spinningmytires
Confident
PONIES! Yes! I've been crazy about them since age 4! From age 9 to 49, I kept two horses in my backyard where I cared for them nearly every day. I often enjoyed trail-riding them through the nearby woods. Nothing too fancy and yet they also saved my sanity. When around horses, I had to stay 'in tune' with what they were thinking and feeling in the present moment. This enabled me to at least forget about my emotional suffering for awhile every day.
The communication that I'd experienced with horses was unlike any other. When riding, I could feel my horse's apprehension in his shortened foot steps, his side-stepping, neck tension, bit chomping, breathing and trembling. At other times, his disagreement was apparent with his excessive head tossing, tail swatting and lowering of his rump. What I'm trying to point out here is that, I was always reading my horse's body-movements, gestures and muscle tension and in that sense the communication was immediate and always there. I only had to learn how to read it.
At age 16, I purchased my favorite gelding and kept him in my backyard for 33 years until I had to endure the heartbreak of putting him down. Yet there's a good and perhaps, not so good aspect to my life with horses. Though these horses had given me the reason I needed to make it though my deepest depression at age 20, they also likely kept me home-bound. I felt I couldn't have emotionally survived without my favorite gelding. My human relationships were then greatly dysfunctional while my own difficulties had lead me to believe that I had no other options.
The communication that I'd experienced with horses was unlike any other. When riding, I could feel my horse's apprehension in his shortened foot steps, his side-stepping, neck tension, bit chomping, breathing and trembling. At other times, his disagreement was apparent with his excessive head tossing, tail swatting and lowering of his rump. What I'm trying to point out here is that, I was always reading my horse's body-movements, gestures and muscle tension and in that sense the communication was immediate and always there. I only had to learn how to read it.
At age 16, I purchased my favorite gelding and kept him in my backyard for 33 years until I had to endure the heartbreak of putting him down. Yet there's a good and perhaps, not so good aspect to my life with horses. Though these horses had given me the reason I needed to make it though my deepest depression at age 20, they also likely kept me home-bound. I felt I couldn't have emotionally survived without my favorite gelding. My human relationships were then greatly dysfunctional while my own difficulties had lead me to believe that I had no other options.