Leigh wrote:
And, the farther I get into this, the more I realize that these are the things that I've been hungering for with horses since I first started riding as a young child. A lot of them got lost along the way, shaped by the structures and expectations of how the people around me were working with horses. I allowed myself to be pulled away from those deep goals and instead get caught up in the tangible mileposts -- to be able to jump a certain height, or execute a particular dressage movement well, etc.
I recognize a lot in that too. Last weekend I bought a set Blacky Beauty, the series dvd's
and while watching them and thinking about my childhood love for horses, I realised that our love for horses really gets shaped into accepted molds.
When you ask a child what his dreamhorse would look like, is the answer:
'A horse who is totally obedient and does everything that I ask of him, whenever I ask it'?
Or is it:
'A horse who is enourmously proud, beautiful and strongwilled, with a spirit that can't be broken but who will do anything for the person who lets him be - while still following his own instinct and thoughts when they are wiser (like refusing to cross a bridge that is going to break down, instead of obediently being led away by thieves fight and escape, indeed Blacky Beauty
)'?
For me, now I came to think of it, it was never that first horse, but always the second. I didn't want a horse who was totally broken and submissive to my will, but instead a horse with a very strong will who accepted my opinions too - whenever he thought they were wise.
There are very few childrens stories about broken horses. Instead they are all about horses who couldn't be broken and could only be contacted through love as they would always fight injustice. And not just horses: Lassie frequently is a 'bad dog' too, ignoring cues to save people, fending off bandits (Bad dog, Lassie, a good dog should never bite a human!
).
Maybe there are children whose greatest wish is to have a horse who is 100% submissive and does anything every human asks of him without questioning it, but I haven't found it yet, and that might be for a reason. Another thing which is interesting about the childrens stories is that indeed the horse/dog does something weird/bad in the eyes of normal people (refusing to cross the bridge, growling at the future bad guy) and other people (usually the adults
) get angry with them for that - and then at the end it turns out that the animal had a very good reason for that refusal or seemingly bad behavior. Too bad we never took
that morale out of the childrens stories and realised how true that is whenever working with animals, whenever they refuse to blindly follow our cues. They always have a reason to do so, one that is good enough for them to choose for that behavior.
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I have never had very clear visions of the future - not only for horses but in every area of my life. I know what I want to be and do NOW, but it´s hard for me to anticipate things in the future and work towards something. It becomes especially obvious for me when some of those small things happen where you can have a wish (like when a falling star comes down, when you lose an eyelash or find a four-leaved clover leaf), because then all that comes to my mind is always something like "I want everything to remain as nice as it is" or sometimes I am sending my wishes away to someone else, because I just can´t think of anything that I want and don´t already have.