Category Archives: horses, dogs & more

May21

sanne, the lily of holland

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This is Sanne, the beautiful Friesian belonging to Pam.   He was imported from Holland when he was three.  His name, Sanne, means Lily in Dutch.  When Pam saw him, she fell face first in love.  That was twelve years ago.

In this picture, he is performing in Scarlet and is ridden by Brandi Rivera.  Sanne is the great-hearted performer in all of my dances with horses.  He is the center, the soul, the horse that can handle it all  Dancers doing handstands on his side, yard of swirling fabric, crowds, choreography, changes in choreography, travel, loud music – he takes it ALL in stride.  Sanne is always in a good mood.  He is always happy to see whoever comes into his world.  He is a lover, a snuggle, a honey.

So when he suddenly started to drop muscle and weight and seem cranky, we all worried.  His back became stiff and sore, and he could not find it in himself to work.  As it turns out, he has Lyme.  He has been on Doxy for about ten days and already his back feels better, and he is back to being his sweet, affectionate self.

It was a scare.  I realized that I am completely vulnerable here.  Without him, my dancers and I cannot perform most of our dances.  More than that, HIS vulnerability came sharply into focus.  The vets get very nervous about muscle wasting.  It is often a symptom of catastrophic illness.  I got a lot of information about encysted parasites, muscle enzymes and equine polysaccharide storage myopathy.  I did not want to think about any of it.

Two days ago I heard from my former trainer.  She has been diagnosed with cancer.  She is facing six months of surgeries and treatment.  I do not want to think about that either.  What I want is for her to be fine, for Sanne to be fine, for my children to be safe forever and for all suffering to be at an end.

The temptation is to focus on suffering, on the lack of wellness.  I don’t think that helps my friend or my horse.  I know that it does not help me.  What does help me is this, from Abraham:  “Many around you want to point out “reality” to you. They say, “Face the facts. Look at what-is.” And we say to you, if you are able to see only what-is—then, by Law of Attraction, you will create only more of what-is… You must be able to put your thoughts beyond what-is in order to attract something different or something more.”

The way that I do that is this:  I keep looking for something to appreciate.  For something that makes me happy.  Lucky for me, I have seven cats, four dogs, three horses, two children, a beautiful wife and a wild and wonderful collection of friends.  And if all of that fails, today the peonies are blooming outside my window.

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May15

the faraway horse

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Here is a new chapter in the story of Nelson.  For the past month, he has not let me get near him.  We went from being good friends to something else.

There are a few reasons for this, having to do with out-of-my-control changes by his owners in his training program.

I like and respect the other person who is working with Nelson.  He is smart, horse savvy and can do things with horses that I would not attempt.  Having said that, it saddens me that Nelson no longer trusts me.  All humans look alike, I guess.

Today, I felt that he was looking at me, through me in a way, and that I had become unreadable to him.After a long while of hiding, he did let me get near him and I was able to pet him and do some very simple movement work with him.  But mostly he was ready to take off if the wind went through the trees.  For the first time I felt like it did not matter how calm and settled I was.  He was on his own track.  Watching his own inner movie, nervous system on full alert.

At the same time that this is happening, there is another Mustang around.  The lovely folks at Little Brook Farm in Old Chatham have brought Amado, a Mustang straight from the wild (after six months in a holding pen), to their farm.  Summer Brennan, the daughter of the owner, has entered the Extreme Mustang Makeover, a competition in which she hopes to take Amado as far in his training as she can in three months. She is documenting the process here.

When I first heard about the Extreme Makeover idea, I was nervous.  “Extreme” anything and horses are not really a good fit.  But Summer and Amado are.  Her idea is that he will tell her what he can do and when.  The basis of the training is love.  You can see it in the pictures.

I don’t know what will happen with Nelson. I am remembering something that I have heard Linda Tellington-Jones say when she encounters a difficult situation with a horse:  “Isn’t that interesting.”  That opens the door, and lifts the limits, which is exactly what Nelson and I need right now.

 

May14

naked

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I was doing some research for my book, Horse Dancing, and came across the Jacques Derrida book, The Animal That I Therefore Am.  The book was sparked by Derrida’s experience when his cat followed him into the bathroom in the morning.  He asks what this animal sees when it sees this naked man.

Derrida aside, I wonder about our emotional nakedness before our animal companions.  I know that I feel more exposed and more uncovered with my horses than anywhere else.  I have to be more self-aware, more vulnerable with them than I do at any other time.  It doesn’t happen all the time, because I am not always that conscious, but if I let myself be seen, if I am listening, there it is.

I wonder if we mostly can’t get quiet or humble enough to really feel that sense of nakedness, if we are just too busy being the apex species to let that in.  Or it is too much trouble to take off all the armor, all the habitual responses to our animal companions.  What is it like to allow ourselves to be seen, to be observed?

I read in one of Klaus Hempfling’s books that humans get triggered into violence with horses because the horses uncover their vulnerability, their lack of skill, their awkwardness, their ineffectiveness.  I have experienced that many times.  You can’t ride for very long without stumbling into that tarpit.

So here is a question to which I would love some responses:  how do you experience your nakedness with animals?  How much do you let yourself be seen?

May6

horse dancing

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Sarah playing with her miniature horse, Chub

On Saturday  we visited Sarah Hollis of Tintagel Andalusians in Westhampton, MA.  Sarah is the owner of Escorial, the beautifully trained liberty horse that we have performed with for the past six years.  She is also the most extraordinary, visionary and talented horse person I know.

Sarah, like many of us, is at an interesting, challenging crossroads with her work, due in part to the wild economic weather of the past four years.  But here is the thing that I am seeing with myself and Sarah and a number of other friends.

The terror and the struggle has birthed a lot of new enterprise and imagination.  I launched a blog, wrote a book, made new performance work and am about to launch a new website with a host of new offerings – teaching, coaching, writing, performance.  Sarah is looking at the whole landscape of her work and digging deeper into her greatest passions:  teaching and training.  We are both looking to move in order to get ourselves closer to what will nourish us best.

Pam and I were talking to Jon Katz on Friday, and I said that I had recently gotten a blog post from Seth Godin about catastrophizing.  Over the past few years I have gotten the feeling that I am hard-wired to catastrophize.  That it is my nature  It is who I am.  Jon said that he sees this tendency in our economics and politics and personal lives as a failure of imagination.  He is absolutely right.  When i am in a state of terror, I cannot imagine or create anything.

I know this from my work with horses as well.  When a horse is afraid, they cannot learn.  They cannot do anything but flee or fight.  That is why the positive reinforcement training strategies work so beautifully.  They open space for communication, calming, relaxation, breathing.

I said earlier that the terror and struggle had birthed new enterprise.  That is not exactly right.  Before I could see my way to new creative endeavors, I had to do a lot of that calming, breathing work first. Sometimes I had to do it every minute or even every breath.  I had to use a lot of different strategies, because if yoga or walking worked one day, it might be ineffective the next.

The point is that I have figured out some ways to stay, as Abraham says, “in the vortex,” or in a state of feeling good pretty much of the time.  When the big rogue wave rises, I can duck dive and let it go by most of the time.  I feel good about that.

This week Pam and I are going out to look at some properties.  Leaning forward into whatever is to come next.  We have a tentative name for our new home:  Wild Rose Farm.  It has a feeling of something old, something growing, something blooming, something wild.  It has the feeling of home.