One is the Loneliest Number
There was absolutely nothing efficient about taking Annie to visit Mercedes...
Mercedes is a retired nun who is completely housebound, and getting a miniature horse from Missed Path Sanctuary to her home required more than simply deciding it would be a nice thing to do...Annie had to be prepared and loaded...we had to drive there, unload her, spend time with Mercedes, then load Annie back up and bring her home...There was time, fuel, planning, equipment, and the inherent risk that comes anytime you take one of our horses away from the sanctuary...
And there was a cost to Annie too...Horses are herd animals, and asking Annie to leave her herd, walk into a trailer that is essentially a metal box, travel somewhere unfamiliar and trust us when we tell her everything is OK is asking a LOT...We don't take that trust lightly, but Annie is an absolute rockstar at it...She takes those experiences in stride with a steadiness that lets us bring a little piece of Missed Path to people who can't come to us...
All of that...for one person...
If we were measuring the afternoon by efficiency, it probably wasn't a particularly good use of resources...We could have done something that reached ten people...or twenty...something easier, more scalable...But the numbers wouldn't have been Mercedes...
She didn't know what it took to get Annie there, and she didn't need to...None of that was hers to carry...Mercedes simply got to experience Annie…And experience Annie she did...
Mercedes has lived with her caregiver, Talin, for two years...but for those few hours with Annie, something shifted...Mercedes was lucid, present and engaged...and she seemed to understand that this little horse had come to see HER...She was special that day...
Maybe the real measure came after we left...Talin told us that Mercedes "still doesn't know the cats' names, but she didn't stop talking about Annie for days."
For days!
Somehow Annie reached through whatever makes it difficult for Mercedes to hold onto the ordinary details of her days and gave her something she COULD hold onto...
And maybe THAT is the part we couldn't possibly have calculated...
Annie didn't know any of it either...She didn't know Mercedes was housebound or that she was supposed to brighten someone's afternoon...She just met Mercedes.
There is something important in that...We humans tend to bring the story of someone's circumstances into the room before we meet the person...We know someone is elderly, isolated or struggling, and suddenly we aren't simply meeting THEM anymore—we're carrying the knowledge of their circumstances and the expectations that brings. Annie didn't have any of that...There was no pity, no attempt to make anything better...There was just companionship.
That is one of the things horses continue to teach me about service...The most meaningful thing we bring to another person isn't always the thing we DO for them...Sometimes it is our willingness to enter their world without needing their world to be different.
We talk a lot about values when they are easy...Kindness, service, community, connection...It gets more interesting when they cost something...When connection requires loading the trailer, when community means leaving the sanctuary, when service takes hours...That's when a value stops being something we SAY matters and becomes something we choose.
How many people will this reach?
How much will it cost?
Is there a more efficient way?
Can we scale it?
Those are reasonable questions...We HAVE to consider them...But there are things those questions cannot measure...
Because sometimes the answer to "How many people will this reach?" is ONE...One woman, in one home, with one miniature horse beside her. There is something unsettling about the phrase "only one person"...Mercedes wasn't one person out of however many we might have reached...She was Mercedes...The person we COULD reach that afternoon...
For that little piece of time, the world of Missed Path Sanctuary extended beyond our fences and merged with hers...Annie had left her herd, trusted us enough to step into that metal box, traveled away from everything familiar and walked into the home of someone she had never met...Then did what Annie does so beautifully...She arrived as herself...No agenda, no lesson, no expectation...Just the quiet willingness of a remarkably steady little horse to be present with another living being.
Maybe that's why the whole thing felt worth considerably more than it cost...
Sometimes living what you say you value IS inefficient...Sometimes it looks like putting Annie in a trailer and taking her to see Mercedes...and having that be enough.
And ONE person IS enough...
But Mercedes also shows us what might be possible if we could do this more often...There are elders in nursing homes, retirement communities and palliative care centers who can't come to Missed Path...but maybe, sometimes, Missed Path can come to them...
That's the vision behind "Forever Seen", our effort to bring Annie and the kind of connection she shared with Mercedes to elders who might otherwise never experience it...Mercedes gave us a compelling reason to keep going...not because reaching more people makes what happened with her more valuable, but because it makes us wonder how many more moments like hers might be waiting to happen...
It will take resources, time, willing hands and people who believe those moments are worth creating...If you're one of those people, we'd welcome your help making them possible.
—by Marc DiFrancia, Co-founder