I’m thinking this will be some slow going as I fully embrace getting back into the horse world. If I’m being completely honest, it’s been six years since I was a fully participating member of that world, and turning away from the fence and running in the opposite direction can sound so much more appealing than finishing a complicated jump line. Or, as is now the case, finishing a dressage pattern instead of just riding a few set elements.
However, I’ve promised myself that in taking better care of me, I’m going to return to my roots, as it were, and learn to love every element horses have to offer again. And this time, I won’t let the bad outweigh the good.
Stay tuned for the lessons I end up teaching myself or that my horses teach me. Short of going back to officially teaching lessons, learning the nuances of dressage is going to become a self taught endeavor. And I’m 100% positive my horses will have their own opinions 🙂
(*I’m in the midst of writing a semi-memoir about the horses who have helped me grow as a person – and I’ll be sharing some of the excerpts as I go on this blog)
Today’s spotlight: Triple Wish, aka Miz Wish, the Diva, the Queen
Attitude is both everything and nothing. Without attitude, we can skate by without creating any waves. With it, we can change the world.
I’m not about to say that only with a positive attitude can we accomplish a positive outcome. The world can be unkind. It can do its level best to break us. And there are times where our attitudes might falter with the times. But what horses have taught me, and helped me to see within myself, is how important it is to know my self worth, and to have an attitude that proves it. There are times when even that seems impossible, but this was, perhaps, the lesson that was the hardest to learn. With that, it is the one that stays burning the longest.
Some horses are gentle giants, or gentle ponies, taking the time to teach us all that they can. Some horses are…not. Instead of gentle cues, and subtle corrections, they will stop in the middle of what they’re doing. Sometimes, they’ll even stop in the middle of doing something that they love just to prove a point. Wish was just such a horse.
…
Some teachers are the kind, mentoring type. They do their best to make sure everyone can see the best in every situation. They try to keep things even and equal. Then there are the teachers who tell it just as it is, with no filter. Wish was definitely the latter. And I learned so much from her. It could be brutal, oh so brutal, but it could also be so very beautiful. I learned medium trot with her, flying changes, and rode faster than I ever had before. And at the end of every day, I knew that her attitude would still be just as strong as it was before. She was so self-confident, so sure of herself, and there was something to be said about that – something to be respected.
One of the enduring lessons that Wish has taught me is that there are times where it’s best not to care what the world around me thinks. I can be a slow learner – she’ll attest to that – but once the lessons are learned, they never leave, least of all with such a demanding teacher. There was a lot that had to be unlearned when it came to jumping from Wish, but there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that I wouldn’t be half the rider I am today without her. And if I had given up on that day all those years ago, I would never have learned what she wanted me to know. I needed to have that same attitude – to see the world as a challenge, and to see myself as ready and worthy to take it on.
These days, Wish is nearing her 32nd birthday (according to the Jockey Club, she passed that milestone on January 1st). However, even now, she still takes the time to run for the joy of it, at least one lap every day. And she will never stop being the opinionated mare I first met. And therein lies the lesson learned – she has always been sure of herself, and refused to fundamentally change for anyone.
Be a Wish – know your own worth, and have the attitude to flaunt it.
I’ve been teaching therapeutic riding for nearly six years now. It was a welcome outlet for me when the barn I was running was sold and, to be perfectly honest, I had been burned out of the horse industry from a combination of factors (hay embezzlers, the boarder from hell who I truly believe found satisfaction in making my life a living hell, vet bills, broken sprinklers…etc etc etc). In the summer of 2014, I helped get TROT off the ground in Pasco, WA, and it was one of the best, most fulfilling experiences I’ve ever had. But this post is not about that, instead, it’s about the way in which horses can work wonders, even when not expected.
Having worked for three different therapeutic organizations, I’ve met and handled dozens of therapy horses. From little minis to giant Percherons. Each one uniquely qualified for their role. I’ve helped train horses for therapy programs, scouted others. There is something truly special about these horses and the work they do, but they, too, are not what this post is about.
Instead, I want to take a moment to touch on how any horse can do therapy with someone. My current horse, Drummer, is 100% not what anyone would say would be a good candidate for a therapy program. He’s moody, on a bad day capricious, and on a worse day, has a penchant for acting spoiled rotten. And that’s after six years of steady improvements. He’s also a sweetheart, not prone to spooking, and well behaved in hand for anyone. (Just don’t make the mistake of feeding him a carrot or you’ll get all the negatives at once as he demands more LOL).
That being said, he is the perfect therapy horse for me. After two months of both suffering from presumed COVID 19 and recovering from it, I finally braved riding again. One of the key elements that has plagued me since I came down with the virus has been anxiety, and for quite possibly the first time in my entire life (and I’ve been riding for nearly 30 years), I realized just how big and dangerous a horse could be. I tried a simply walk around the arena, but had an anxiety attack. Drummer, bless his heart, didn’t spook when I became tense. He slowed, asking in his way if I was okay. When I couldn’t control my symptoms any longer, I got off, hugging him to let him know that none of this was his fault. Back in the barn, I struggled to remember how to do the simplest things – I couldn’t get his breast collar off over his halter, I nearly dropped his saddle. It was one of the worst moments I’ve ever experienced in the barn. However, I did my best to make sure he realized he was a champ. He took extra special care of me that night, and continued to do so when I returned two days later.
I’ve been back to riding for nearly a month now. And the anxiety has nearly disappated for something I’ve known for so long. But I’ll still startle at loud noises, still become worried by strangers walking by or even people I know being at the barn when I am. Through it all, he has continued to be as kind and gentle as he ever has been. He has been, in the last month, my true therapy horse. And for that, I am grateful. For all his quirks, I’ll take them and love them if it means I have a horse willing to help me every time he sees me.
I guess what I really want to say is that for everyone, horses can offer a bit of therapy not available elsewhere. They don’t have to be perfectly behaved or model citizens, sometimes they just have to be themselves – and we have to realize how much we need them.
When I first started riding, I was like any other horse crazy girl. I just wanted to be around those giant, glorious creatures all day, every day. When I got my first horse, Tanimara Tempest, I began the rocky learning process of just what it takes to keep a horse. Other horses followed, but it was with Triple Wish that the competitive bug bit, and bit hard.
Nearly five years ago now, I started to experience disabling back pain. My right leg would buckle when I walked, and I had to face the reality of being unable to ride. After a lifetime spent in the saddle, such a reality is a dark place it is hard to come back from. Even after two years in and out of physical therapy made it possible for me to walk normally again, something had been broken inside of me.
The saying “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is no joke. I spent a year away from all of my horses, only seeing them every other weekend while I finally finished college, and in that time I realized that simple truth: I needed horses in my life.
Now after so many physical issues, mental blocks after two years living my supposed dream and barely surviving the mental abuse that came with it, there was no easy way to just start riding again. When I did , I tried to fall back into the same mentaility that the only way to successfully ride was to compete. Then life interceded, but instead of it being me to face back issues, it was Drummer.
Over the last few months, I’ve come to embrace a different way of riding and working with Drummer. Some days all I do is wander around with him and listen to what he has to say. This works wonders when it comes to where he’s particularly tense, and it has helped me realize where I might be holding some tension in as well.
I covered in a previous post how he holds a bunch of tension in his beautiful Benedict Cumberbatch cheekbones. Now that we’ve established that area, he’s become more and more willing to work with me, sometimes anticipating me and staring to crack his own jaw in large yawns to work through tension. With such progress, I’ve moved back to where his jowls meet with his neck. And we’ve reached a new sort of learning curve.
I really need an assistant to do justice to what we’re working through, he isn’t a very willing subject when it comes to pictures unless he’s hamming it up. However, when it comes to the back side of his jaw, I’ve quickly come to realize that concentrated pressure points aren’t on the menu yet. He’s still too sensitive, so I’ve been working on getting him to accept my palm first, then sliding the pressure onto just one side of my hand. If the pressure is too localized, he immediately reverts back to an old habit his last owner taught him, to put his head on the ground rather than continue the conversation. I won’t lie, it annoys me, but I know it isn’t any fault of his own.
Too often, as riders and equestrians, we have a predetermined idea of what we want, and we reward what we think we’re getting, but in doing so, we teach out horses to repeat a motion without keeping the dialogue open. Drummer is truly the perfect candidate in working to maintain open channels. He was trained in his younger years to be a good citizen, to put his head down when asked, to curl into a frame with pressure, but that isn’t who he is. It isn’t who most horses are. And after having lived with him with the mode he found to express himself through – acting out and aggression – my top priority with him remains to keep those channels of communication open. As long as he recognizes that I’m never going to push him into a box, he stays open. And this latest pressure point just goes to show that sometimes they’re physical, and sometimes they’re mental.
This journey Drum and I are on now is one that will be a daily learning experience, and every lesson learned is a step forward in understanding horses in general. And if I’m being honest, helping to understand myself as well.
Something tells me this will be a common title for articles. I think one of the keys to healing is finally being able to accept that wrongs were done, and that there is still a light at the end of the tunnel. It might not be the same tunnel we thought we started in, but it’ll take us where we need to be headed.
Part of what makes Drummer such a perfect horse to be working with right now is that he also has old scars that sometimes I have to really search deep to find, and sometimes they are just there right in front of me. Since I’ve known him off and on for nearly his entire life, it helps to know where I’m starting from, but it also helps that our most recent scars have been experienced together.
Physical scars are perhaps the easiest of the lot to address. However, when I was riding this week, it occurred to me – embarrassingly late if I’m honest – that just as my spine still has issues and I have tight days, so too does he. Last summer, after turn out, he took off across the arena bucking. After his third buck he stopped, dead lame, and I knew he had somehow managed to pull something. Turned out he also managed to throw his own back out. People are still amazed a horse could do that when I tell them, but we all do have our own special talents…
Now we’ve spent the last six months really working on his “physical therapy”, which includes rub downs, some massage, addressing pressure points, and, finally, just working through things usually via lateral work. For my own physical therapy (most of my issues come from an epic fall off of Myth that cracked two of my lower vertebrae and bruised my kidneys), I use a little tens machine, massage, heat, and stretching (and riding for exercise, LOL). The slow and steady method Drum and I have been using over the last few months has really helped me address where my own posture both in and out of the saddle can create issues with my back problems. And I’ve been well aware of his problems, but it was only this last week that I finally realized that he too would be prone to good days and bad days.
Of course, this wasn’t a completely unheard of concept – I’ve known days he needs more body work, and days where cantering isn’t the best option for either of us – but I finally realized that I needed to tailor our rides to us both. If we’re both having a bad day, maybe we only walk, or do something on the ground instead. This week, the solution was to dial back and put more time and effort into our trot work. He’s finally sound enough to venture back into the outdoor arena, and the deeper, at times more uneven, footing has really helped him give that extra push that has been missing over the last few weeks. We had plateaued and I hadn’t even realized it. The last two rides were wonderful for both of us. We were able to address where we were, and we were able to make gains. Guess it just goes to show that you can teach an old horse – or in this case rider – new tricks.
Like I said, this will probably be a common topic. Drum has his physical and mental hold ups, so do I. But we’re making progress, and each time we ride now, we break down a little bit more.
Now after several years in and out of physical therapy for back problems (from a fall off of Myth), I’ve come to the somewhat painful realization that my back will never be exactly as it was. This carries over into every aspect of my life, but especially into riding. When your horse also has had back problems (first when he was nine and had an accident in training, and then again last summer when playing on his own he bucked his own back out of alignment) it makes for a very delicate balance when trying to find harmony.
One positive for my ongoing relationship with Drummer has been that he now trusts me enough to know that if he’s tight when he starts and I make him work through it, he knows he can. He used to explode when in pain, or knot up into an immovable rocking horse overflowing with petulance. Today’s ride saw both sides of our relationship, him willing to work through his own tension and me working on my own to try and help him out. However, I found that after some loose rein walk, trot, and canter, that I still wasn’t giving him the aides he was looking for.
I won’t lie, I rode bareback most of my childhood bareback because I couldn’t tack up my horses in a western saddle, especially not my 17 hand standardbred mare, Tani. However, there is truly nothing to compare to bareback when it comes to finding out what messages I’m sending my horse as a rider. In fact, the one and only time I had previously tried riding Drummer bareback was as a last resort after trying out all sorts of different saddles and pads. It was also when I realized just how much pain his petulance stemmed from when a simple rotation of my right hip resulted in NRHA levels of bucking.
Today was the day I decided to try riding bareback again, after six years of not even considering it. And here, in a nutshell is what I learned:
As riders, we are told to open our hips. What can be missed, though, in this rather simple movement, is how if we don’t adjust the angle of our thigh, our hip can pinch. Today’s solution was to drop down my seat bone before opening the hip. This relaxed my knee back into a more natural line, releasing the tension starting up in my lower back.
Of course there are at least a dozen other things to keep in mind at any given point – shoulders, core, ankles, hands, chin, etc – but this simple fix of making sure I was dropping my seat bone before asking Drum for a more balanced curve made for a near instant fix, or at least as instant as anything can be when it comes to dressage.
There are countless books written about how to achieve harmony in horseback riding. But there is just something about realizing the problem on your own that makes the advice of books pale in comparison. For those of us who are not endeavoring to set the world on fire with our horses, but simply to better harmonize with our 1200 pound companions, the process of better understanding them and ourselves in a lifelong endeavor. The process with Drum has been a long one, often fraught with miscommunication, frustration, and the occasional blow up from us both. However, if the last six plus years have taught me anything, it’s that there is always an answer. But the basics can’t be forgotten. I still have to breathe, take my time, listen, and stop to reconsider when things don’t always go according to plan.
At least I learned two things today, not only do I need to work on my seat bones before I worry about the rest of my leg, but I can now go back to that part of riding that has always helped the most. I can now go back to riding bareback, and I can start to listen at the most basic level to what my horse is telling me.
The process is a lifelong one, but we’re making progress.
Until the next lesson.
Here are a few more articles for those who have had a similar epiphany:
When I first met Drummer, he was just a baby in a pasture with a significant hole in his face from an unfortunate run in with probably a sprinkler. I helped stitched up the weanling, not thinking anything of our interaction other than to marvel at his talent – much like my own – for finding trouble.
Flash forward nine years, and I get a call from my instructor asking if I remembered him. There’s not much chance of forgetting a colt who, like myself, had to have stitches in his forehead, so I said of course I did. She then asked me if I wanted a new project to work with. I had always known Drummer was of a sort of pedigree that I wasn’t likely to be around much in my line of work. His father had an Olympic heritage in dressage, and I had heard that Drummer had inherited at least a part of that prestigious distinction when it came to dressage. Honestly, who wouldn’t want to work with such a horse?
In my excitement, I went by the stable the day he arrived, finding a chestnut with a blaze in the round pen. Now my instructor also had a chestnut with a blaze, so I went in to pet this particular one, and sure enough, found the scar from that first meeting all those years ago. This, then, without a doubt, was Drummer. There was nothing in those first few minutes of getting to know each other that spoke to any sort of special relationship. He seemed pretty ambivalent, and my enthusiasm couldn’t quite find it’s footing around his cool demeanor. This was not the colt I remembered, but my job was not to fall in love, my job was to work with him.
Weeks turned into months, and still I struggled with him. I tried saddle after saddle, different bridles, worked on the ground, tried everything I could think of to just connect with him. Nothing really worked. The closest to success I came was realizing he hated his rope halter, and switching it out for a better fitting leather one at least improved a tiny portion of his attitude. (The leather one I often left unlatched at his jaw, for he might not have inherited his dad’s size, but he certainly inherited his massive cheekbones. The rope halter had pinched on his cheeks whenever he was asked to change direction.)
Finally, nearly out of ideas, I decided one day to just get on bareback. I had cut my teeth, as it were, riding horses on my grandfather’s farm without a saddle, and I knew that if it was a saddle fit issue, it wasn’t likely to manifest with no saddle. But if it was something more, it would. Boy was I right, and quite possibly for the very first time in my life, I did a completely voluntary dismount. He had let me get on just fine, as bored with me as usual, and we started to walk in the round pen with no real issue. Then I asked for a figure eight, and as soon as my right seat bone rotated to direct him, he exploded.
I think it’s fair to say that Drummer was 16 hands of tension when he first arrived, and nearly two months later, he was still much the same. What I discovered after I got up from the ground (unharmed, I landed on my bum and had never had such a smooth fall) and watched him continue to buck like a champion bronc around the round pen, was that there was definitely something more hidden under that tension. When he finally calmed down enough to let me catch him, I knew exactly where to look, and sure enough, his own movements had loosened up his body just enough to find a knot twice the size of my fist sitting just behind his right shoulder. We had a winner.
I worked a lot in the next few weeks of not necessarily riding, but just working some of the kinks out of his body. I was also very diligent in saddle fit, making sure there was never going to be a pinch point. It helped, but even now, six years later, he still has his moments where touching him can cause him to flinch.
Last fall, I had a equine chiropractor who specialized in overall body work take a stab at him. We have come a very, very long way in the interim. He now trusts that I won’t hurt him, and that if I ask him to move on, he knows he can work through his own tightness or I’ll stop asking when he can’t. As horse and rider, we’re in a good place, but the chiropractor still marveled at just how tense he could be. When she was done, for a few days his gaits were what they had once been and that I had never fully experienced – they were enormous, showcasing the Olympic pedigree to its full extent. Tension began to creep back in, but I had long since made massage a part of our daily routine, and we’ve been able to work through so much more.
The one point I wanted to conclude with was the surprising ways in which tension can manifest itself. I cracked two vertebrae falling off Mythriel and had another destroyed when Wish ran me over, resulting in two years in and out of physical therapy. I’ve learned that tension in my thigh can be helped by massaging just above my hip bone. The same theory has applied with Drummer, but no one place more so than his aforementioned cheeks. Even when he is relatively relaxed and limber, he’ll still hold tension in those Benedict Cumberbatch cheekbones. After I work over his body, and before I put his bridle on to go for a ride, I massage his cheeks. He often fights for a minute before accepting, and then he can’t stop the yawns as he releases his own tension, licking and yawning over and over until he relaxes.
Promise no horses were harmed in the making of these pictures – here he is tensing on the pressure.While he’s not the easiest model to work with, this is his after shot after bringing his tongue back into his mouth.
It’s truly fascinating how the song we knew as children about the thigh bone being connected to the knee bone is so very accurate. Everything is connected, and we have to know where the pressure builds so that we can begin to know where to release the pain that comes with the tension. Of course there is no simple solution. Drummer will always be tense, I will never be fully healed in my spine, but this is yet another lesson learned. If we can learn to release what holds us back – in the physical case – then we can start to move in ways that will help us unlock even more.
Something truly fascinating about horses is how often an experience with them reflects so much on our day to day lives. Sometimes it’s as obvious as realizing that our moods affect theirs. Sometimes it’s deeper, for example, learning that they way I’ve handled tension in all my horses up to this point in my life is not necessarily the best way to handle it with Drummer.
Most of my horses throughout the years have been relatively hot and extremely sensitive. Off the track thoroughbreds and standardbreds have been my breeds of choice, with the odd BLM Mustang thrown in for good measure. However, Drum is neither of those things, and even though he is half thoroughbred, the warmblood side is the dominant set of characteristics with the occasional thoroughbred day thrown in to keep me on my toes.
I don’t consider myself a novice in the horse world by any means. I started riding when I was five, and continue on twenty eight years later. I’ve competed at schooling shows, registered shows, fairs, and the like. I’ve run a stable, helped found a therapeutic riding program from the ground up. I’ve raised horses, sold them, been there in their final moments. But that’s not to say that there is always something more to learn. And I think that can be one of the most difficult things to accept for anyone who has spent so much of their life in one avenue. There are always opportunities to improve, to broaden our horizons, and, most importantly, to admit that we’re wrong.
This came to my attention after my last self taught lesson. With my thoroughbreds, if they started the day a little bit tight, I’d walk, trot, canter, and by the time we’d done this in both directions, they’d be ready to go. This has worked at times with Drum, but at times it hasn’t, and I was finally willing to step back from what had always worked and reevaluate what he needed.
As this is the first warmblood I’ve worked with consistently in all of my 28 years of riding, I might tend to attribute his uniqueness to his breed. I might be wrong. I might be right. I honestly don’t know, but what I do know is that he requires something different than any other horse I’ve worked with – a slower, more fluid approach. When transitions don’t work, it is time to find where we’re going wrong, and to make the changes necessary to make it right.
For Drum, this comes through an almost completely loose reined use of the entire arena to do just about every form of lateral work. A little shoulder in (with just enough left rein to encourage his shoulder to fold in instead of bulging out), some haunches in and out up the center line, leg yield into half pass across the diagonal.
Just as every person has a specialty, so does every horse. For my first horse – Rabbit – it was moving cows. Tani had flawless shoulder in. Wish an extended trot that consistently got us 8’s and 9’s even when the rest of our dressage test was a 5 or a 6. Myth loved her piaffe and acting like a ballerina. Samson defied all odds by being perfectly able to perform all 3 major airs above ground. Merlin has a canter that could fix any back problem. Drummer excels at his lateral work.
After a few minutes of just walking around mixing it up at every opportunity, he finally relaxed. And then we could go back to the other stuff. It was the epiphany of the day: that just because something has worked before does not mean it will work today. It’s simple enough to say that this change was necessary because of Drum being a warmblood instead of the fast twitch muscles of the thoroughbreds, but even then…there’s something more to be learned here, and something more to be taught.
This blog is about me teaching myself to become a better rider. But in that process I will also be coming to address the darkness that nearly broke my love of horses. And each epiphany I have with Drum reminds me that the love of horses is not something that can disappear once it’s taken hold. We are born with it in our very bones, and no matter how the world and certain people in it might try and break us, it stays there. If we ignore the whispers, we fall deeper in to the abyss, and each day we don’t listen to the horses who would talk to us, the harder it becomes to claw our way back out into the light. At least so it has been for me. I allowed the struggles I faced to break me, but having been able to identify it, and knowing that horses are as much a part of the cure as they were the problem, I can start to regain my footing. I am not the rider I was ten years ago, but I can finally admit that this might be a good thing.
“There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.” ― Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters
My New Year’s resolution this year was to take better care of myself, but not in the usual methods. Should I improve what I eat and work out more, yeah, but before I even start to focus on that, I need to focus on mentally repairing the damage that has been done.
It’s easy enough to blame others. Over the past two years, for example, I could blame morale on the workforce. But who hasn’t experienced that? No, my goal is to focus on what it is that brings me peace. One of the key factors that does that, and one that has been neglected in recent years, is spending time with horses.
Over the past 15-20 years, I’ve been teaching others how to ride, how to develop their communication with their horses, how to experience the same joy I once did as a child when the smell of horses was akin to heaven. This love of all things horse related meant that I had the secret ambition to run a barn, to live horses 24/7/365, but like most things in life, the reality is so rarely as beautiful as the dream. The two-ish years I ran a stable nearly broke me, mentally and physically, and the scars are still felt to this day – even six years later. But in reflecting at the beginning of the year, and realizing that the wounds had made me head shy, and that I needed to just face my fears and refuse to let that time continue to affect me today, I made that first fateful step towards reclaiming one of the best parts of my life. Horses have been my shelter from the world for over 25 years, and I couldn’t let the scars of the past continue to keep me from enjoying as much as I could.
Now, of course, the real world is rarely so kind as to just allow us to fully embrace such changes. I still have a full time job, one that tells me they pay me for 50 hours of work a week, not 40, but even by that standard I tend to view Fridays as working for free. Taking lessons, let alone teaching them, just isn’t in the cards right now. That does not mean, however, that I can’t still teach myself. And that’s where this blog comes in. This is my outlet. I still want to teach – and some day I will again – but in the meantime, I’m taking it slow. I’m taking the time to smell the flowers, as it were. To fully learn what it means to be an equestrian. I thought I knew before, but I think even when I made it my profession, I missed some of the nuances. I’m prepared now to pause a moment longer and search for them. Many may not appreciate this, but I’m finally prepared to fully learn dressage – not master it, I doubt many ever truly do. But this former three day eventer is finally ready to focus on the one element most of us eventers found a mere warm up to the fun stuff. And, luckily for me, I have a horse who is the perfect canidate for this – a sensitive, moody, delicate Warmblood named Drummer, who I ended up with after he had also become burned out. Through stiffness and a lack of communication with those around him, he showed up in my life. He loved jumping – we successfully did a few shows and an event derby before I finally burned out then dealt with the effects of one too many falls on my spine. Now, he’s nearing 16 and I think we’re both ready to try the slower lane. This relationship between horse and rider is one that will last for the rest of our lives, and for the first time since we started working together, I think we’re on the same page when it comes to dressage.
Drummer’s story is ongoing, and while I’m getting back to basics, I’ll set down some of his highlights. He’s a very complicated horse, and a single post wouldn’t do him justice. But then a single post isn’t going to do my latest venture justice either. I’m just going to have to relearn how to walk before I can canter.
Haute Ecole* 