Thank you all for your continued support. The Chronicles of Ernest will remain up with the occasional cross-post, but my adventures will now be posted on Into the Looking Glass.
There's been a lot of thinking happening in my small corner of the world in the last few weeks. With Stella and I on a new path, and my life moving into a new and exciting direction, I think it's time to leave this blog behind a start anew.
I will still be blogging about my journey with Stella, but this blog started as a tribute to Ernie, and in honor of him I have decided to leave it behind and begin a new chapter. It will be left up in his memory: I think there's a lot of value on this blog, not just in information but in lessons learned, and I will probably be visiting it frequently.
I am very happy to say that I have found a wonderful training partner in K, who in our very first session showed me a method of round penning so different from what I have learned, and with fantastic results. Last Sunday she came out and tutored me from outside the pen. Stella was wary and wild at first, but by the end she was completely calm, poking around for food, and recognized immediately when it was time to pay attention again and would "offer" to listen by approaching me head on and standing by until I gave direction. The next day I worked with her again and with the same results: we went for a post-work graze and even with the snow covering most of the grass she was completely relaxed and happy to stand in the same spot and nuzzle around. This is a HUGE change from this summer, when the grass was lush and completely visible and she'd still wander anxiously from spot to spot. This time, her eye was soft, her breathing was regular and she stayed with me all the way back to the barn.
This sounds so minor, but for us it's so huge. I'm learning how to press her enough to get a change but not enough to cause her stress, and realizing with K's help that a lot of what I thought was disobedience is actually her expressing confusion and frustration. And it continues to come back to me: what this mare does is a direct reflection of where I am in my own recovery, and I'm continuing to see it. It's proving to be a blessing and a curse, but it's causing a change in me first, and that's exactly what needs to happen.
You can continue to follow us on the new blog, which I will be linking this one to in the next couple of days.
Oh, the wonders of Vermont weather. We're catching the tail end of that nasty winter storm (apparently they are naming winter storms now, this one is "Euclid"...God help any human with that name...) and so far it's dumped about 7 inches in my area, but there's more at the barn, which is 20 minutes north of me. It's caused quite a bit of excitement there this morning, where I found Stella having quite the ball, rolling, bucking and rearing!
This one is my favorite. Look at my Snow Mare! I love her mane and tail.
I promise I have the good news post coming...I caught my dad's cold so I haven't been doing much: more time to blog!
I am getting to love Christmas more and more. As awkward and (often) un-filitered as my family is, and as much as I've never liked the holidays, getting older comes with a growing sense of patience and love, even for those who you want to slap on a regular basis.
Always a good time. Even when it's not.
As always, a very, very Merry Christmas to all my readers, their families and four-legged friends. I hope Santa was good to you all!
Some of you may be wondering how Sunday went. Fear not, there is a post coming, and boy is it full of good news punctuated by many exclamation points. Let's just say Santa was REALLY good to me this year (even though I'm pretty sure Santa doesn't dabble in emotional healing and relationship building)...
As a teaser, this is a quote pulled from my Christmas post last year, and boy is it ringing true for me now:
"I firmly believe that all of us have to pick our way through our troubles on our own time, in our own way. If we are to get to a better, happier place, we have GOT to do it ourselves."
BIG changes are coming to a barn near you...well, near me. Actually, my barn, specifically.
It's time for Stella to get back to having a job. And it's time for me to (wo)man up and start getting this mare on the right path.
There's been a lot of hemming and hawing the last year or so. She has a job, she doesn't have a job, she gets worked for a bit, things go downhill...it's been all a lot of hearsay when I looked back on it. How many times did I say I needed to make a change? How many times did I say we were trying something new, different, blahblahblah...well, this time I'm not messing around.
All of this has been about me, and it's taken a lot of intestinal fortitude to admit that I had NO IDEA what I was doing. I brought Stella as far as I could with what I knew, but she got there fast and then we stalled, HARD. What do you do with a horse once the groundwork is established, the saddle is on, the bit is in and you are on their back? When they know how to walk, trot and canter? When the basics are installed? You start asking all the things I don't know how to ask. That's where the trouble started. I waded into waters that were too deep for me, and I sunk fast. Unfortunately, I took Stella down with me, bringing us to now.
This really, oddly enough, has less to do with the "holes" in my horsemanship, and way more to do with me as a person. I've been through a lot in the last 14 months of my life. I've been severely depressed, been in counseling, been on meds, been very lost, scared and anxious about where I was in life, who I was, what had happened to me in my younger years. I felt like I was floundering: I had support but I found ways to subconsciously sabotage their efforts to help me. I was so utterly unhappy, but I was OK staying that way because it was familiar and comfortable, in its own insidious way. I kept trying to rebound, but things happen on their own good time, and this wasn't something I could push along and make happen faster.
So here I am. It seems like it's been forever since I've been on the back of a horse, and it has. I haven't ridden Stella in over a year. I haven't done anything truly meaningful with her in almost as long. I haven't known how, and I've been too far down in my own life to really be there for her.
I'm FINALLY there. I'm at the point where I have brought in help. I'm at the point where I WANT my mare back. I want to be somewhere good, somewhere that works. It doesn't have to be perfect or even pretty, but I want to get her confidence back, along with mine.
Sunday at 11:00AM I am meeting with K, a classical dressage trainer who has worked with some very well respected classic masters in Florida, Spain and Brazil. She specializes in young, hot horses (YES, because guess what I have...) and works on the premise of patience, trust and correctness of mind and body. Her first and primary concern is the well-being of the horse. We've talked through email, and she is everything I have been looking for to help Stella and I on this journey. We will start with Stella on the ground for as long as it takes to get her focus, trust and confidence up, and then we'll get me back in the saddle.
I'm so excited, but also a little scared. I've been at this "starting line" before and it's been frustrating as all hell. I think the difference is this time I'm ready. Truly, honestly ready. I've been looking in the mirror for a long time and acknowledged that this is all me; I've owned that, and I'm ready to give Stella the opportunity she needs to get okay.
Another year, another Thanksgiving. I'm still thankful for all the same things I was before: my wonderful family, my amazing and supportive boyfriend, an incredible network of friends and supporters who have always been there for me, the health and happiness of all my fuzzy-furries, big and small, and of course all of you! The group that reads this blog is small, but I'm flattered that anyone does!
Dinner for us is late this year, so I'll be headed out to the barn to spend some time with Stella-mare (not that she knows or cares it's a human holiday..)
Go hug your ponies, feed them some treats and enjoy you families and friends! Happy Thanksgiving!
This is the horse I've been working with, Falcor. We took this video in late October to see if we could document his "knuckling", which I believe(d) to be attributed to a sticky stifle. We have since discovered that this is not JUST a sticky stifle, but also likely due to nerve impingement/damage in his back from being stuck lying on his side all pretzeled up for 2 hours when he had his accident. He does this much more rarely now, but you can see how bad this must hurt!
(Oh, ignore me...I'm the one trotting him and being a goon)
I can't show the video here because it's private...but I CAN show this video of him in 2011 when J was in FL trying him...watch the right hind at the trot, and if you fast forward to about 1:40 you will see why I maintain he has stifle issues. It's subtle, so watch closely.
The art of watching movement is all about subtlety and rhythm. If you watch his trot, the rhythm behind is off by just a hair: it looks OK, but there is something just not right...around 1:40 you can see a very small "stick" of his stifle. Doesn't look like much, but it's a big deal.
Why does this happen? Let's see if I can put it somewhat eloquently *teacher hat on*:
The stifle is the equivalent of the human knee. It's movement is governed by the hip joint, and it governs the movement of the hock joint. Whatever the stifle does the hock must do, so the degree to which the hock flexes is directly controlled by the degree to which the stifle flexes. To put it in very simplified terms, these three joints are thus controlled by a reciprocating system of tension-ized ligaments and tendons which parallel the leg all the way from the lower back to the toe. From this, you could surmise this law: "whatever the stifle does, the hock must do."
However, there is much more going on here than just the stifle and hock. This whole system is governed not just by long tendons and ligaments, but by the entire hip and the long muscles of the back and lumbo-sacral area. Essentially, this reciprocating system is just a sub-system of a much larger biomechanical system. Thus, a much better and more accurate "law" is as follows:
Whatever the lumbo-sacral joint (hip) does, the stifle really wants to do.
The stifle gets some leeway here because when stuff's broken, i.e. not working right, you get funky kinks in movement. So the stifle really WANTS to follow the hip, and in a functionally correctly moving horse, it does, but when things aren't quite right, it doesn't. Case and point: a slipping/sticking/catching stifle (all of these terms mean the same thing, but you'll hear them all used...)
Now we can go into specifically what stifle catching is: very, very simply, the horse has that lovely stay mechanism in place so he can stand and snooze. It's great when he's not moving, but not so awesome when he is. This system involves the patella (knee-cap) and the femur. In normal movement, the patella slides back and forth over the articulating surfaces of the femur, controlled by patellar ligaments and a very specific muscle called the tensor fasciae latae (TFL). With each stride, the TFL pulls the patella UP to allow the femur and it's bumpy parts to slide underneath. Then it's allowed back down, and the process starts over. This is supposed to work to keep the patella up and out during the point in movement at which the horse's stifle is widest open (i.e. when the horse's hind leg is extended out behind him).
If the TFL fails for whatever reason, it will thus fail to contract and lift the patella up and out at the exact correct time, making it so it catches as the horse starts to move to return the leg underneath his body. The result is that appearance of the the leg getting stuck, as if it just dropped out from underneath the horse.
The horse can feel is coming, and often compensates by dropping his hip dramatically to lessen the discomfort and weight placed on the compromised limb.
Why does this occur in the first place? Muscle tightness, unevenness and tension. Anything the rider does to create tension over the horse's topline can cause stifle catching. In Falcor's case, he's had this issue, albeit not on as grand a scale, for a long time. Now that he has serious muscle death, tightness over the topline and nerve damage from the accident, it's coming back tenfold.
Stella is a 4 year old Appendix QH mare with a small stature but a lot of attitude. In 2009 I knew I needed to start looking for another horse to fill Ernie's shoes. I had no idea what I wanted: schoolmaster, retrain project, youngster? It was completely coincidental that Stella and I ended up paired together, but it couldn't have been a better match. I bought her as a 2 year old from a woman I worked for and the bonding process began right there. She is quick, smart, possesses the best temperament of any horse I've ever worked with but still let's me know that, hey, she's a redheaded mare, and nothing comes all that easy!
LBM started off with the name "Nel", which I quickly scrapped and opted for something sweeter and more feminine to match her kind (but feisty) disposition. I swore I'd never own a mare, but Stella has grown on me and firmly rooted herself in my life to the point where I know I will never be able to part with her. She's progressing in her training quickly and my hope is she'll be making appearances in the dressage show ring in the next couple years.
Jam Session ("Ernest"): 3/14/80 - 6/27/11
Ernie left this world on June 27th, 2011 on a beautiful summer afternoon. The sun was out, and there was a cool breeze coming from the north. He enjoyed a day out at pasture with Stella, plenty of grooming and hand grazing and his favorite treat, a bag of barbecue Fritos.
There are so many words to describe the incredible spirit he embodied, but one comes to mind every time I think of him: resilience. What he suffered in the 11 years between his first owner and when I met him I don't know, but his condition when I got to him said everything. He was mistrusting, nervous, self-protective. He would give you the up and down as you approached him, wary of your hands especially. I can't prove he was abused, but everything about him screamed it.
For months we worked on trusting. I was inexperienced and naive and easily frustrated, but he stuck with me through everything. He began a new life as a wonderfully talented dressage horse. He blossomed right before my eyes, a beautiful deep red-bay with a heart as big as they come. He came with his quirks: a chronic weaver, tirelessly herd bound. However, many of his other issues were caused by people: he had ulcers and a terrible case of cold back. Yet his desire to please, even when he was terrified (if not for no reason, as he often was) overpowered it all.
He came through 5 homes. He lived through unknown abuses. He spent most of his life in some level of pain. He suffered two "career ending" injuries, he went missing once, and when he finally came to school with me, the sigh of relief as he walked off the trailer was enough to cloud my eyes with tears.
I have lost a piece of myself in his passing, but I am more whole than I was before he entered my life. I still hear him whinny in the distance, and I feel his presence in the barn. He is always there with me in some respect. Physically he is gone, but the lessons he taught me will be with me until I meet him again.
March 14th, 1980 to June 27th, 2011. It is with immense love and honor that I knew and cared for him.
Show Name: Jam Session Barn Name: Ernest/Ernie Registered Name (Jockey Club): Krohn of My Own Sire: Dr. Krohn (Arts and Letters x Lady Swaps) Dam: Princess Paulette (Moonlight Express x Warewup) Breed: Thoroughbred Color: bay Markings: Roaning on right front pastern, white splash on face over right eye Height: 15.3 DOB: March 14th, 1980
DOD: June 27th, 2011 Disciplines: Dressage with the occasional hack
Show Name: AMS Boudicca Barn Name: Stella Sire: Diamond MajorLeaguer Dam: Artful Dreamer Breed: Appendix (TBxQH) Color: chestnut Markings: "longhorn" on muzzle, white coronary band on LH Height: 15.2 DOB: April, 2007 Disciplines: Dressage in training
Horsemanship: the practice of working with horses. Survivorship: the state or condition of being a survivor. Lifemanship: the art of getting through it all. If you're taking in breath, you're practicing lifemanship. Each of us has our own ways of finding our path. In my particular case, horses have played a tremendous guiding role in helping me understand, well, everything. Along your trek, dark days are inevitable. Whether you become aware of it or not, you bear the scars of trauma in some form. If you're lucky, you find a way to channel all that emotional junk into a (dys?)functional way of being. I'm blessed enough to have discovered genus equus caballus. We all could learn a thing or two from a horse. So welcome to the journey. Hope you brought your ridin' boots.
