Taking it in their stride
ADVENTURE comes fairly naturally to Rupert Isaacson — so perhaps it’s not a total surprise that having a young son assessed as autistic became, well, as just a different sort of adventure to be embraced.
Family life and Rupert’s day still involves horses, horses and more horses, but it also involves healing, therapy, treks to shamens, battling for bushmen and tribal rights, literary talks and medical debates. And, then some more horses.
It also meant a $1 million advance for his top-selling book called The Horse Boy, (with a documentary to match) and an expanding network of healing with horse centres around the world including, soon to come, Limerick.
Issacson is due to talk about the phenomenal success of The Horse Boy, and its evolutionary unfolding, at Kinsale Arts Week on July 12 (this year’s event has the horse as its theme, see www.kinsaleartsweek.com) as well as giving a demonstration in Limerick next Monday.
It won’t be Isaacson’s first visit to Ireland. He came here first aged 13, on a solo trip, to a horse camp to meet an Irish school friend, and ended up going to an Irish wake, and getting his first, early teenage taste of Guinness “and I thought, this is a really good time”. The taste for adventure and stout obviously stayed with him, because for his own bachelor/stag party “a group of us cycled across Ireland to Killaloe, staying in fields and sleeping on the floor of pubs when we got there…nothing to be proud of!” he remarks.
Isaacson’s immediate roots are in South Africa and Zimbabwe, but he was raised in the UK, and he bought his first horse as a teenager “while running a market stall, out of the back of a colliery.” He went on to make a youthful living as a horse trainer, while also developing an alternative career as a writer, first for equestrian magazines, as a journalist and travel guide author and as a rights campaigner for indigenous tribes.
Now, his immersion is total in a consuming, voyaging family life that combines his far-flung and sometimes left-of-centre/non-Western interests in a way that’s begun to work wonders for his son Rowan.
Rowan was confirmed as autistic at age two and a half (his mother Kristin more or less diagnosed it by web-browsing symptoms), and by the time he was four had developed severe traits, such as frightening temper tantrums, increasing social distance from peers and a lack of verbal communication combined with faecal incontinence. Following a well-documented epic four-week family trip by van and horseback across Mongolia in 2007, (the documentary movie Horse Boy won awards and plaudits), touching the Steppes and Siberia whilst meeting with spiritual healer shamens “at the spiritual home of the horse”, Rowan began to respond to the combination of stimuli and experiences, across all three of his main distressing symptoms.
The film shows him bonding with a Mongolian boy his own age called Tomoo, managing a first controlled poo, and reaching welcome periods of calm. His journey continues.
The special link between animals and children with special needs has been increasingly appreciated, from dogs and dolphins to horses. Making for a fairly powerful combination, water is another element in which many autists feel more quietly at home and connected. Ireland is fast finding itself rich in both water access, and trained horses as therapies for autists.
Isaacson and his wife Kristin Neff, who’s a University of Texas professor of psychology, a practising Buddhist and first-time author, are both 45, and live with Rowan on a farm near Austin, Texas. They’re escaping soaring Texan summer temperatures by globe-trotting — with nine-year old son Rowan in tow. Kristin’s currently in Italy, Rowan and Rupert are in London and they’ll all meet up briefly in Kinsale, but will busily scatter again, with the boys going to a dressage camp in Wales.
“He‘s doing well, we don’t talk about a ‘cure’ for autism, I see it as a skillset, or a healing,” says Rupert, pointing to a way of taking a lead from Rowan’s own interests and directions, and going with them where possible. Current project, initiated by Rowan, is a documentary on animals at risk, called Endangerous, and he’s already focusing on working behind the lens. “It all came from Rowan,” says his collaborative father, a mix of easy-going, open-minded personality and hard-working campaigner.
When back home, Rowan is interested in a variety of animals, not just horses. “He’s not a horse obsessive like me, he’s very equal opportunity: into tarantulas, snakes and emperor scorpions, for example — but he definitely has a special bond with Betsy, the first horse he was ever on,” says Isaacson.
Out of natural parenting caution, Rupert admits that he at first had kept a flailing, hard-to-control Rowan safely away from his own passion, horses, but found him being drawn (OK, throwing himself on the ground in front of a horse) to the gentle, big-striding mare Betsy belonging to a gentlemanly Texan neighbour.
Rowan’s first time on horseback — emotionally revealing and told in The Horse Boy — saw the child being the most verbally communicative he’d ever been until then: light-bulb moment, chink of salvation, horse-sense.
The big animal connection, aided by a big Western saddle for adult and child, the rocking/rhythmic motion to stimulate learning receptors in the brain, sensory connection and other combined communicative elements and more go into a method of therapy that’s now being taught to teachers/riding instructors from around the world.
OK, most Irish parents of an autistic child won’t be taking flying trips to healing shamens — Isaacson’s other pillar of aid and what gave Rowan’s story a unique angle — but generations have gone to Knock, Fatima and Lourdes with children with special needs.
“You don’t have to go on a plane to Mongolia,” says Rupert, astutely distancing their own particular, spectacularly epic journey from being a general prescription to others coping with children on the spectrum, “most parents in our situation routinely go to the ends of the earth in their own living room, every day.”
Limerick woman and self-confessed horse fanatic Shellie Murtagh is following in the Isaacsons’ hoof marks, having trained last year in the Horse Boy Method in Texas.
A rider since age five, and qualified riding instructor via Fás, she’s also training to a be a primary teacher at Mary I in Limerick, combining her talents to work with children with autism. She was the first in the Republic to learn the method, and welcomes the fact more trainers are coming along: “If I was on my own, I’d be working every hour of every day, there’s such a need and demand.”
Shellie hopes to adapt Rupert’s ideas to an Irish situation. She and Rupert Isaacson will be giving a presentation noon on Monday next in Clonlara Equestrian Centre, Limerick.
See:
- www.horseboymovie.com
- www.horseboyfoundation.org
- www.ledulra.com
- Riding for the Disabled Ireland www.rdai.org
- www.kinsaleartsweek.com
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