Formed from Lightning and Metal

Ditching my professional rule book

Photo by Louise Pilgaard on Unsplash

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

Counterculture:
A way of life and set of attitudes opposed to or at variance with the prevailing social norm.

Coming out of last week’s journaling workshops where we explored the topic of forgiveness, I was shocked by the amount of amends I still owe the horses I have known and loved and ridden throughout my life. The words you’ll find in this week’s collection of thoughts and stories are a frail attempt at saying I’m sorry.

Given a choice, I choose discovery over validation. In this piece, I’m not writing for — or to — other horse professionals. These are my personal reflections. My ideal client is someone who is approaching a horse for the first time. My ideal reader is someone who has always believed they don’t like to read.

I always thought I was someone who supported the outliers, the eccentrics, the nonconformists, and the heretics. But it was easy to believe I was collecting outsider art when my professional life with horses was, by its very essence, a specialized niche.

Working in the horse world makes for really fascinating dinner conversation.

But when I took a sober look around my own house, and by house I mean farm, I realized that I had been playing the conformist game for so long that I’d mistaken my complacency for innovation.

Modern horse sports are not very comfortable for the horses. As a result of following tradition, I have personally made horses very uncomfortable. My work now is daily penance for the wrongs I committed in the name of the status quo.

I’ve dubbed my daily, working atonement Equine Counterculture to give me a solid reminder of how easy it is to fall into the trap of unquestioning loyalty to ideas or institutions. It’s a pirate flag I’ve planted in the sands of my little island of self-importance so that I can see it waving in the breeze and remember to scan my awareness for the right questions.

Here are my reasons why.

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Stockholm Syndrome

I stare at hoof prints etched into the smooth, grey sand of a riding arena. A morning rain has settled the dust, but it’s midsummer and the air is sauna-thick, a weighted terrarium with the high sun burning into the valleys and crevices of the mountains. I’m waiting my turn to put my horse into gear, into a tiny, controlled gallop, to beat out my time in footfalls to the base of a jump.

My nervous system is on fire, but this has so long been my standard operating mode that I have forgotten what sensations like comfort and safety feel like. Some people choose to chase adrenaline as a pastime, but I do it because I’ve been told that there is no other way if I’m going to make a life with horses.

The act of jumping a horse is part science and part faith like a quantum religion. A horse in the wild would not waste energy leaping an object for fun, they’d choose to go around it.

In this memory, I am twenty-five years old and I grew up in the hunter/jumper industry in the United States. We’re the only country with hunters as a discipline. The difference between the two isn’t one of athletic ability, but aesthetics. Hunters are judged on beauty and way of going, like a pageant. Jumpers are judged on speed and precision, like a race car.

I came to horses because something deep inside me said early on that horses would make me feel better. So I grabbed a phone book and called stables until someone agreed to schedule a riding lesson. I gave my grandfather the details and explained that he would be driving me. He agreed without question and that action changed the course of my life.

I was seven years old when my mother disappeared from my life. Until that moment, she was my only friend. From the time she walked out the door, through the carport, and up the road on a snowy February morning, I became a substance squeezed within the vice grip of family warfare. I learned early on what it felt like to be judged for my use, to be spread around like currency. The horses and I had a lot in common.

But when two species in the thick of Stockholm Syndrome collide, trauma is so much a part of daily life that it’s impossible for either one of them to see their existence is somehow abnormal, that there are other ways of being. When all that you’ve known is discomfort, there is no language to describe its opposite.

The horse I’m riding in this memory is named Kolo and he is Dutch. He was imported at a young age because of his talent and breeding. He is a Grand Prix horse, which means he jumps the big jumps. As I sit back and press a spur into his side, he arcs up and forward into the softest, gentlest, most beautiful canter.

It’s important that I ask him to move in this gait because, at the walk and the trot, he is so lame an untrained bystander could notice his limp.

But at the canter, he is a machine. As we round the corner and lock our sights on a plywood wall, painted in a brick pattern, with rails added to the top, Kolo sea-surges forward. I sit back, find his rhythm, and wait. He carries me like a dancer. He carries me like a warship. He carries me like his life depends on it.

“This horse will make you famous,” my instructor says.

I don’t buy him, but I want to. The owner has offered me a deal.

Ten days later, Kolo is sold for $50k, dead lame at a trot and an angel that lifts his rider’s confidence to the top of the jump standards.

At least once a week, twenty-five years later, I wonder what ever happened to Kolo. Where did he go? Was he drugged to keep going or was he gently laid to rest?

Photo by Karin Zabret on Unsplash

Don’t Tell Anyone You Have Anxiety

As much time has passed since I rode Kolo as the number of years that I had been alive when his bay, leggy excellence was harnessed between my legs. I have never forgotten his name or the way he took care of me so that I could breathe through my terror of the big jumps.

I had been trained and polished and molded into the ideal rider. I was effective and bold. I rode the horses, without question, that my trainers put underneath me. I knew theory and timing and had a deep understanding of the mechanics of modern hunt-seat riding. As I graduated into the jumpers, this method of riding was the only normal I knew.

My teacher’s teachers were cavalry officers. The place where I grew up was the home of the first civilian Olympic trails in 1950 and many of those old greats stayed and ushered in the world that 20th-century, competitive horse riding became.

Frozen with anxiety, I quit my real jobs after college to write a book and see if I could make horses my full-time gig.

“Don’t tell anyone you have anxiety,” a trusted mentor said as we stood around hosing a horse after a ride. “It weirds people out.”

I rode so many horses a day that I would brace when I saw a bright colored tarp blowing in the wind on the side of the road as I commuted between barns in my car. My body was so used to following motion that anything was capable of a spook. Horses are notoriously afraid of billowing plastic.

My early professional life was spent in disaster preparedness, bracing against the next explosion, the next fall. At the end of the day, shifting around to find relief from the points where my seat bones had bruised my ass, I polished my black tall boots and took pride in my aching body.

I didn’t know another way.

But I knew that horses made life bearable and that they allowed me to channel debilitating anxiety into the useful and very real panic of riding an unpredictable horse. We were partners in uncertainty, the horses and me, — the horses because they were clueless as to what boundary they’d be forced to push that day, and me with half the information I needed to be able to complete an effective and pretty job over a course of jumps.

When a horse in training finally flipped over on top of me, breaking my saddle tree as her body crashed against a wall above me. The horse’s solid, trembling realness missed my torso and landed on my outstretched leg. The accident forced me to change course and ride side saddle for a while. With two legs on one side of the saddle, I could communicate with the horse using my unharmed calf.

“Your leg looks grotesque, just sitting there,” my father said, the Thanksgiving he came to watch me ride in a lesson. I didn’t practice side saddle wearing the regulation apron skirt so all the mechanics were on display.

“But look at how this has taught me how not to move, how to wait for the jump to come to me,” I said, riding a big, Irish field hunter with a flat, coffee table back.

“It looks unnatural,” my father said.

He wasn’t a horse person.

I thought I had found another way.

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The Dark Arts

In the learning of any craft, there is a period of impersonation before we find our style, before we find our voice.

I’ve always been a good student.

Learning from the very best, I discovered how to create smoke and mirrors with my words, how to beguile and charm like any good magician. I learned how to play the human nervous system so that a person’s thoughts couldn’t form fast enough to question the exercise I gave them on a horse. I learned how to make a client believe that the best riding attire and the fanciest horse would fill the aching hole inside of them, the place that was shoveled out by comparison and an obsessive need to belong.

The horse has been a trophy of the aristocracy since the first curious steed kneeled down in submission to an arrogant human — and that prize remains to this day. The horse, within our psyches, makes us feel like we’ve arrived, that we’ve finally made it to that nebulous place of respect.

And then slowly, slowly, like a loosened knot, I began to unravel the difference between what had been instilled in me as fact and what I actually believed.

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Manifesto:

• I’ve been doing it wrong.

• We value dogs for their companionship and their mere existence in our lives. We value horses for their use. All of us do this — the mother who can’t afford groceries and wants to see her daughter excel on a horse and the hedge fund manager whose son rides at boarding school. We all do it. And our need for the horse to have a use, our need for the horse to make us look good, is an ingrained rule that we’ve subconsciously absorbed.

• I will re-write this rule.

• Social license to operate is a real thing with far-reaching implications. Just because we’ve done it one way for a long time doesn’t mean that we continue to do it indefinitely. As the greater public becomes more conscious of animal rights and abuses, the horse industry needs to lead the charge in updating practices. If we don’t police ourselves, the public will police our use of horses for us.

• I will edit, add to, and subtract from the rules.

• Human projection is the devil’s work. Pain is difficult to gauge in an animal that is hardwired to mask injury. Though we often minimize the horse’s reactions by comparing them to human emotions — he’s such a baby, we say — the facts are that a horse in the wild receives no benefit from making themselves a compassionate target. Injury is a liability. Coupled with a horse in captivity’s survival being dependent on their ability to intuit cues from the foreign language of a different species, we’re just witnessing the tip of their feeling, like an iceberg.

• I will strive to view other animals and humans as THEM and not ME.

• Horses are not our mirrors, but they offer a reflection. There is a sweet spot where horses can work in tandem with the public while being allowed the autonomy of rest and comfort. We humans can watch this work and take notes to understand the way we rip ourselves to pieces by the mirror of our expectations. The horses don’t reflect our humanness, but they offer us the stillness to feel what we’re doing to ourselves.

• I will better understand my behavioral defenses.

• I will do better.

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Overheard at a Dinner Party

I do not want to be here.

I’m sitting at a table in the home of a couple that have financially and physically supported my initiatives at the new farm. The husband asks me what my ultimate goal is for the stables — where do I see my work heading?

“I’d like for us to have matching tack trunks,” I say. A tack trunk is a box that can be found in the hallways and tack rooms of horse farms. The designs can be simple or elaborate, and some models are custom-made with the farm’s colors.

I’m fresh out of a donation scam where a gift of custom tack room drapes and director’s chairs for us to use at horse shows was promised as a way to solicit money from my clients.

I want my drapes. I want an orderly world where our boxes and ball caps match. I want branding and distinction.

“Seriously? Matching tack trunks,” the husband says.

I had also been promised a custom wooden tack trunk when I graduated from high school, and then when I graduated from college. The box never came. As I sit at this dinner, dimensions and etchings are in the hands of a craftsman who is making the box that, like Pandora’s Box, has been a long-coveted prize of my own devising, purchased with my own money.

“I want this to be a requirement for anyone who is keeping a horse with me. Matching tack trunks,” I say.

The husband laughs. I bristle. We’ve both had too much to drink.

“You think that’s funny?”

“Not really,” the husband says, “I think it’s stupid. I’d pegged you for someone that didn’t give a shit about the establishment.”

“I believe in tradition. I want to honor the industry that made me,” I say.

“By requiring matching boxes?”

“It’s important to me.”

“I think you’ve been sold a lot of nothing with that need,” he says. “It’s like the world’s largest Ponzi scheme.”

“Some things matter,” I say.

“The horses matter,” he says. “Not the objects we attach to them.”

Photo by Jacob Jolibois on Unsplash

In Support of Equine Counterculture

I’m always saying that my life lessons arrive in times of desperation, and it’s true. I wasn’t eager to move into the farm that has been my home for the past twenty years because the barn was old and my career was blossoming and I knew that my high-dollar clients wanted an air-conditioned lounge and a covered arena.

But I didn’t have a choice. I had to move from the farm I’d launched my brand from and the land that is now Bramblewood Stables was the only place available.

I hauled twelve horses down the driveway two decades ago and they did something very curious when I unloaded them. Each horse took a long, deep drink of the water that is sourced from a well that taps into an underground river.

They drank until they were full, and then they slept. I remember it vividly, how strange I thought it was that the horses were sleeping so peacefully and for so long.

I was eaten up with anorexia and ulcers — but dang everyone said I looked good. When I think I’m right, I’d tone-deaf to good sense, so it took me a very long time to follow the horses’ lead.

I became sick of screaming at people in riding lessons. I became tired of barking orders and arguing in defense. My heart began to ache — or I slowed down to notice the ache that had always been there — for the way I pushed the horses to fulfill a certain role, a certain task, a certain way of going, as if pushing them to their limits would actually fill the gaping hole of need that brought people to live the dream with horses in one-hour, weekly increments of projection and shame and longing.

I began to notice what operating mode I had adopted on any given day: fight, flight, freeze, fawn. One harrowing afternoon as the horses were being brought in from a storm, I noticed all four F’s in a series at once. My well-practiced fears did not, despite my hope, stop the storm.

I began to notice which nervous system state my horses had adopted for survival.

I began to notice how much I influenced, consciously and subconsciously, my horses’ feelings.

I slowed down. I ate. I slept.

I realized how much I had abused my body to keep it tidy and slim within the dictates of equestrian norms.

I realized how much I had abused the horses’ bodies to keep them working and fat and within the dictates of equestrian norms.

With absolutely no template to draw on, I thought — What if we re-designed our program with the goal of people and horses finding a sense of calm together? What if we did this as a public riding stable? What if we literally changed the model of what a riding lesson could be? What would happen if I edited my business to reflect the things that made me feel better, instead of perpetuating the things that always made me feel worse?

And what if some sessions didn’t have riding as the goal at all?

When I first started my professional journey, I didn’t know how to work without being fueled by the rusted tank of adrenaline I had inherited from my teachers. The horses and I were like crude sculptures formed from lightning and metal, all conductive and combusting and in pain.

I stopped trying to change us. I replaced adrenaline with comfort and safety as our medium, as our fuel. Softening into a newfound assurance that I had the right to step away from traditions, that I could make new ones, that I could change everything.

I drank deep from the well water that is sourced from an underground river, and I finally learned how to sleep.

And in sleeping, I dreamed.

There are no rules in dreaming — there are only possibilities.

Photo by Chiara David on Unsplash

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Disclaimer

It’s hard for me to write about my truth and experience with the horses without sounding like I’m throwing blame at everyone around me. That’s not my intention. I am thankful for the farms and teachers that housed me and made me who I am today.

For my own part, I know that I can do better, and I have been blessed with a community of like-minded souls who are working to do the same all over the world.

I want horses to be in human lives. I want people to continue riding them. There is not enough land remaining to allow our horses to roam free in the wild, and we’ve bred them to the point where their bodies can’t support their instincts.

Horses and humans are on the same pirate ship together floating through a new world on an ancient planet, our energies craving a way of life that no longer exists.

Humans need horses and we need farms to visit so that we can remember our way back through nature and dream our way into a new start.

It’s a refreshing time to be alive in the horse industry. So many of us are making amends and editing our personal and global rule books. If you’re curious about connecting with a forward-thinking farm in your area, let me know. The world is vast but the horse world is tiny — I bet I know a good teacher in your neighborhood.

Love,
Kim

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July Calendar of Events:

• Stable Roots Paid Subscriber ZOOM Gathering: Friday, July 19th @ 6PM EST

• Journaling Workshop (@Bramblewood Stables): Friday, July 26th @ 6PM

• Journaling Workshop (ZOOM): Sunday, July 28th @ 1PM EST

• Bramble Buddies (@Bramblewood Stables): Friday, July 12 @ 5PM

• Kids’ Horsemanship Camps: July 9 and July 30th (@Bramblewood Stables)

• The Half Halt: (@Bramblewood Stables): Thursday, July 25 @ 6PM

• The Comprehensive Instructor Apprentice Meeting: Wed, July 25 @ 6:30 PM EST

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