I watched episode 9 of Yellowstone’s season 5 last week and was impacted by how Taylor Sheridan honored cowboy legend Billy Klapper. “When he’s gone, we’re all out of legends, with nobody trying to be the next one.”
I haven’t been able to shake that statement. The reason? Because I am around some of these living legends in my life.
I have seen them do things with horses that changed me forever. I’m not alone in that experience either.
In 2019, I met Charlie Hill in a parking lot at our local church and told him I need to just be around what he does more. I had seen him do some things with horses that looked like magic. An experience that was unexplainable, in a world I was living in that required explaining everything. He invited me to meet Rob Boyle – who was developing a program for people to observe either wild or troubled horses interacting in relationship with humans. What played out over the course of an hour with a horse and these men left me with a feeling that I had to be around this for the rest of my life. I felt a transformation had occurred in me. I saw life, I saw kindness, I saw hope and I saw freedom. To this day I (and everyone who was there) has a difficult time describing what we saw. You simply had to experience it. A horse that was so full of fear and anxiety was running in a round pen until beads of sweat were rolling off of him.
The leader stepped in with him.
I learned about communication without words. How horses interact. How they communicate. How they lead, and in this case – how they are led.
This was relationship. This was trust. This was facing fear. This was courage, honesty and overcoming. All displayed by an animal in his response to some of the most kind and clear leadership I had ever seen. An opportunity was given, the horse hesitated several times…and as he was encouraged – he stepped through his fear and found new freedom right in front of us. He found peace as he stood there, with his body showing signs that he had just purged so much of what was going on inside…and we could see it.
I saw people in the small crowd weep. Myself included.
And we all opened up and shared our lives, some of the deepest parts of it, with people we had never met before that day.
After 4 solid years of trying to recover from physical and mental illness, much of it successfully – I never saw anything that integrated all of the elements of true healing like I experienced that day.
It was the vision given to Rob Boyle to try and get this out to the world.
I later met Mike Buchanan at one of these events. I had shared openly about how I felt that I was living in an internal prison, not able to escape even though the door to my cell was open. He invited me to experience something that he learned from being one of the leaders at the Wyoming Honor Farm, where he worked with prisoners and wild mustangs. This took me into an entirely new realm of knowing my “self within self.” A way to see the dance and harmony of life, to see that it wasn’t about “my way, or their way”…but to think and see it as “the way.”
All of these men pointed to a common thing. The horse. It’s honesty. It’s transparency. It’s ability to reveal in us the conflicts, the truth. They see us. The authentic us and all the parts that aren’t.
Over the course of the last few years, I have grown to be a better husband, a better father, a better friend…and most of all…a man more true to who I was created to be.
Broken Arrow Wranglers was created to point to what these Legends are pointing to. To share something that they have spent a lifetime cultivating. To learn it, apprentice in it, become disciples of it, and to share it. To build communities around it.
Man in the Arena
Man in the Glass
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