enlightened horsemanship through touch

But not big in the way you expect, given the recent spate of FEI-related posts. And now for something completely different:

From Fran Jurga, a report that on Friday, July 16th, under the motto, the heavy brigade is on its way, 70 draft horses of various breeds (called “cart horses” in Europe), as well as carriages and working teams will compete in the First North Rhine-Westphalian (NRW) Cart Horse Day at Aachen.

The dressage riders and show jumpers will need to keep a tight rein on their mounts when these fellows rumble by. The refined warmbloods will be face-to-face with their cold-blooded root-stock. And they’d better watch out that the big boys don’t steal their show, or at least inspire a children’s book or two.

My all-time favorite and most beloved mare is a Percheron. Millie taught me everything. Maira is half Percheron. Windsong’s Justa Firestorm is a Percheron stallion. His son, “Buster,” is Perch/TB. You get the drift. Their nobility and grace, and courage in stressful times cannot be matched. Millie and I tried dressage. It was an unparalleled disaster. Not only am I terrible at dressage, but Millie’s typical but beautiful draft conformation naturally made it difficult for her to rock back on her haunches and carry herself properly. It was a battle. Why torture her for no good reason? We decided to stick with what we do best–hunt for a couple of hours and go home, triumphant. Trail ride and enjoy it immensely.

Below I have posted a YouTube video of a Percheron training that really takes me back. I believe that what you see in this video is typically what you get when trying to get a draft horse to do dressage. Draft horses. Conformationally appropriate? No. Willing? Yes. Capable? Yes (????)

I hopehopehope that the beauties of Aachen wow them with more than just the rumbling of the earth! I’d give quite a lot to be there.

As I began to explore in my post Critical Mass, major changes are afoot.  Among them,

I have listed my farm for sale.*

Burnt Mountain Farm in October

I have lived in this old farmhouse for longer than I have lived anywhere in my entire life. It is the first home that has been solely my own. It is the first place I have experienced the peace that emanates directly from place. I love it. It loves me.  When I first arrived, I think I sat in a rocker on the porch for two solid years, soaking up the silence composed to birdsong and the snufflings of animals. There are so many reasons to leave. Maybe in some later post I will burden readers with those reasons. Maybe I’ll get an attack of compassion and spare you!

Maira Lycaeia at 3, still a little downhill, and before some much-needed conditioning

I have also sold Maira. Since Maira and I became partners, I have been plagued by injuries (a bad fall, two herniated disks), traveling, and finding my time occupied with my daughter (as it should be). Maira knows Nancy, the woman who leased her while I was in Hawaii, better than she knows me. This painful reality, plus the obvious fact that my back is not going to get better overnight make the decision to send her off to be loved and ridden daily by a foxhunter’s hubby the right one for me and for Maira.

I will ride in Hawaii, but I will not own a horse. I am in negotiations for a condo with a sea view and welcome the opportunity to shrink my life to smaller, more manageable proportions. Not to mention looking forward to the weather. I plan to practice TTouch® and equine massage in Hawaii, in addition to my regular duties for Linda Tellington-Jones and Animal Ambassadors International.

The question is, can a person who no longer rides, hunts, or even has the opportunity to groom a horse on a daily basis really have the right to write a blog about horsemanship? It seems the real meat of the matter may be lost. I’m interested to know what readers may think.

* If you know anyone who wants a completely renovated farmhouse plus nearly 40 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains of central VA with pastures, woods, a pond, fencing, a barn, heated black-bottom pool, miles and miles of blackberries, Black Mission Figs, black walnuts and peace and quiet, located within 20 minutes of the University of Virginia, please contact me! (Sorry, couldn’t help it.)

Now that I’m (mostly) back on my feet again after more than four months off nursing my injury, I find I have little time to work with Maira before I go off to work in Hawaii for the autumn and, hopefully, the winter.

What little work I do will have to be efficient and jam-packed with meaning. One of my favorite websites these days is www.zenhabits.net.

Leo Babauta writes about how he has simplified his life through mindfulness of what he really needs, and what is superfluous. Leo has found that most of what many people think they really need is superfluous for him and his family. He lives a stripped down, Zen sort of life in Guam with his wife and six kids. Late last week I ran across his post about limiting yourself to the essential, which Leo calls HAIKU PRODUCTIVITY.

Haiku, an ancient and beautiful form of poetry, is, as Andrew says, limited but powerful. In its traditional form, a haiku is a poem contained in just 17 syllables, arranged in 3 lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables each. This “limitation” of form forces writers of haiku to focus on finding the words with the most “bang for the buck.” Powerful and compact, haiku cuts to the heart of the matter, focusing on one essential concept. Just 17 syllables can express mountains of meaning.
Here is a fine haiku by master Hashin, which, in its transliteration from the Japanese does not follow the strict 5-7-5 syllable form:

No sky
no earth – but still
snowflakes fall

You get the point. Minimum words, maximum effect.

While Haiku in poetry and in life is a nice in principle, few people take the time to winnow down the zillions of bits of information whizzing around, belongings piling up, and responsibilities multiplying to the degree that Leo Babauta and his family have. In our modern world, we have a lot of stuff coming at us: sitcoms are on 24/7, the radio is exhorting us to buy a cheap used car, the kids have to go to practice, the trash has to go out and the groceries have to come in. We are jugglers. We really don’t take the time to evaluate what’s absolutely essential and pare away the rest. After all, the American dream does not involve purposely doing without, does it?

But Leo got me to thinking. I work very hard to be mindful in my daily life. To eliminate the non-essential “noise” wherever possible, so that the things that really matter stand in sharp relief. If I can see them clearly, I can give them the attention they deserve. While Leo thinks in terms of productivity, I think in terms of creating and preserving a peaceful life, both inside and outside myself.

With Maira, as a four year old, there’s a lot of work to be done. In terms of my own riding skills, the mountain of things to be learned looms ever larger. It’s easy to be overwhelmed. I have no systematic way to focus on the essential stuff, and eliminate the rest. Here is where I look to Leo and Haiku Productivity. I’ll rename his concept Haiku Horsemanship (with his blessing, of course) and think about how I can best use the short amount of time I have with Maira before autumn.

The key to Haiku Horsemanship will be to limit myself to an arbitrary but small number of goals, forcing myself to focus on only the most important stuff and eliminate everything else.

I have chosen three things to practice with Maira. They may seem simplistic to readers, but they will take some finely-pointed attention on my part, and some cooperation of Maira’s part:

1. Elimination of the flyspray dance
2. Standing stock still at the mounting block
3. Bending and straightness in simple serpentines at the trot

I have a little time. If I work with careful attention and avoid the temptation to work on other issues as they come up, I can get the most bang for my buck in terms of training time. I will limit my attention to these few essential goals and allow the rest to fall away. No huge efforts to keep up with whatever is being taught in the lessons. No “going where the day takes me.” FOCUS. Like meditation on a mantra, I will attend only to Maira’s stance, to bending and straightness. These are concepts both simple and complex. If I give them 100% of my attention, I’m hoping I can plumb the depths of their complexity while dealing with them in a straightforward manner.

I spend a lot of time with Maira on the ground. I may as well make it count toward my Zen Horsemanship goals of eliminating the flyspray dance and getting her to stand perfectly still at the mounting block. We will begin with practicing “the statue” tomorrow.

Maira bends like Gumby and she knows how to move straight. The transition between the two, under a sloppy rider who is out of shape, don’t come easily, however. Tomorrow I will begin with straightness. At the walk. We will stop and turn at the fence. She will probably be bored, and I will have to cough up a lot of treats to keep her on board. Come to think of it, I may need a treat or two myself.

Lately the pressure at my barn to put shoes on my mare has been ratcheting up to the point where I think if I don’t do it, I might have to move her elsewhere. More on the reasons below*.

As I’ve said before, I don’t have a lifetime of horse-knowledge under my belt. During the short time that I have been with horses, I have done my best to learn as much as possible about all aspects of horsemanship, including the care of their feet. I am well aware that reading hundreds of books and attending clinics and trainings is not a substitute for forty-some years of experience, but it should count for something. I wish that the barn managers would understand that my decision to leave Maira unshod (to have her hooves trimmed naturally, to have her wear boots when we are in the mountains and rocky areas) was a decision made not out of ignorance or unwillingness to part with money but out of a respect for her feet and bones.

In How To Become Your Farrier’s Best Friend, I wrote a little about my feelings on this subject. To me, it’s a no-brainer that if your horse doesn’t have soft, shelly feet or some malformation that needs a shoe correction, or if you’re eventing at a high level or racing, then you should leave his feet alone. To the managers of the barn where I keep my horse, it’s equally a no-brainer that you put shoes on horses. Period. That’s the way it’s always been done and that’s the way you do it. Granted, they have little time for getting current with new trends in horsemanship. They are busy. They work hard. They have a lot of horses to ride and lessons to teach. Why fix it if it ain’t broke? But I am the lone boarder who says, “it’s broke.”

In the year and a half that Maria has been there, she has been lame twice. Once was an abscess of unknown origin, and the second time I believe she had what was maybe a light a stone bruise. She was fine the next day. Horses with shoes get stone bruises too. But the pressure was on to put shoes on her because both problems were thought to be due to her barefootedness. I have a million arguments as to why and how this is not true, but they don’t stand up because I’m not a lifelong horsewoman. I don’t have the clout. I lack the deep lines in my face, the calloused hands, the blue ribbons by the thousands.

In today’s blogpost, my friend Dogo Barry Graham told a story that perfectly captures my frustration and I wanted to share it. Maybe get his work to an audience who doesn’t ordinarily read the word of a Zen monk. He is a wonderful writer and I encourage anyone interested to read his blog.

When I was in my teens, living in Glasgow, Scotland, I developed an interest in fishing that lasted a couple years, though I only ever went fishing about a half-dozen times in all. There was nowhere to fish in the inner city housing project where I lived, and I could rarely afford the bus fare out of the city. Sometimes I’d walk north for two hours until I was in Milngavie, where I’d fish the River Allander (never catching anything) and sometimes illegally fish the reservoir.

Occasionally, I’d take the bus all the way out to Stirlingshire, to the River Forth. Twice I met a man there who had been fishing for more than ten years. One of the times I met him, he was annoyed because he kept catching eels, which he didn’t want. (I’ll never understand this aversion to eels, which are delicious; maybe it’s because of their snakelike appearance. Then again, I’ll never understand why people don’t like snakes.)

Even though I had only been fishing a short time, I’d read enough and talked to enough people to know that eels are bottom-feeders. I could see that this man had so much weight on his line that it was lying on the river bed rather than drifting in the water. I could tell this because the line was slack and curly, rather than being pulled tight by the current. Since the bait was on the bottom of the river, it was in the perfect position to catch eels, and the man caught plenty of them, which he gave to me and grumbled that he wanted trout.

I politely told him he had put too much weight on his line, and that he should take some off if he wanted to catch fish that weren’t bottom feeders. He shook his head. “I’ve been fishing for ten years,” he said, making it clear that he didn’t need to be told anything.

He had been fishing for ten years, and in that time he had doggedly continued to do the same thing, over and over, not getting the results he wanted, complaining about it, and never considering changing his methods. Young as I was, I was shocked. As I got older, I learned that most of us live our entire lives like that man.

I don’t want to live my life that way, and I don’t want Maira’s care to be determined that way, either. I”m still trying to decide if it’s worth staying and fighting the battle, or if I should just knuckle under and shoe her. What would you do?

* Wizard Liz, whom I respect greatly, has suggested that the boots will not hold up under trail riding conditions, and that she does not want to ride Maira using them. While I’m gone to work in Hawaii for the fall and winter, Wizard Liz will be riding Maria every day. This poses a problem.

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Maira Lycaeia, Victim of Carnivorous Beetle

This morning at 8 o’clock it was 96° with a relative humidity of about a thousand, and Maira seemed to be taking almost everything in stride except the lemon yellow Volkswagen Beetle parked at the end of the dressage arena, trunk open, doors flung wide, like a carnivorous daffodil. This monster had just consumed the judge, and me, the scribe.*

At the age of four-and-a half, Maira likes to pretend she’s cool with a lot of things. Cows, dump trucks, umbrellas. These things do not faze her. Small children and bicycles, and now apparently, yellow Volkswagens with flapping wings, are very scary things. Imagine the self-control she had to conjure to trot up the centerline and halt at X, in front of this newly-minted bogeyman.

As hard as her young rider tried, she could not prevent Maira from wobbling drunkenly first left and then right as she did what looked like a giant comical double-take before trotting off to the left to begin her 20 meter circle. It was a valiant effort! I am so proud of her.

In spite of a shocking early heat wave, The Virginia Horse Trials are in full swing, and today I was thrilled to be scribing again. I only lost concentration once, while watching the most amazingly talented rider. I missed a whole section of scores and severely tried the patience of the judge.

The thing I love about being a scribe is the opportunity to learn. It’s like sneaky backseat riding lessons. You don’t actually get up there and ride, but you learn a lot.

Among the things I’ve learned while scribing:
1. Naturally, different judges value different “directives,” or skills, such as the balance and ease of a turn or the straightness of the centerline. You can tell this by the number of times you have to write the same thing in the teeny tiny box on to the right of the score.

2. Usually, the smaller the box, the longer the judge’s comments. All the tests progressed faster than I could write. Something tells me this is the result of too much typing and not enough writing.

Today’s challenge for me involved writing the word, rhythm about three hundred times. I find this is a hard word to spell. I found myself scribbling, rhy, then moving left to fill in the score, and returning to complete the comment thm or some variation I prayed hopeful riders could read.

Often when I’ve scribed, judges will be sticklers about one thing or another. Last month, I spent a fantastic afternoon with a lady who cared a great deal about bending and straightness. To her, these form the pinnacle of dressage perfection. I wonder how many riders actually get good bending and real straightness, other than those we see in the Olympics. It’s the ideal, but that has little to do with reality at the levels where I hang around.

Two of today’s themes were those I value a lot: relaxation and rhythm. These are actually attainable for the average rider, I think. And so does the United States Equestrian Federation, I discovered today when I actually took the time to read the fine print on the back of the test I was recording: “To confirm that the horse’s muscles are supple and loose and that it moves forward in a clear and steady rhythm, accepting contact with the bit.”

This judge was looking for horses who appeared relaxed and who didn’t lean hard on the bit, or drag their riders around the ring, both of which you might expect to see at the lower levels. It’s awfully hard for a horse to relax when its rider is uptight and forgets to breathe. Even harder when both horse and rider inhale hot, viscous air instead of warm springtime breeze.

Rhythm is kind of a tough thing for both novice riders and inexperienced horses, as I know well, as Maira and I are such a pair. The moment you have rhythm, it slips away. Kind of like spelling it. You think you have it right up until you get to R.H.Y…no that doesn’t sound like English…..oh yes it is!… T.H.M…. there it goes again….poof. It’s gone. It’s particularly hard to remain relaxed and maintain rhythm when you are about to be attacked by a giant horse-eating narcissus.

After all the riders and horses had departed to cooler climes, and the judge and I sat baking in her car, I asked her a bit about my pet issue, the free walk. I tried hard to put my question delicately, but here is what I really wanted to ask: “Why aren’t horses and riders any better at the free walk?” I’m grateful that she took the time to talk with me about it.

She described the free walk as a kind of double-exposure snapshot of the horse: its present way of going superimposed over its development and early training.

The judge stressed that those riders who mistakenly believe that the free walk is a “little rest” in the routine do not understand the nature of the free walk and how horses carry themselves and the rider. Hence, the scores mostly between 3 and 7 today.**

Watching the free walk gives her most of the information she needs to know about the basic under-saddle training of a horse.

A horse who can lengthen its topline, stretch out and release those long muscles while maintaining its balance and self carriage has truly been trained to become an athlete. To move from, say, a medium walk into a free walk with no change in head carriage, level and engagement of the back muscles and hindquarters, is not a free walk at all. The pace may change, but the back, from poll to tail, is not free.

I watched Maira and her rider carefully during the free walk. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but I don’t think that at her age, it’s too late. Maybe at my age it is. But if we can’t swing it on our own, I could probably bribe the scribe.

* In case you’re wondering, a scribe is the person who sits alongside a judge at a dressage test, writing down scores and comments while the judge “judges,” because they cannot do both at the same time. The word scribe literally means “one who writes documents by hand.” My bestest friend Caroline sent me this link: Scribing 101.

**Let’s get this straight–I couldn’t land a 7 if you held a gun to my head, so I’m not picking on anybody.

Today in the TTEAM Training, it was time to round up our assessments of our horses. We discussed how to effect the necessary changes and encourage beneficial qualities in our horses. We spent a warm and breezy afternoon in the arena figuring out how to use some of the Tellington TTouch® ridden work in the Playground for Higher Learning, experimenting with TTEAM equipment, and getting sunburned.

After examining Maira thoroughly, Linda’s pronouncement confirmed some of my suspicions, but when she threw in everything but the kitchen sink, the diagnosis got a little alarming. I’ve got a lot of work to do.

Read more…

and I ache in the places where I used to play…

When I first heard that line in the Leonard Cohen tune, The Tower of Song, I giggled a bit. After all, Mr. Cohen is upwards of seventy years old, I thought smugly, preening my forty-seven-year-old self.

Then God said, “Ha!,” and made me ache in all my places!
Last week I made an ill-advised decision on horseback and received a face full of dirt as my reward. “That’s nothing new,” you say, “I fall off all the time!” And like me you may even have broken a couple of ribs, bruised one entire side of your body, damaged subcutaneous nerves in your thigh, and nearly dislocated your shoulder, as I did. But this is about me!

As I sit, stand, lie, wander (whatever hurts less), my thighs tingling with the regeneration of those damaged nerves, able to take only the shallowest of breaths, wishing I had just bounced like I did all those years ago, I have the opportunity to examine the circumstances surrounding my accident, and to consider my options for preventing a reoccurrence.

Riding accidents happen both in a flash and in slow motion. As we take flight, we have the peculiar combination of acute awareness of our impending doom and no clue at all how it’s going to play out. The minute we hit the dirt (and after we catch our breath), we wonder, “How the heck did that happen?” yet we know. We know. We play the whole scene back in our minds in slow-mo, in our dreams, in the recounting to friends and the EMTs.

Usually you can chalk it up to a series of errors.
Not this time.

I think maybe all horse people have at least one extra risk-taking gene. I have two. This tendency toward a lack of good judgment diametrically opposes my efforts to be a more mindful person. In all areas of my life, the “risk-taking override” often kicks in when I should stop and take a moment to step out of automatic pilot, to exit “doing mode” and enter “being mode” to connect more deeply with the present moment.

My dust-eating face plant is a prime example, and one from which I want to extract every lesson I can.

I remind myself of Henry David Thoreau’s comments on this subject:

“I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit… The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is; I am out of my senses… What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”

I have a young horse. A four-year-old Morgan/Percheron cross, not quite finished growing. Still a little “downhill.” Read more…