Healing Horses; Healing Ourselves; Healing Civilizations

I've felt paralyzed these past few days. I haven't wanted to write. Doing so has felt self-serving and selfish. We have a president-elect who believes climate change is a hoax while the vast majority of educated people in the rest of the world realize it's real. Scientific facts point to human activity as a significant cause. And yet now the upcoming leader of the most powerful nation in the world likely will dismantle the protections other world-leaders have been putting in place.

It's tempting to rage, to provide example after example of the awfulness in our future. But I won't. I've always had a strong sense that people are better than their portrayal in the media. And I know humans are innovative and strong. I love young people. I love that in many ways -- this 11/9 date notwithstanding -- we are moving in the direction of compassion and growth. In the last couple of days, three things have happened that give me hope.

First, a friend sent me a "Breathe" GIF. I watched the GIF and breathed, felt muscles soften and my shoulders drop, felt gratitude that somehow she knew what I needed when I needed it. I breathe when I'm on Lexi (or try to), but somehow I forget much of the rest of the time.

Second, a colleague and friend at work stopped me in the hallway yesterday and told me she'd heard I needed surgery. She offered to help, told me she had sick days and would take time off if I needed a driver to Seattle -- "Anything," she said. "Anything at all. I'm here."

I'm tough. I've had to be -- as most of us have had to be. But I almost broke down then. It's hard feeling alone when faced with significant medical decisions. In truth, I'm lucky. I have my daughter and she would help out if she could, and often she does. But she can't afford to take off work to come to Seattle for my medical appointments, so often I've gone alone. Yesterday, my friend's offer filled me with joy that followed me the rest of the day.

And in class the day after the election, my students engaged themselves in an active debate about the results of the election. I love my job, and I specifically love where I work. My town's economy is driven by apples, cherries, blueberries, grapes, and hops. There's a burgeoning wine industry, and a cottage industry in indie brews that is going beyond cottage.

More than half of my students are Hispanic. We are officially a "Hispanic-Serving Institution." These young people and their parents are the people that keep our agricultural economy going. They are apple pickers and the children of apple pickers; they get up at 4 a.m. in the harvest season and pick or work in the warehouses, and they put food (and now wine and beer) on the table of Americans for a pittance. Often they started picking as children, today's version of child labor. They live packed in tiny houses and apartments and send money home to Mexico. They write of their dreams to buy a home for their parents. They recognize the sacrifices their parents and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters made in hopes of an education, of a better life, of the American dream. And they do it without complaint, sleep-deprived, hungry for knowledge, hungry to participate in the great Democracy that they've believed America to be: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" They believe in the truth of the words at the base of the Statue of Liberty, and so did I, when I moved here from Ireland.

And so in class on Wednesday, my students discussed who they'd voted for and why, and some of them told the handful of people who had voted for the president-elect how sorry they would be one day. "When we're all kicked out of the country and you've nobody willing to pick your food for you in 100+ degree weather you'll be sorry. You gonna go out there and do it?" They laughed about it. Good-natured ribbing. Because they are close, this group: they care for each other; they don't hate each other for voting differently. But the Mexicans in the class know what a Trump presidency means for them. And I think maybe the handful who voted for Trump got a moment of reality. In one young man's eyes, in particular, I saw something startled and questioning.

What happened in class heartened me. Conversation. Dialogue. Not hatred or judgment. Just statements of reality amongst students who have become friends. Some of them are unlikely friends, but they sit together and share their candy and are hard to corral when they get excited. Watching them smile gave me hope.

And then, this morning, I got up to find a new message from my Irish GIF friend. She wrote: "This will be the cloud with the silver lining, the next generation are learning from this, the world is on the verge of change, it is good. There will be dark days ahead but not for too long. The world is watching."

It's true. The world is watching. And young people the world over are activated. For me, right now, that needs to be enough. My daughter and I will become more politically active, because the future of the planet does matter, but I'm not going to give up on writing. My friend also sent me a quote from Toni Morrison: "This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."

I started my little blog for me, to track Lexi's progress with target training. Then I thought I would use it to learn more about how to write in public and because sharing my work with Lexi is also a way to share how horses can help us. Now I think the quiet actions we take as individuals to find a kinder, more loving path are significant. When I work with Lexi using target training, making our time together fun, finding a way to help her brain heal from the trauma she endured, I take a step towards being a more compassionate person myself. How? Because it helps me be more mindful; it helps me tune into another living being. As soon as I make that connection, I feel better.

If my writing about it can help anyone else feel hope or find a path forward, then I am doing what I can to help our civilization heal. So write I will.

In gratitude for the pen.

My therapist is short and red-haired and always listens to what I have to say and never charges me a penny

It will be easy, they said. It will be fun, they said. You might as well give it a shot.

And so I did; I applied for a sabbatical. It's been 16 years since I've had one, and I've been working at YVC for 25 years. Time for myself. Time to write.

It sounded all well and good except for the promises I made. I had a funny kind of proposal, a two-way proposal. I told the committee that if a miracle happens and I get published right away and have to do readings, then I'll do the glamorous writer thing and travel and read to adoring fans and write in the peace of my hotel room at night. But most likely I won't be published (yet -- hope springs eternal), and if that's the case I'll take the time to finish the next novel and thereby get it done in a couple of years instead of the 12 years it took to finish Entangled Time.

But then, just because I wanted to increase my chances of actually getting a sabbatical, I made a ridiculous proposal. I was going to go on social media. I was going to promote myself. I was going to learn all about marketing my writing!

And now here I am, facing the dragon. I am going to have to share words with the world in some kind of public way because that's what writers do nowadays. No more garrets and talking to friendly rats in the glow of a dying candle.

Normally I would procrastinate. My sabbatical isn't till spring. I have MONTHS before I have to think of this whole "exposing yourself on Facebook" fiasco I set myself up for. But now it looks like I'll also have winter off work, or at least somewhat off, and that means I can theoretically start writing sooner.

And I have Lexi, and this little blog I started to track her progress, and maybe without thinking consciously about it, I have set myself up for how I'm going to meet the terms of my sabbatical. Because, you see, writing and horses are quite similar, and for me they are inextricably intertwined.

Yesterday an old school friend of mine asked me an innocent question. She asked me if Lexi was mine, and when I answered yes, she asked me if I thought having a horse was helpful with recovery from mental health issues. And that opened up Pandora's Box.

See, I grew up in a house of secrets and I turned to horses to survive the weight of those secrets. Horses freed me; they lifted me up, empowered me when I had no power. Writing did the same thing in a different way.

If I were to dissect the elements that have brought me here today, suffice to say I couldn't do it in a quick conversation over tea. It's too complicated and too messy and too much the stuff of dirty laundry. But I'm getting more and more convinced that sometimes we do need to drag the laundry out into the daylight and wash it where everyone can see where the dirt came from. Because when we hide the laundry, when we're silent, we end up being complicit in a world that lets horrors happen. I don't even want to speak about those "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkeys that shaped so many years of my life. They're responsible for an awful lot of evil in the world today.

So for my sabbatical, for me, I'm going to write on this blog. I'm going to write about monkeys and bastards, about genderfluid chickens and learning to train horses in a new way, about disagreeing with Skinner and yet loving clicker training, about what happens when a human saves a horse with PTSD, and when that same horse saves a human with PTSD.

And maybe I'll answer my friend's question about how horses can make all the difference when it comes to psychological wellness. They do for me, anyway.

In the meantime, meet my therapist:

Lexi's lesson with Meg

Lex was fabulous today. Went right into the trailer, travelled quietly except for a couple of pawing moments at stoplights, and got to our destination with hardly a ruffled hair.  Then she saw signs of the Apocolypse across the road through the trailer window: a whole herd of carnivorous goats, a horse-hating Pyrenean Mountain Dog, and the dog's best friend, a cow -- which is just wrong. Cows and dogs aren't supposed to be best friends, and if they are, clearly the cow is seriously abnormal and can't be trusted. So Lexi, who doesn't mind cows normally, had a moment. Head in the air, dancing in the trailer, wanting to rush out. But I asked her to step forward and be calm before I opened the back doors and the ramp, then asked her to relax again before dropping the butt bar, and she was good, came out pretty quietly on command and stood at the bottom of the ramp to think about mouthing a treat. 

At that moment, the carnivorous goats and abnormal cow with her dog-sidekick decided to approach the fence on the other side of the road, so Lexi got a little marbles-in-her-nose attitude and danced around to warn me that we should really be running rapidly from the vicinity. I had to do a little light lunging to settle her before I rode, but once she figured out she really was OK, she was excellent for our lesson with Meg. 

And afterwards she loaded without any need of help from others (she took a couple of false starts because she was busy making sure the carnivores on the other side of the road weren't heading our way, but then went right in). She didn't budge a foot the whole way home and was calm and polite when unloading. And not sweating. And not in a panic about getting out.

I love having the time to take our time and do it right. :)

Lexi's Story

Anyone who knows me knows I love horses. I have done so as far back as I can remember. I rode in pony club in Ireland, got my "B" rating, and was working on my H. Then life intervened and I ended up in the States, in college, working, in college again, and all that time I was poor and couldn't afford a horse. I catch rode -- rode whatever horse anyone would let me hop up on -- off-and-on during those years, and longed for my own.

Some time after I started teaching, I finally got my own, but riding even then was constricted because I had a new baby and was working full-time. Then there were a few blissful years where my daughter and I rode together, I on my precious TB/Connemara cross, Conner, and she on her darling Welsh pony, Christopher Robin. We did musical kurs together at dressage shows. She rode baby events, and I rode the slightly bigger courses with her older pony club friends. We were the Hairy Trotters, and we had fun.

Then came the Dark Ages of my life. I lost my best friend to cancer, and I got sick and sicker till I had to have my tonsils out (strep throat for six months straight is no fun, especially in America where the insurance companies can and will deny necessary surgery). A month later my mother got cancer, and then I got it too, and we had the fun of enduring treatment together -- including literally back-to-back mastectomies. And the following year I was hospitalized with Hep. A. because my immune system was shot, and the next year my parents' house was hit with an earthquake and should have been evacuated but my mother refused and they lived there without power, water, sewage in the winter for three weeks till services came back. And during that time my mother's cancer metastasized and she went into treatment again and then my dad had a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery and neither could drive and my poor sister was trying to finish her Masters' in entomology during this time and I was driving back and forth over the pass to help out and things just got harder and harder and harder. And then I developed asthma and couldn't breathe anymore, and so I had to let my darling horses go.

And that's the short version.

Anyway, 10 years later, my dear friend and former Hairy Trotter partner Kara Toye got me back into riding with a text on a cold wintry day right as I was walking in the door after a trip to D.C. with my dad: "Going to Paso Del Mundo. Come ride."

And I did. And the rest is history.

I rode her horse Blitz for three months till he sold as a trail horse. Then I rode "my" beloved Willow, a little Hungarian warmblood cross with a big heart and a sparkling intelligence. She wasn't really mine and I wasn't in a position to buy a horse, but she's been in my heart ever since. Then there was Cody, then Bailey, then Danny, then Coco and Butterscotch, then Al and Windy -- all of these my regular rides, horses who left their mark on me, all whom I hope will remember me fondly. And in between, some 30-odd other horses whom I rode once or twice or a handful of times.

And then came time for me to get my own, a time when I finally had a space at the boarding barn where I had been on a waiting list for two years -- a place aptly named "Horse Haven." And after much searching, after friends and I had driven sometimes across town and sometimes across the pass to see horse after horse, there was Lexi. Like Willow, she's a Hungarian warmblood, and that caught my attention. Unlike Willow, she had come back to her breeder after being at a barn where she was badly abused. She has quirks, which made her more affordable than she would have been otherwise. She needs someone who will give her time to recover, who will take it slowly, who will recognize her worries and give her time to think when she's anxious.

Yesterday I bridled her in the arena. She's headshy, and particularly terrified of any contact near her left ear. Following her breeder's instructions, I dropped the bit low on the bridle to give plenty of room for the headpiece, told her "head" as I put the reins over her head, then lifted the bridle, waited till she accepted the bit, and then gently moved to press her ear forward and below the headpiece. She grew anxious, raised her head high in the air, backed up with wild eyes. Slowly I talked her down, rubbed her and whispered to her, gently lifted the bridle again. Again she backed, scared, flashing back to some terrifying experience of pain and betrayal. Slowly I worked her down again. A few minutes of dancing and her bridle was on, and then suddenly, unexpectedly she turned her head around and hugged me, her nose buried in my chest, me between her head and her shoulder, cradled there. She held me there for a few moments, breathing softly, her eyes dark and shining and soft, and then let go. And I realized there were tears on my face because that little "click" I'd felt the first day I met her had become something deep and powerful -- the first steps towards a partnership that I hope will last for years.

Horses can communicate if we listen. I've not always listened, not because of lack of wanting to hear, but because my own fears or frustrations got in the way of me paying attention. I know there will be times my lack of facility with Equinan (or is it Equinish?) will get in my way and I'll misunderstand her and she'll misunderstand me, but I hope there will be few of those times, and that I can remember the hug she gave me when I honored her fear and let her take her time to trust me.

In gratitude to horse hugs.