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ACK! Been away so long, WordPress changed their homepage. Freaky!
I suppose ’summer’ is as good an excuse as any, to invoke against sluggishness in blogging. I’ve mostly been spending the time daydreaming about writing my non-fiction horse book, and waiting to go across to England to do a week-long course. The course is done, and the woolgathering mostly finished… I’ve got a full chapter under way, and am in that horrible state that plagues writers — or at least, this writer — that is, the book is no longer a collection of misty images of perfection, but has begun to be wrestled into form. It’s no longer ideal. Now the work begins…
It has been really difficult to blog, since the headspace is entirely different, but not writing anything at all isn’t getting me anywhere. So I’ll say something about Saturday:
The lesson has changed, it’s not fun anymore, there’s all sorts of randomers in it, and it’s been a hassle to get a lift down to the bus. We’re an hour earlier, but last week I still got home at 5 because of the poxy bus.
Amigo, apropos of nothing, bucked me off. No warning. Okay, he’d jittered around for a bit before we got to this fence — was it jittering? I don’t know, it may have been a bit of rodeo, jumping and bucking… my hands were too high, but I sat back and got him to stop — anyway, one minute I was trying to get a decent line in to the straight pole and the next I was flying over his head to land on mine.
My instructor said she’d give me a lift after she’d ridden her own horse for half an hour, and would I ‘wash Amigo down? Don’t be mad at him!’ I wasn’t mad, and I was delighted to give him a soak. I was disappointed, though. I’m running out of horses I can trust. I did the course one last time, on Delilah, and I just can’t ride her anymore, I’ve gone beyond her. Now what?
I know. I know.
So I gave him a bath — note to self: must toss some baby shampoo in the bag — and then, lacking a head collar, lead him around the lanes by the reins, in the sunshine, allowing him a snack now and then, and running my hands over him, checking him for damp.
It was so lovely. So relaxing. The least I could do for the poor dude, after his third hour in a row. I felt grateful, to be able to give him some TLC, and grateful that I wasn’t going to hold that buck against him [he's a lamb, but, damn, when he wants you off, you are gone. Even Tango gives you a bit of notice.] We walked, and I talked to him, and I felt like… like, I want this. I want this time, alone, with a horse. I want to be responsible for the well-being of my own animal. I want to be able to give back in attention what is given to me in work.
Gulp. I don’t think I’m playing at this anymore.
Oh, Tuesday. I had Rebel, we were outside, there was a massive puddle between E and C, and he had decided that it had my name on it.
He was spooking at a teeny tiny one between C and M, and in open order, I kept going back over it, to get him to look at it, ‘It’s just a teeny tiny puddle, dude!’ … with no great success.
He was fighting me for the bit, and when it came to the jumps, I kept him in trot, because we were coming from the A end, and I knew he’d do that dropping-the-shoulder-thing to get me off, and wet.
We managed, although it was a battle after every recovery to get him back on track, to get him back into trot, to get him away from that damned puddle. I lost my balance a fair few times, he refused a fence a split second after I realised he was going to do so [and off I came, but it was dry under the crosspoles] and the whole lesson was a war, but nobody else but me noticed. Well, apart from the falling. [I haven't fallen in ages, and this was a good one, flying right over his head; I still had the reins in my left hand when I landed.]
The turns after the landings were controlled entirely by him, and down went that shoulder, but I did the belly button thing, as scary as it was at the time, and I felt him have to get control of his balance. So score one for me.
I was determined to have him again on Thursday. He’s always better on his own [mostly] and my stubbornness was back. Read the rest of this entry »
So I’d been doing all this stuff — sitting on the edge of my seat on the bus, walking around with my elbows loose yet down, standing with my balance entirely in my pelvis — to help me in the saddle. This is as far as my ‘on the ground’ work has gone.
I’d never lunged — longed? It seems to be one or the other — a horse on a long line before. Read the rest of this entry »
BECAUSE IT FEELS BETTER The last few jumps on Thursday were over an oxer. I seek to use the correct terms, and I suppose an oxer is an oxer is an oxer, but this was, maybe, if I was pushing it, eighteen inches wide. [There had been some sort of crazy series of fences set up, and the first two were too close together to be a bounce, so it had to be an oxer, and it was DEEP.]
Anyway, we took it in the trot, and it was mostly kind of lacklustre, until the last one: I stopped thinking, and we made a good run for it, and I felt it, perfectly, I folded and rose with Rebel, as he powerfully rose up over the poles, I felt myself meet him, perfectly, and land, perfectly, together.
Over the fence, I was unthinkingly aware, in the instant, of everything being right, of my arms moving up just so, of my hands staying steady, of my shoulders going forward, of the feeling that the two of us were in perfect harmony, that I knew it looked right, because it felt right. I didn’t need the ‘Goooood!’ hollered from the ground, but it was lovely to hear, all the same.
Thing are much better in the jumping department. The thing is, I’m back to not thinking about it again. I’m convinced that I had been doing so badly for the previous six months because I had been thinking about it so much. But I suppose I had to think about it to be able to, eventually, forget about it. If I hadn’t been thinking about it, all the bits of it — the legs, the position, my hands — then I wouldn’t be able to not think about it, which I am doing now. Meaning that now my body just knows things. And even if I am coming up the long side, looking at the fence, and in my head I’m reminding myself to keep my leg on and not grab with my knees, for example, the awareness of the need to adjust doesn’t come from my brain. And if there’s a running monologue, it’s in my body; my body’s awareness is reminding me to look up, to wait, wait, wait, fold, and sit up. I’m able to forget about all of it because the processing is shared out evenly between my mind and my body, and this essentially allows me to get out of my own way.
Oh, you know what I mean…
Last Tuesday was great. Perfectly sunny, perfect blue sky, and we went up to the upper arena to jump.
I had Amigo, and I think he likes it up there. I sure do. It’s the perfect balance between being outside and being up in the mountains. I’m still a bit leery of the highest hill, and suppose at some stage will be back up it, but for now, the upper arena is an excellent compromise.
You can see for miles. You can see the miles and miles away to where I live. The whole of Dublin Bay is below, and you can see out over the Irish Sea. The hills flow down to the water — it feels as though the entire east coast of Ireland is at your feet. You jump and jump, and stop, and look out, and being up on the back of a horse makes it all the more glorious.
We got some good jumps in, too, I’m feeling Amigo’s approach better, and only fell behind on one fence. He seemed less… unsure of the fences, maybe it’s all that air and space. Once I could kind of forget about him, and what I thought he was gonna do or not do, I just let him do it, and we went really well…
But then came the pony parade…
So, at one stage, whilst waiting to have another go at the fences, we all noticed that a bunch of ponies had… run out of the lean to, or something? and were pelting up the big hill. Flynn was tacked — didn’t care, he went and followed all his friends to freedom.
Ha, ha, so cute, look at them go.
And then we were done, and were about to leave the upper arena… Read the rest of this entry »
People have asked me for more information about the belly button thing, and the thing about the belly button thing is that I did it twice, maybe, and then I lost it.
But that’s just par for the course, isn’t it? Read the rest of this entry »
EQUALS AWESOME The other thing being that thing that they tell you to do, when the horse is falling in on a circle in canter, which is: open the inside rein. Which seems ridiculous and pointless and scary, because surely if you open up the inside rein, the horse is just going to fall in even more and you’re going to end up spinning like a top?
Actually, you don’t. What happens is, the circle gets frighteningly smaller and then the horse, who has been overcompensating, compensates in the correct direction, and Bob is the brother of your mother or father.
It really does work. Especially when added to the belly button thing. Oh, and the thing that Ruth told me to do in the canter, to drop and open up my knees. Honestly, I barely know myself.
What happened was, we had been having some excellent canters, knees were down, navel was engaged, and the inside leg was on. I was holding Rebel back a bit, just to let him get used to the idea that I am now taking a greater interest in being in charge, but still, we were going great.
Until the last canter. We went into the twenty metre circle at C, and damn if he didn’t start running away a bit, and dropping his shoulder. I sat back, legs long, did the belly button thing, and opened the inside rein — and damn it if he didn’t straighten up.
He tried it again, I did it again, and bang on the money: I could feel him shift his weight so that he didn’t tip over like a dozy cow.
I think that it takes a while to process something intellectually about the riding. So much of it is counterintuitive, that it’s a struggle to believe, in your mind, that sitting back is actually safer than curling up in a ball on the horse’s neck [well, when I put it like that...] and that opening up the rein in the direction in which a horse seems uncontrollable will actually get him under control.
I believe it in my mind, now, because I did it in my body. There was a moment when the circle was getting reeeeeaallly small when I thought that I didn’t dare try to open the rein again, but I did, and he straightened up.
All without using the stick. All without bashing the belly. All without panicking. All easily and quickly done. No drama. Lots of praise resulting. Feeling of self-amazingness increase expotentially. There’s a lot here to like.
IT REALLY WORKS It really does. Read the rest of this entry »
