More About the Belly Button Thing

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?

Just for a Moment

I can gauge my progress more clearly now. It used be: didn’t fall off. Now, there are some things that are happening that happen, just for a moment, and they change everything.

Rollercoaster. Of Love.

It’s the Monday after my rodeo show with Rebel. I’m still annoyed and unhappy, and now I’m heading off to ride the Big Horse with No Bit.

‘You Work Too Hard’

So, despite my promise to write about the myriad books I’ve read about horses, and natural horsemanship, and the esoterica of the mythology of the horse, etc, I haven’t, but believe me when I say that I’ve read a lot. I read before I rode. I read before I do just about anything, to be honest. So I’ve been through your Monty Roberts, your Linda Kohanov, your Chris Irwin, your Linda Tellington-Jones. I’ve absorbed the teachings, and would have been trying them out, all this time, but hey, no horse, and it’s unfair to schoolies to give them a little bit of something without consistency. I’ve ridden a variety of horses over the past two and a half years — I think the count may be up to fourteen? Fifteen? — and I haven’t encountered the kind of horse I’ve been reading about, the kind that is sensitive to me, as rider and as person, and who will demonstrate, to me, in a holistic, yet non-nonsense, and if I’m being truthful, creepily prescient way, how I need to grow.

I’ve never met that horse, until now, and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Not a Bit of It

I decided that I wanted to take some private lessons at Festina Lente, where I offer reiki to the horses. For whatever reason — despite my feeling that my riding has been getting worse — I wasn’t nervous. Not a bit. I stared languidly out the bus window, I walked up the long road placidly, I got myself organised once in the locker room without any undue kerfuffle.

I suppose it’s because I felt familiar with the place. Whether or not I was going to ride a horse I’d tended, I didn’t know. It was nice to be recognised by my instructor, even though we’d only been introduced twice. I chatted with the dude who was tacking up Jack, and then the instructor came up, and lent a hand.

She started to explain that we’d be taking it slow today, as it was unlikely, given my relative newness to horseriding, that I would have ridden without a bit —

Without a bit?!
Oh, shit.