December 2023
First, let me say thank you and express gratitude for supporting this work at Heroes and Horses. It just might be the most important thing we are involved in. I will not write a coined letter about nuts and bolts, I will share from the heart. That will come in the Annual Report, but in a business sense, we are sound and serve this mission with every intention, overseeing your contributions with honesty, integrity, and direction as a business, but business is not our business. The tracked results from the classes are "profound" and will come out as a stand-alone in early 2024. We are not selling anything; we are trying to change the world one life at a time, and it's been our best year ever, thanks to you and the HH Team and the willing students embarking on the road less traveled. Ever-growing, ever-evolving.
So, we will make it through, but how we do it is entirely up to us. The year 2023 is coming to a close, and I use this time of year to deeply reflect on the lessons I have learned personally, evaluating the experiences I choose to engage in, the actions I have taken or have not taken, the relationships I chose, and the ones I left behind, and the critical nature of work we are performing here at HH. Free of the emotional charge, it's always a deep well of understanding. You might need some grace, love, and compassion for this deep dive journey. It brings me to tears because this is what it's all about. It's a gift and necessary for us to un-become and decondition ourselves from what we have been told or agreed to in pursuit of the great mystery. I have realized that we as a society are too willing to be taught and led. With this in mind, I oppose putting more things into people. Rather, I focus all my intention and attention on awakening the wisdom that I know is latent inside us, tapping into the technology on the inside. It's always strange how we will obey and love our creations and serve them, forgetting that we were the ones that made them, and what mysterious place inside us did they come from in the first place? Sadly, we all fall into the trap of outsourcing the most important decisions in our lives to strangers, information, experts, devices, and institutions and then being unhappy with the results that we choose. It's not working, and the fracturing has become impossible not to see. No one has a patent on intelligence. We have now traded real experience for information and expect our lives to be different as worried, sullen, passive observers. Ironically, everything changes anyway, regardless of what we do or don't do. We are an idea holding onto an idea that is no longer here. The way things are, they are not the way they were and are not the way they will be. I have realized we are the co-partners in the creation of the world we live in and that our choices will answer the ultimate question about who we really are.
Why is everyone killing themselves? Why is everyone killing each other? From just the veteran's perspective, 350 billion dollars in budgeted funds for 2023 with the parenthetical goal of ending suicide. That's not even calculating the 51,000 nonprofits for veterans! The reality is they are doubling and topping at 44 per day. This is only one issue, by the way! Why are so many people anxious, depressed, afraid, suspicious, isolated, and shrouded with this fearful feeling of impending doom? The signs are all around us. Every living being is drawn into something, shaping us into its agenda. Adrift inside a context formed by a bubble of interlocking assumptions, judgments, blind faith, and information, we are now subservient to the things we made or to the ideas we promoted rather than connecting to the things that made them. So, we are dealing with a specific structure we will likely need to outgrow if we want to keep expanding, creating a future for the next generation to live in. I recently talked to a graduate from this past season. He said to me he felt that things were starting to "wear off " a couple of weeks ago. I laughed to myself a little bit as if somehow there was a special potion we were giving students that had a shelf life that then could wear off! Gummy bear juice! As he spoke, I thought shit! Wait, there is a potion, the most powerful potion, the one that shapes worlds, creates empires or conditions of pure hate or unbridled worlds of freedom and love. As we continued, I thought, wow...I was overwhelmed with the awareness that we all have this elixir potion. It's our choices plus action. The mixture of these creates worlds..... There is no way to escape this. There is no pill, no amount of YouTube, no amount of browbeating, health books, and podcasts that can bypass this fundamental we all possess. The shaping of our life through our choices and actions. The mundane to the profound reality is always malleable; it can change right before you. So the stage is set, and your choices and actions come back to you as an effect on the reality you create for yourself and life, rippling into the world. So, if we can change how we look at things, the things we look at will change.
So, as we roll into this Holiday season and into 2024, we can create a shift in the world, and it can happen. It must, and nothing is of a higher priority. First, it happens in your own heart, then in your home. From your home into the work of your hands and on into the world. A thought revolution. It's up to us to begin making new choices and taking new actions on behalf of what is of the good mind. Ask yourself what you will contribute or not contribute to the world, but whatever we choose will undeniably come with consequences, so it starts with us one choice, one action at a time. The world needs unconditional LOVE, but we come all too often to deliver it with a huge bag of conditions. It's like everything we are doing as a culture has become some defense against the very thing we came here to uncover. Love. So my prayer is that we can begin to see ourselves not solely as individuals but as a single thread in a complex fabric of interconnected experiences, and what we do to the thread, we do the whole tapestry. With all the love accompanying this season, may your hearts and homes be filled with the true sense of it, joy, gratitude, and the spirit of forgiveness and grace for all mankind.
With love and Gratitude,
Micah Fink
CEO/Founder H&H