Funky MeerKAT wrote:
I am starting to feel that its time to travel... my feet are starting to itch
.
My current plan is to start an art degree, work with my own horses, and train other peoples as well. I love drawing and there is so much I want to learn... painting, sculpture...
I was thinking I would like to be "taught" the art and teach myself the horses. But I'm thinking I might want to do that the other way around. The thing that always keeps me here is my horses, I really don't want to leave them!
But oh the things to discover in the world
. I know Mum would love to have Mate for a while as a nice quiet hack, and Ra really needs another year to grow and mature before he can do a whole lot anyway.
So. If you could train with anyone who would it be? I am quite happy to offer myself up as a working student should the right oppotunity arrive, the task is finding someone who I want to learn from...
"When the Student is Ready,
the Teacher Will Appear"
Do not confuse "ready," with "want."
I recall being, for most of my life, far too impatient for the teacher to come. Often finding that I either had the teacher in front of me and could not see her or him, (really), or that my ordinary day had opportunity after opportunity that I did not take advantage of.
In 1947 I was twelve years old. Already having been a horse owner for two years, and learning to ride fairly well. I exercised neighbor's horses and my own of course, just for the fun and experience.
I had ridden my own and other people's horses past a small racing stable (probably no more than a dozen horses in all) time and again without turning in and talking to anyone.
One day I was exercising an OTTB, Red Rocket, and rode past and the trainer came out and said hello. That he recognized the horse (having trained and raced him), and invited me to stop by and he'd show me around some time. I was there the next day of course.
My teacher had arrived. And what a teacher he was. More than just about horses. That's another story, but suffice to say, I finally arrived at the right point in the universe in space and time, for my teacher to step up.
The article (comments, really) that I link to below says much about this preparing for your teacher to arrive.
I can add only that when one is deeply committed to learning it seems to draw the teacher to one.
http://tinyurl.com/mur43jI've had many teachers since that horse trainer. Few as good, but also a few even better.
Sometimes they even slip on by without me being really fully aware of how much they taught me, and how it would come to me many years later.
For instance the concept of AND had in me a seed that let me recognize it, but not until I had taken many years to learn by gestation. The seed had to grow for many decades.
And you'll find it interesting I think that it was a New Zealander that planted it. A young man I hired to help me teach and train horses in a stable I ran in Hawaii back in the 60's. David Bonham. Kind of quite, bookish, and determined to quit horses in time. I don't know if he did, but I did get his reasons.
He was the first person I'd ever met that conveyed to me somehow (he never was explicit) that we deeply and wrongly exploit the horse. I cannot even say how he did this, except by how he treated horses himself, and a sense that he didn't even consider himself not an exploiter.
What especially made him my teacher? Why did I pay such close attention, even though I did not know what lesson I was being taught?
His daily devotion to his family's ancient Cocker Spaniel in it's last days. Blind, incontenent, he would take it on little walks and clean it and feed it by hand, and give it his presence until it died. Rather a long time. He never faltered in his devotion.
I didn't even like Cocker Spaniels, (my little sister had been bitten by one many years before) but David taught me something I wanted to learn.
And he's in everything I do with horses, good or bad, I feel his presence.
Especially when I am patient, and kind, and loving toward my horses. He'd have been AND.
Donald
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