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| ears |
My relationship with horses has evolved over the years.
It used to be near-compulsive, a desperate, life-consuming need to fill the voids I didn't know I had.
Then it was a place of transcendental peace. I could go to the barn and center myself, surrounded by familiar sights and smells.
The last few years have seen another shift, one where I tackled new challenges in training and trusted myself to feel my way through and find my own balance. It's enlightening to break each goal down in to smaller steps and find ways to explain them to another creature. I learned more about myself, my patience, my methods, the things I'm proud of.
Step by tiny, baby step, I built trust with my partner on a level I haven't had since the grand old man himself, Cuna.
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| throwback |
And then, I moved ZB from the lovely barn that we were at to a place much closer to my house with trail access right out the front gate. (Also if you ever want to have a weird time, try hauling your horse across town at rush hour by yourself for the first time in the middle of a massive mental health crash out. TL; DR it was fine and we survived.)
Now that the trails on are the front porch, I get to ride on them any day I want. It isn't an "event", like "well you hauled here so now you have to DANCE". It's a more easy version, where I roll up and if all is well, off we go. If we need to school in the arena, we do that. If we need to hack around the property, we do that.
And if my brain needs to just feed her cookies and tell her she's wonderful and we'll try another day, then we do that.
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| peep DARLING custom dino halter gifted by a friend |
The ability to take the stakes down to nothing has been MASSIVE. I find myself excited to go to the barn nearly every day. We're in a roughly-once-a-week training program at the new barn and for the first time in my life, I think lessons are fun. Which is probably an insane thing to say out loud.
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| best arena view in town (trainer up, not me LOL) |
I'm a capable adult amateur and I think I appear a lot braver than I actually am plus I tend to just not tell people when I'm scared to death. Which, we could psychoanalyze but let's just not right now. The point is. My lessons always ended up pushing me WAY BEYOND my comfort zone for one reason or another and yeah, I have a lot of good skills, but it just ended up making lessons a pretty shit experience for me. Like you want to pay more to do that thing you love in a wildly less enjoyable way? Take a lesson!!
Note--this is not a comment on the quality of instruction I've received. I've been fortunate to work with a variety of trainers I respect and the reason I've been able to succeed working mostly independently with ZB is those trainers gave me an incredible foundation of horsemanship. I fully own that it is on me as a student to communicate the struggles that I am having so the trainer can address them and that has not been a point of strength for me. Plus I probably needed a therapist more than a trainer for most of it, but I have one of those now so yay.
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| the return of barn teeny (he is still mad I made him be in this picture) |
I chose to move ZB closer to me because it made sense logistically.
I'm been connecting with a lot of pieces of myself that are healed by the way I interact with my horse each day. It's loving her through all of it. It's trusting her in the tough moments. It's showing her that I'm a leader she can trust. It's being in a partnership that's as natural as breathing.
You know I believe that our horses are a mirror for ourselves. That the way we talk about them is the way we talk about ourselves.
So we can flip that statement.
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| <3 |
It's loving who I've become.
It's trusting myself in tough moments.
It's leaning in to the partnerships that matter.
As I look through familiar ears on another sun-soaked afternoon, there's nowhere else I'd rather be.
