, journaling, and sometimes, through a certain amount of research into the archetypal meaning of the myths and symbols that arise. The body is a sentient being, and its forte is connection as it picks up cues from the environment, from other beings, and from aspects of the collective consciousness that flows in and out of us all. In this way, you could say that the body is telepathic, like an immense tuner, receiver and amplifier for all kinds of information floating around. It truly seems to have a mind of its own, one that doesn’t play by the rules of logic. Here at Epona, we emphasize that the body is essentially the horse that your mind rides around on. To tap the body’s wisdom and gain its cooperation, we must learn to appreciate that it has a different way of expressing itself than the socially conditioned mind, and that its imagery quite often foreshadows and informs other synchronistic events.”
This certainly 
proved to be the case as one of the Pioneering Spirit participants, Catherine Firpo, mentioned that she was in fact an avid archer, and that this was a prominent theme in one of her murals. “I was already a fan of Catherine’s artwork, a powerful combination of modern and archetypal themes. In fact, she’s one of the few people I’ve met besides Kim McElroy who’s been inspired to paint the mare-headed goddess, an ancient figure that I wrote about rather extensively in the Way of the Horse guidebook (Card 35, “Keeper of the Mysteries”). When Catherine rolled out another oversized canvas she had brought to share with the group, it took my breath away. Carrying a bow and arrow, the figure of Artemis, the moon goddess/huntress, was racing toward three horses with another hybrid being, a deer headed woman, running behind her. With Comet so close to giving birth, I began to consider naming the foal Artemis if it was a filly. A few nights later, it seemed the stars were singing ‘Orion’ for a colt.”
Into the Dreamtime
Over the next few weeks, the sky show continued as Artemis, in the form of the April new moon, got in on the act. “On Tuesday, April 8,” Linda remembers, “the crescent moon actually positioned itself between Orion and the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, also prominent in the Western sky. It didn’t escape me that Comet herself came into this world during a significant celestial event. She was born outside, at night, under the very prominent Hale-Bopp comet, and she herself had the unmistakable imprint of a Comet on her forehead. And so it seemed especially appropriate to name her foal after one of the intriguing spectacles in the night sky.”
Still, Linda had only a superficial familiarity with the Artemis and Orion myths. She knew they were both exceptional archers and hunters, but she assumed the connection stopped there. And though she thought the name Orion was more mellifluous than the more percussive sounding Artemis, she could not rule out the possibility that the foal would be female.
“I’d had a comforting dream several months ago about Comet’s foal which suggested it was a girl, actually,” she continues. “This dream had a similar setting to it as a dream that had, two years earlier, foreshadowed the death of Comet’s first foal Midnight Mystique. During the time that Comet and Rasa were pregnant in 2006, I dreamed that the entire black horse family came into my backyard to speak to me. There were two new members, a small yet very vivid, lively black foal next to Rasa, and a more vague, amorphous foal standing just behind Comet. He seemed to fade in and out of focus. I asked Comet to encourage her foal to step forward and tell me his name, but she said, very distinctly, ‘He’s not staying long.’ As it turned out, Midnight Mystique was born with a birth defect and died in my arms three days afterward. Rasa’s foal, Indigo Moon, on the other hand, is now a healthy, personable, unusually poised yearling—pure joy to be around.”
Linda’s experiences with the births of these two foals are featured in her latest book Way of the Horse: Equine Archetypes for Self Discovery. Card 21, “Moonlight’s Embrace,” discusses the profound lessons the entire Epona staff learned from Mystique’s short yet potent life. Card 28, “Dharma’s Reflection,” explores the myth of Indra’s Web that emerged from Indigo Moon’s entry into this world.
“Whether you’re dealing with a two-legged, four-legged, or winged creature, the major transitions of any being’s life have an archetypal dimension that reveals the deeper mysteries and meaning of earthly existence,” Linda emphasizes. “But the soul’s language is not logical or scientific or straight forward. Spirit speaks more like an artist as well: in myths, metaphors, dreams and waking visions. If you’re willing to pay attention, and do a little research, the richness of life often reveals itself in some surprising, synchronistic ways. For this reason, I collect books on myths, symbols, and artistic forms of expression. And I pay attention to my dreams. I try to walk that fine line between taking them seriously without over-interpreting them or getting too attached to them. They give me hints not only of what’s to come, but what it all might mean.
“A few months before Orion was born, the black horse family came to me again in a dream. This time, Comet’s baby was vivid and lively, very much like Rasa’s foal Indigo Moon in that lucid vision two years earlier. The new foal was born quickly, without any need for human intervention. It was sitting comfortably out in the field with the rest of the horses, even among the stallions, who were quietly watching over the new baby. The foal had a gentle, feminine feeling to it. So when the night sky seemed to shout out the name Orion a few months later, I was still thinking the foal was going to be female. I spent an hour on the Internet searching for a feminine name connected to Orion, but the choices I found in superficial descriptions of the legendary archer just didn’t seem to light me up in any way. I kept going back to Artemis, figuring that, maybe in this case, the constellation Orion wasn’t actually speaking to me mythically, that it was, this time around, just a pleasant feature of the night sky.”
Orion’s Lover
Then, seemingly just to confuse the issue, two weeks before the foal’s birth, Linda had two dreams in a row that the foal was a colt, that he was born quickly amidstlots of people doing lots of things at Epona, and that he liked the name Orion. So when she happened to be in a bookstore the Friday before his birth, she decided to look up the myths of both Orion and Artemis in an in-depth text on world myths.
“I found out that these two figures were much more connected that I had previously guessed,” she says. “Artemis,goddess of the moon and the hunt, was a protectress of wild animals, particularly those giving birth. She was also well known for shunning all men. However, much to my surprise, I read that she actually fell in love with Orion and considered giving up her pledge of eternal virginity for him. A series of unfortunate events led to Orion's untimely death—in some versions of the myth Artemis was tricked into killing him by her jealous brother Apollo so that she wouldn't take a mere mortal like Orion as her mate. In other versions,Scorpio (also prominent in the sky these days) stung him as retribution for indiscriminant hunting. In any case, Artemis tried to resurrect her one true love and got into some trouble with Zeus, who finally conceded her a small favor: It was Artemis who managed to arrange for Orion to be remembered in the stars as one of the most prominent constellations.
“Such adventures in mythic themes! And if that isn't enough, there's another story that Orion was romantically pursuing the Seven Sisters at one point, and so Zeus put them up in the sky as the Pleides to protect them. Apparently, Orion was as voracious chasing women as he was in hunting animals. The constellation’s position in the sky shows that he never really gave up the chase as he truly seems to be pursuing the Pleides across the Western horizon these days.On April 8, that night when Orion, the crescent moon and the Pleides lined up, it looked like either our moon goddesswas running interference for the sisters, or she was trying to get Orion’s attention by placing herself among them.”
In commemoration of these intriguing mythic and cosmological synchronicities, Linda decided to include the April moon’s compelling interactions with the constellation Orion by naming the colt “Orion’s New Moon.” And she hopes that this time around, Orion’s namesake will live a long and healthy life, uniting the powerful archetypes activated in the sky above his birth, leading to a potent balance of masculine and feminine qualities in the horse’s already sweet yet powerful, adventurous spirit.
“Myths Ask to be Regrown”
“When the mythic world bleeds through consensual reality,” Linda says, “it’s important to pay attention, to pay homage to the archetypes that inject our lives with energy and meaning. According to author Jean Houston, myths are not simply old stories; they’re living complexes of wisdom that are still evolving and unfolding. That certainly seems to be the case with Orion and Artemis. Why are they drawing attention to themselves now? What wisdom do they want to share, and how can we help them transform? I’m starting to get the sense that it has to do, once again, with the redemption of the masculine, a theme I explored in Card 27, ‘Merlin’s Spirit,’ in the Way of the Horse deck.
“Our behind-the-scenes work here at Epona has emphasized ways of socializing stallions to regain their place among the herd as active husbands and fathers. Stallions are routinely isolated in civilized culture, and this makes them more violent and frantic than necessary. To gain sensitivity and balance, they must be allowed to move into a more natural relationship with mares—to spend more time with their mothers before they are weaned, and to actually live with their own mates. Our stallions Merlin and Spirit have shown remarkable sensitivity with their pregnant mares. Yet it was the feminine element that socialized them. Until they were given the opportunity to live with mares, they had a marked tendency toward explosive and unpredictable behavior. Looking more deeply at the Orion archetype, he had a destructive side that moved out of balance with nature, which in some versions of his myth led to his demise. Yet the ultimate Greek moon/nature goddess herself fell in love with him. It seems that Orion wants to be reborn in some way and the Artemis archetype has a role in this process, during a time when masculinity itself has the potential to be transformed through the empowerment of the feminine and its call to reconnect with and co-create with the natural world. For me, this is the deeper meaning behind the name Orion’s New Moon, as it marks a new chapter in the engagement of this ancient myth.
“I think I will be working with this archetype for some time, because Orion is still drawing significant attention to himself in this world. Adding to the growing list of synchronicities—during the EASE program the first week in April participant Lorna Shepardson was delighted to hear I was considering naming the foal Orion because she has a young son named Orion. I had never actually met a person named Orion before, yet there I was, shaking the little boy’s hand at the end of the workshop, a matter of days before my own colt Orion was born. And if that wasn’t strange enough, when Riding between the Worlds started up the day after Comet’s colt was born, another participant, Michele Wilson, reported that her stepson was named Orion. Imagine the chances of that!”
As non-material patterns of existence, archetypes can hide out indefinitely in the depths of the collective unconscious, but they can’t be suppressed forever. They reappear, as Jean Houston emphasizes in her audio book Myths for the Future, through the “other great bleed through realms of human experience: dreams, religious knowings, visions, art, ritual, love, and madness. Sometimes, they occur in their archaic forms bearing the accoutrements of earlier cultures, but they ask to be seen in fresh ways. They ask to be regrown.”
In The Tao of Equus, Linda observed that “mythic messages evolve over time, dressing themselves up in the customs of different eras, drawing attention to destructive patterns of thought and behavior while offering solutions through symbols of transformation. Perpetually looking for an ‘in’ to our world, they search for a receptive audience among artists, dreamers—and, occasionally, people who work with horses.”
Over the years, however, Linda has come to believe that mythic intelligence is not just “occasionally” engaged through working with horses; it is, instead, one of the horse’s innate and most powerful gifts to stimulate visionary states in receptive humans. And more and more people are answering the call. Popular longstanding workshops like Black Horse Wisdom and Riding between the Worlds have made it apparent that many people would like to go deeper into the mythic realms that horses so easily traverse. This summer, Linda will lead a powerful advanced workshop Keeper of the Mysteries: Equine Archetypes for Initiation and Transformation as well as an introductory collaborative workshop with artist Kim McElroy called The Horse as Muse.
“To think that evocative, synchronistic, soul-nourishing images are even coming up in leadership workshops like Pioneering Spirit gives me hope that someday the human race will give intuitive, visionary, artistic, and mythic intelligence equal billing with logic,” Linda says. “We need the power of both worlds now to melt the human heart, reinvigorate our collective soul, and bring the masculine and feminine into balance.”
Communion
Jean Houston asserts that when “we forced nature to reveal its secrets,” the human race became “autistic.” In the name of conquest and commerce, we surrendered “our capacity for communication with the inner life of the natural world, such as the aboriginal and indigenous people display, as well as the inner life of ourselves. Non-mythic, non-storied folk are always autistic, for they have lost their capacity for communion as well as communication. Instead we flail about in half-hearted measures to save the planet from ourselves. And I really wonder if anyone probing the inner life can really be successful without being in communion with the depths of nature.”
“Here at Epona,” Linda observes, “and at many other ranches, boarding barns, and backyards throughout the world, we seem to have a secret weapon in the struggle to regain the wholeness that is our birthright: Teaching people how to commune with nature and the mythic realms is one of the horse’s specialties. And our vivacious new colt has truly brought this into focus for me at a whole new level.
“With all the evocative myths, images and synchronicities surrounding the birth of Orion, I feel like I was initiated into a deeper understanding and conviction of the horse’s role in expanding human consciousness. In helping people reconnect to nature, to the authentic self, to the herd, and to the community, these amazing beings create an experience of consensual liberation unavailable to the social outcast or rugged individualist. The time of the ‘lone wolf’ is over. The new symbol of ‘freedom through relationship’ is undoubtedly the horse. And in this respect, that symbol, that archetype enters our world every time a new foal is born, growing, bucking, rearing, running, and evolving alongside us in the form of those living, breathing horses with whom we are privileged to share our lives.”