In the car to the LUAS, we chatted about the lesson, as we do. My horsey friend said how she trusted the horse she’s currently riding — and maybe that was a mistake? And I said that I didn’t think so: ‘Because since you trust him, you’re relaxed, and he feels your relaxation, and then he relaxes, and the whole situation just feeds on itself, in a good way.’

So what’s the opposite of a vicious circle? I initially thought ‘precious circle’ and criiiiiinged. This from someone who makes smoochy noises at Connell, in the barn, in front of everyone! Seriously, though, as words go, ‘precious’ is just one of the worst. Sorry, it just is.*

Luckily, Wiki offered up a legitimate antonym to ‘vicious’ in ‘virtuous’ and this pleases me, not least on an alliterative level. This also allows me to go down a dictionary/thesaurus rabbit hole. Virtuous has mainly to do with morals, is what I conclude, and I think… I think that the virtuous circle with the horses goes back to that state of trust.

The more I trust someone/something/somehorse, the less I worry. The less I worry, the more present I am. The more present I am, the less I worry, and then trust is a foregone conclusion, because I am confident and relaxed [because I am not worrying!] It’s like when we’re jumping a series of fences as we did last night: double at B and a crosspole roughly at X, on the right rein. Now, I don’t trust Rebel on the right rein, it seems to make him fizzier and fightier, but since we had so much to do, and I had so much to think about, I mostly just left him to it and focused on getting us around the place. Now, I do trust that once Rebel at least sees the fence, he’s going to go over it. I know that much. Since I trusted him to do that, the fact that he was taking off really early on that first fence — well, I just went with it.

The thing was, he needs to be able to trust me to do my job, too, which was to notice that, hey, he’s taking off really early and not getting his stride, so therefore perhaps I should pinch up my butt. We did the double again, with me pulling up my arse muscles, and it was perfect. [This was not an independent decision, just to be precise, my instructor reminded me to do it.] So maybe he trusts me, now, to be paying attention and making adjustments?

I don’t know that I trust Rebel in the pure sense of the word. I know I can rely on him to be stroppy, frustrating, and moody. ‘Rely’ means many things, but ‘count on’ seems to work here, in a less than positive sense. But! I suppose the answer here is to be able to rely on myself, to know that I will be present, in the moment, in every moment that makes up the lesson, and that I will flex as necessary.

I am finally in the place where I understand [acknowledge, know, be aware of, be conscious of] that I have to be there, every single second. Even more than I already have been. Which I had thought was a lot, but apparently, there’s even more Now to be experienced. I’m very juiced up to be experiencing this, and am going to be seriously experimenting with this virtuous circle thing — without being too precious about it.

*Some words I do like.

The thing is, I know I was going to say that I was keeping an open mind, and that… I didn’t. I mean, I could feel the word on my tongue. It almost made it all the way out, but then this other word slipped out of my mouth, and I realised that this it was a good thing to say, and a good way to live.

This concept has been on my mind for the last week or so. I’m working on what I’ve been calling my ‘horsey-divorcey’ book, a middle-aged lady, post-divorce, equine conversion, codependency recovery memoir. I’ve been working on it for the last forever, or at least it feels that way, and it’s another reason that I wasn’t posting very often in the last year or so. I was having a hard time switching from blog-brain to book-brain, and I feel that since I’m halfway done, and have also nailed down the memoir’s raison d’etre, I can do both at once.

One feeds the other. Each chapter features a number of posts culled from here; this post is inspired by some things I’ve been thinking about lately that have come up from the book writing. In one chapter, the main thrust of which is falling, I talk about how much I wanted to be a rider! and I proceed to recount the first seven falls that were meant to ‘make’ me a rider. [All seven posts can be found in the Catalogue of Falls category'.] Someone had told me that horse people said that it took seven falls to make a rider; I had some fear around falling, and the notion of turning it into a goal kind of took the sting out of it.

It occurred to me that there was no way in heaven or hell that I wanted to call myself codependent, and I couldn’t imagine how I was going to take the sting out of that. I have by mainly turning it — the concept of it, my reality of it — into a hook in a book. By extension though, through that kind of distancing, it’s easier for me to hold the notion at a healthy distance, from which I gain perspective. It makes it easier for me to look at my behaviour in my unsuccessful marriage see how I can heal, and move forward.

But was it unsuccessful? On Saturday, I woke up a bit tired, and what with my ligament thingie still bothering me, by the time I got to my lesson, I had already reckoned on the kind of lesson I was going to have. And I had exactly the lesson I thought I’d have: not stellar, largely featuring inconsistent jumping on Connell, who wasn’t doing anything but giving back to me exactly what I was giving to him, an hour in which I went in and out of focus, in which I corrected something only to let something else go by the wayside. A lesson in which, at the end when the instructor gave us all feedback, I was literally and figuratively often unbalanced.

I was not fully ‘successful’ in that lesson, but I can look at it and realise that it was successful in that I knew what was happening going in, and got what I thought I was going to get. I now, completely and utterly, understand that I bring myself to this work, and that it’s not up to the horse to ‘make’ it go well. In this way, I can look at the things I am looking at, as regards my codependency, how it manifested in my former marriage, think about what I’ve learned and how I’ve used that knowledge, has enabled me to sit here right now, a horsewoman-in-progress, pulling all the bits of my life together and bringing it all forward.

That’s the only kind of enabling I’ll be doing now, but even as to that, who knows? I’ll do my best, and I’ll keep an open heart.

I actually had to say to myself, before bed Thursday night, ‘Tomorrow is Friday, tomorrow is Friday.’

Part of this is concern about the over-extended whatever in my right knee. This is so annoying! The aging process, in action! It feels somewhat better, but I just texted a pal to see could I get a lift to the yard [as well as the one I get to the bus after...]

As well, part of this is what I hope is a renewed enjoyment of my Saturday lesson. Last year didn’t see much blogging because I was so bummed by how poorly I was riding. Now, I feel back up to snuff, and maybe even a bit beyond. It’s made me look at that injury in a new way.

You can’t learn to ride without riding. When you don’t know how to ride, the learning curve is steep. There you are, up there, in public, in an arena full of other horses and riders, and the pressure is actually enormous. The instructor is yelling, because there she is on the ground, and there you all are, up there, and it’s not like she’s yelling at you… but sometimes it feels like that. {And okay, sometimes she is.} But every week, you go back for more, and somehow, the penny slowly drops, and you do something right that you used to do wrong, and it is amazing.

In the beginning of this undertaking, for me, the gains were massive, or seemed so. One day, I wouldn’t even understand what the canter aid even was, and then the next, I would get it. One day I wouldn’t even know what it meant to ‘sit back’ if a horse went all sparky on me, and then this day, I simply sat back and reached a whole new level of control.

It’s not like I’m not being continually told what to do, but there’s this thing, this brain freeze thing, in which what happens is: something goes wrong, the instructor instructs me on how to correct it, but the thing going wrong just makes me go deaf, or something. The thing about riding is, there’s not that much you can do to correct something that is wrong, because the correction is essentially simple, so I suppose the sheer repetition of hearing it, over and over, makes it sink in somehow.

When Reb took off on me on Tuesday, I didn’t even need to hear the direction to sit baaaa-accck — I did it. Somewhere, deep in my limbic system, I must have called up the memory of this, and I didn’t do what I did then, and managed the whole thing more successfully. And remembered enough of that event, deep down, to get down and cut my losses.

All of this goes back to that time taken off. Which wasn’t much, I got back up there really quickly, even if I couldn’t do everything the lesson required, because I couldn’t bear to be away… but even when I couldn’t do everything that the lesson required, as far as jumping was concerned, say, I still had fully functioning eyes and ears. I could still learn by watching and listening. When I did do things, I had to do them more slowly, and use more of the muscles that I was probably supposed to be using all along, and I learned from that, too. I think that a lot of the pressure was off, the pressure to go and go and go, and in taking the riding more slowly, even though it was going really badly, it was actually going really well.

So it wasn’t really time taken off, but time taken and used to do the things that I had been doing over and over, in a new way. I think that’s built my confidence, my mental confidence, measurably, and I’m happy to have learned that no time in the saddle is wasted.

Apparently not… and I tacked him up with no worries, led him to the indoor, mounted, lead the ride down to the outdoor, not a bother on us…

And things were mostly okay until I went to pull him in behind Spuddie, after open order. It was only two strides, maybe three, but he belted for the queue, like, galloped to catch up to Spud, and I thought, Uh oh.

Yeah. Around and around we went, and he’s absolutely focused on running up Spuddie’s arse. I am sitting back, massaging the bit, and the reins are so short that my fingers are practically in his mouth.

It’s our turn to canter. He’s wobbly, and he’s fighting me, and I tap him up — and he bucks like he means it.

Now, Rebel mainly bucks the way that a child might stick out her tongue. It’s cheeky, and annoying, and somewhat disrespectful, but it’s easily corrected, and everybody moves on.

This was different. I was thrown fully forward, and a little to the right, which is not great as you will read/may have already read below, and for a second I saw the arena’s fence and thought, Crap, there I go, over the fence — and hauled myself upright, left stirrup lost. Rebel fulfilled the promise of those earlier gallop-y strides, and took off;  I heard the instructor say, ‘Sit baaaa-aaack’, really gently, like she’d talk to a horse, and I sat baaaaaack and dropped my leg, and leaned back, massaging the bit, and then what happened?

Oh, yeah, then I got the stirrup back, and brought him back to canter for the short end of the arena, and then we stopped. We trotted whilst everyone else in the ride cantered, and just as we were about to change rein and canter on the right —

I pulled him in the centre and sat there. And then I got down.

In that moment, I knew the difference. I knew the difference between what happened here, and what was happening last night. I knew that he was going to take any and every opportunity to explode. I acted on that awareness, and went up and put him away.

I brought Connell down, who was also fairly fizzy, and managed to jump him handily over a couple of fences, and to stay aboard when he refused one of them < which was all down to me anyway, I knew I wasn’t riding the approach properly.

Frankly? That was one of the best lessons I’ve had in while. I’ve only realised that now. I felt like crap all the way home, worse when I was limping to the second bus, but now, I understand that I made independent decisions and was completely aware of how I was affecting my own experience. I got off Rebel. I knew that Connell refused because I hadn’t kept my leg on. I also asked to take the fences again, really quick, just so that in my own head I could know what to do correctly. I was not psyched out, because I could see how my own behaviour had contributed to the result [or non-result], and therefore, I could do it again because I knew what I had to keep in my awareness [everything.]

I am resting and icing and writing — the best way to heal, as far I can tell.

Yesterday, before I left the house for my lesson, I felt like my right knee was acting up again.

I had felt it tweak a bit on Saturday, and by the time I got home it was back to status quo, which is: I was aware of it, as I have been since I injured it, but not so much so that I was conscious of it. Do you see what I mean? I am always aware of it now, it is a thing I check in on, the same as I query my left foot and knee, but I don’t think about it all the time, the way that I did about the teeny bit of calf muscle I tore that had such a monumental effect on my riding for the past eighteen months.

I put on my stretchy support bandage and made my way to the yard. I got there, and went to the loo before I put on my body protector. Somehow or another — maybe the floor was slippy — I twisted my leg just so, overextended my knee, and fecked the ligament again.

Well. At least I had the bandage on. I made it through the lesson, no small feat as you will have read/will read above, and was limping by the time I got off my first bus home. Once there, I got out the Tylenol, the gel ice pack that is always at the ready in my freezer, stuck the ice in the bandage, and sat. Given my experience in this realm, I feel like it will sort itself out sooner rather than later. It’s not the big fear I had when I banjaxed the Achilles, but I’m now conscious of this part of my body again, and I’ve learned not to mess around.

The post re: the Achilles injury is here.

*Rest – Ice – Compression – Elevation

This was little something extra.

What happened was: It was really cold yesterday. Cold enough that I thought I might take off my light jacket halfway through the lesson and decided against it; cold enough that I was wearing a light jacket at all. I remember a period of time, early on, during which there was a more experienced girl in my Saturday lesson. This is going back… five years, maybe. There I was in my layers of outerwear, and there she was in a button-down top. I’ve toughened up over the intervening years and often ride in the winter in a long-sleeved top, and that’s it for protection from the elements. And my body protector, sure, but even so. I think I even wore a scarf one time, early on? Sheesh.

So, Saturday was pretty chilly. We worked hard, non-stop, on the flat, and Con worked up a sweat, so much so that he had white stuff all over his jowls, and near the girth. It was too cold to hose him down, and I couldn’t bear to leave him like that… so I took off my jacket, dipped a section of it into his water bowl, and wiped him down as best I could. And then dried him off, again as best I could, with the jacket.

I balled it up, stuffed in into my rucksack, and thought nothing of it.

Until I sat there on the bus, wondering what in holy hell smelled.

In fairness, even as I asked the question of the general Consciousness, knowing fully well that it was me that was the source of the pong. I felt a little self-conscious, but also a little bit proud. I worked so hard in that lesson that I stink to high heaven. <It’s almost lyrical, that.

I also felt a little dubious. Surely I can’t be smelling as bad as this?! Could I have sweat that much in so much cold? Then I remembered the jacket, and how I had wiped all that sweaty white stuff onto it, and then, weirdly, I was a little embarrassed. I don’t even know what that is about. Why would I be more conscious of the stinky jacket and not the stinky bod? I haven’t got a notion. I think because I really don’t think that I smell that bad, but whooo, man, the reek of this jacket was noticeable even through the rucksack.

Ah, sure. I forgot about it, mostly, after I identified it as the source of all things smelly. I even took it food shopping. I only hope that it helped to prevent Connell feeling too much discomfort. If it did, it was well worth the the looks from my fellow commuters. Sorry, people! The comfort of the horse wins.

Okay, granted, I was still literally ‘high’ from jet lag {and perhaps figuratively, too: I do believe that I leave part of myself up there, negotiating time zones, until I re-enter my body}. I had a new plan coming back from the States this time round: usually, I dose myself with Tylenol PMs, inflate the neck pillow and apply eyeshades, and pretend that I am sleeping through the flight. This is impossible because there is too much activity in the aisles, and I doze fretfully, and still have to take a nap a few hours after arrival.

This time, I stayed up for the entire flight, watched movies {Cowboys and Aliens — lots of horses} and then stayed up the whole next day until 8pm. Like, I had been awake for twenty eight hours, and I still managed to wake up at 2am! I think I should have taken a nap, directly when I got in the door, maybe even on the threshold. Dammit.

Anyway, that was Monday, and Tuesday was the first day back, and I… I didn’t feel scared. Was it that I was too stupid with lag to be? I don’t think so. I knew that all I wanted was to be there, up at the yard, getting back into it. The first sight of the horse’s heads over their stables filled me with such joy, I forgot to worry whether or not Rebel was going to be car-razeeee after three weeks off. I simply got up there, and voted for going outside for the lesson. Who’s car-razeeee now?

I did sort of think maybe I may not like to jump, but I did anyway, and we had a high enough fence for the last one. High enough to earn a crosspole along the bottom of the straight. I don’t even know what that means. Anyway! It felt great, I didn’t even think of anything, I didn’t waffle with Rebel, and I reckoned that this was gonna knock the lag into little bits and pieces.

Not so much. By Saturday, for the second lesson of 2012, I was still a little dozy. Got a little flutter in the belly… but not so much on that, either. I watched the lesson that runs before mine, watched Connell act up a little, and thought, I know how to handle that. And then I thought: Hey, I just thought that. That is amazing. Wow.

We had a good flat lesson. Con wasn’t really in the humour, but we still managed to get two GOOD SUE WELL DONE’s in a row, until we had to canter in a circle on the right rein and then: ignominy. Did a spot of formation riding which we both love, and then had a meander down the lane after.

If I continue to forget to be nervous, that is great, but it really doesn’t matter if I do feel nervous again, because I know that I can work through it. I suspect I’d feel trepidation riding a new horse, or before a showjumping competition, or a ride out on a new horse, but that’s to be expected. I think it is an ‘essential’ nervousness that I forgot to feel, and that’s a new place for me to be. Excellent.

And now we’re all rolling our eyes at one another, shaking our heads and hoping for better in 2012… which is exactly correct.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between ‘right’ and ‘correct’, as in the difference between doing something right or doing it correctly. I’m working on what I call my ‘horsey/divorcey’ book, a series of essays about different aspects of horseriding that tie in with my personal story as a post-divorce middle-aged lady who started riding horses late in life, and one of the things that seemed to come out of nowhere was the idea that there is a difference between two things that seem to mean the same thing.

Right v wrong seems so, well, black and white, whereas if you do something incorrectly, you can correct yourself, and then do it… correctly. The former seems freighted with lots of emotional rubbish, and the latter seems gentler, somehow. Like there are shades of grey between correct and incorrect, and that correction may be as simple as lowering your hands, or sitting one half inch further back in the saddle.

When consulting the Funk & Wagnalls, there are two definitions of ‘correct’ that pertain to adjusting, and I think I’m responding to that spirit of the word. I can make an adjustment, but I think it’s harder for me to swing from the being perceived to be wrong all the way over to right. Wrong according to whom? Who’s ‘rightness’ are we defining to be the hallmark?

Is it right or wrong, correct to incorrect to malign an entire year? To blame a period of time for all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? To invest so much emotional energy into an artificial designation for the cumulative movement of the earth around the sun? I mean, what would a horse do?

Animals pretty much live in the now, and I think that’s the correct approach to take. Sure, there’s been plenty to moan about in 2011, particularly the fact that lacks of funds meant that I have been riding only twice a week for much of the year. My own eye-rolling and head-shaking is all well and good, but I’m going to think like a horse and just keep my head in the day.

^Without freaking out at the next crisp packet that blows across my path, of course. WINK.

Thanks to Haynet for featuring flyingchanges as blog of the day!

I think the cold weather had something to do with it, but everyone was kicking up their heels this last week of term.

Now, as far as Tuesday was concerned, the wind didn’t help keep the lads settled down. We’re fairly used to the wind, up there on that big hill, but this was like nothing we’d ever heard. It was relentless, and the clatter on the steel roof crescendoed upon crescendo until I was sure someone was going to go ballistic. At one stage, Winston and Rebel seemed determined to have a bit of a race, but it didn’t come to much. Spuddie broke out into a canter, unasked, as well. We made it through, though, even if it did sound like the roof was going to fall in.

Saturday: too cold to watch the first lesson, so it was with some surprise that Connell came back to the indoor carrying a different rider. Seems he did that squealing/bucking/galloping thing, and it necessitated a switcheroo.

I wasn’t bothered. Still cresting the confidence wave, it didn’t even occur to me to be bothered. Or if it did, it didn’t even last the length of the thought. So I got up there and we made our way down to the indoor, where the wind was still blowing from Tuesday, and the horses in the field we had to pass were going mennnnnnntal. Connell did a little muscle bunching, precipitate to reacting, but we managed to get past without incident.

We had a good, solid flat lesson, and I don’t care if it was because he was hopped up on the notion of two weeks of freedom, Con was positively springy, and felt great. When we got to the canter, there was the usual right-rein power struggle, and when I did get it off him, there it was, that little squeeeEEEEE and a buck and the first two steps were like wooHOOOOOO — and I just sat back and had none of that. Fantastic.

We were meant to get a little more cantering in towards the end, but the horses in the field decided it was New Year’s Eve or something and were racketing all over the place. They were far enough away that the humans didn’t notice them until we noticed that the horses we were riding noticed and that they wanted to join the party. Or were freaked out. Or both.

As we were queueing up to leave, I said to the instructor, ‘Hey, I’m nervous.’ I’ve got a streak going here, and I’m not going to wreck it. She grabbed Con’s bridle and walked with us until we were well past the critical juncture.

It takes a lot of confidence to admit you’re afraid. That’s kind of awesome, isn’t it?

Not the riding, but the idea of ‘Saturday’ itself. I was so intimidated and overwhelmed by the level of horsewomanship in the lesson that I thought about switching out to another. I was so tired of falling off of Connell. I was tired of feeling nervous every single Saturday. The thing is, I started this whole journey on a Saturday in September 2006; ach, so sentimental. I love going up there on Saturdays, it’s buzzy, I know lots of the other riders and some of the mums, the energy of the activity on and off the horse is so great… so I really didn’t want to drop it…

But it had been so hard. It had been so hard to get up there, get up on the horse, and fall. Honest to God, I fell every week for months. I can count on my fingers the number of lessons I didn’t fall off. They all weren’t all FALL falls: some of them were more of the ‘slow slide down the horse’s neck’ variety, but one or two [or three], whoo, ouch. I didn’t have the confidence in my leg, to risk the clinch and grab — I was so afraid of tearing that poxy muscle again, it was easier on the leg, if not on my ego, to hit the deck.

I was so sick of falling off! Every fall, no matter its stripe, was gouging chunks out of my confidence. Never mind that I was riding fine on Tuesdays. I wasn’t nervous on Tuesdays. I was like Dr Jekyll on Tuesdays, and Mr Hyde on Saturdays, and I was sick of it. I skipped lessons… I had work, and stuff, but there wasn’t the gut-wrenching I’m going to miss horses! that I’d had for years and years when I didn’t have a choice but to miss, to reschedule.

And then… and then there was the day that I did not fall off that !@&ing horse. That was all the way back in June! Wow, I seriously thought it was two months ago. I’ve been building and building on that day, on that victory; there was the steady commiseration and encouragement from the excellent, excellent women in the lesson; there was the growing positive feedback from the ground; there was the beginning of the sense that I could get back to where I was, before The Injury, and the idea that every lesson was a victory, a victory of focus, and learning, and frankly, sheer stubbornness.

Three weeks ago I woke up on Saturday and went, Huh…; the week after that woke up and went Hmmm…? Today, as I made my way to my second bus, I noticed that I was walking with purpose, one previously unhappy foot feeling rather bouyant, and the feeling was !!!!! — there weren’t any words, just a full-body flow of energy and excitement.

Connell was fizzy in the lesson previous to his and mine — Well, he’s awake, I thought. I got up there, warmed up, and we started jumping. At B, a cross pole, one stride, a straight and then canter over to a straight at E. I have been psyched out by Connell, as I have mentioned, particularly at combinations, and I decided — I decided not to be freaked out. I kept my gaze pinned to the tops of the hills in the distance, and he jumped and jumped, and we made it round on the correct lead, and over we went, over and over, to the increasingly vocal affirmation of everyone in the lesson. I felt every single step, I rode every single step, and I did my part to get us to the fences, and let Con do his job. He stopped at the first fence, at some stage, and I just turned him round and started over. I did not !@&ing fall off, and his pace around to the E fence was smashing [but not in a crashy way.]

At the end of the lesson we were all sitting there, and Paul said, ‘Sue did really well today!’ and everyone turned to look at me, and they just… beamed. It was perfectly, beautifully awesome.

I untacked Connell, wishing I had a treat for him, and over and over in my head, I said to myself, I did not give up. I did not give up. I did not give up. There is ‘stopping’ which for myriad reasons, one may have to do. I had to stop riding for a while because I simply could not heal and ride at the same time. There is ‘not pushing’ when you know that to do so is inadvisable, dangerous, too scary. Confidence is lost, and lost, and lost. But I regained mine today, because I did not give up going after it. I knew it was in there somewhere, and the only way to get it back is to get up there and go. To go after it, to dig it out, to recover it — to build on it, and build on it. Sure, I’ll take more knocks to it, but I will never, ever give up.

Broke a nail, though, so this experiment is going to have to start over. Not giving up on that, either!

A quick search yields the use of this headline, with variation. Three years ago… plus ça change…