Mares Eat Oats

The reason I stopped blogging was because the issues that were consuming me were deeply personal and private and didn't involve just me. Sometimes this public forum just isn't appropriate, as much as writing things down and getting feedback helps. I was able to do that with several people IRL, but the issues continue and I'm far from feeling like any kind of resolution has been reached or that resolution is even possible.

Despite the limbo on one front, I feel compelled to share the trials and triumphs with my beloved Missy. My first ride on her was May 20, 2007, so we've just passed our one year in-saddle anniversary, and I've been riding her exclusively since January. I convinced my trainer that continuing to ride the lazy quarterhorse lesson horses was not a good primer for learning to ride my hot thoroughbred.

Last year we went through a spell where she threw her head around so much it was nearly impossible to ride her, and it turned out that she had to have some dental work done. She has an overbite and some other dental issues and after she healed from the work (including the removal of several wolf teeth) she was much better. A couple of months ago she started the same kind of attitude, only this time it seemed much worse, so after a few weeks of extreme frustration and disappointment my trainer decided we would try a hackamore, which is basically just a bridle without a bit. Within a half hour she was a different horse. It seems counter-intuitive to be riding a hot horse with a hackamore, which is usually considered to have less control that a bridle with a bit, but she doesn't have any bad behaviors, she just wants to go fast. She's learning to wait for my audio and leg cues before moving from one gait to another and usually is pretty good about slowing down and stopping when I ask her. Every time we start out she takes a few minutes to settle down and realize she doesn't need to fight a bit that isn't there, but we have made some amazing progress in the last month and a half.

So much so that my trainer is finally ready to let me ride her on my own! This is huge. Part of the deal I made when I took her was the farm would comp my lessons until I was ready to ride her on my own, so they have a monetary incentive, but my trainer is extremely cautious and would not be doing this unless she felt we were both ready. She is not the easiest horse to ride, I was starting from scratch and she was coming off of a 3 year haitus, so I suppose that in the grand scheme of things one year doesn't seem like such a long time, but to me it seemed like an eternity. Especially since I had to watch other riders, who in my opinion were not as skilled as I was, ride their own horses while I had to be supervised.

I look forward to writing more often and catching up with all my bloggy friends. I haven't been ignoring you as much as just needing a break from the whole blogosphere. I'd love to hear what you've all been up to.

Update

Thank you to everyone who checked in on me and sent me good thoughts and wishes. I'm still in a place that is dark a lot of the time but I promise I will be back soon, at least with some pictures for you to look at while I figure out how to write again.

A Beautiful Mess

Still here; still struggling. I have a lot swirling around in my head but it's too fragmented to write down. I feel like my life is too big for me at the moment and I don't know how to make it smaller.

If you want to know where I am right now, take a look at this amazing post by "music is art".

The Perfect Storm

Sometimes the universe seems to conspire against me and many different elements come together at the same time to form what seems like an unsurmountable obstacle. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I've just crawled out of a pit of despair.

It started when a chronic medical issue raised it's very ugly head and stepped into the spotlight. Even though this is something I've been dealing with for a long time, it can still zap my energy, obliterate my fragile self-esteem and make me feel hopeless and bitter. You couple that with two solid weeks of bad weather, a couple of power outages, 10 to 12 hour days working with ungrateful clients, not being able to ride my horse and becoming isolated from my social circles (because of the bad weather and the heavy work schedule) and you end up with a very unhappy woman. I shudder to think where I would have been without my blue happy pills, probably in a fetal position in a cellar.

My sister is bi-polar, and I have witnessed a few of her manic phases. Although I suffer from both anxiety and depression, I don't have the euphoric highs of the manic depressive, instead my anxiety manifests itself in the form of panic. The meds do a good job of dampening those tendencies, but when I get into a depressive cycle it doesn't do nearly as good a job in keeping me from sliding downward.

Normally I feel the urge to write it all down when I feel depressed, but this was different...I felt so shitty about myself I didn't think anyone would care enough to read about it and even if they did, they would be so put off by the nasty bile I was spewing they wouldn't care to come back to read any more. All I could do was work my way out of it, every day giving less weight to the negative thoughts and trying to pay attention to what my body needed (sleep, food, etc.).

So, if you're reading this, thanks for checking in on me. I'm getting there.

The Best Laid Plans

I really wanted to blog more this year and here we are, nearly two weeks since my last post. I'm partly blaming the weather. A series of storms hit the Bay Area last weekend and we were without power from 5:30 am Friday to 10:30 pm Sunday. We do have a generator but you can't run it constantly and it doesn't run everything. Our homes and lives need electricity to function, its just how things are set up in our modern world.

I'm also partly blaming work. When you work in the financial world, the first two months of any calendar year are the busiest, and when you have 20 active clients like I do, you can do the math and figure out I don't have much free time.

The weather also prevented me from riding all week but I do have a lesson on Miss tomorrow morning. I lunged her yesterday and today and she is looking sound and fit. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the hard pads the farrier has been using are going to continue to keep her sound. Even though we're coming up on one year since I took ownership of this horse and about 8 months since I rode her for the first time, I don't think I've ridden her 10 times yet. Between the weather, her health and mine, it's been a difficult first year. But, I am commited to making this relationship work and the past few months have been more productive.

Here are the last group of pictures from our trip to St. Lucia, if you are considering a trip to the Caribbean I would highly recommend it. If you've seen the Pirates of the Caribbean movies you'll recognize the Pitons.

Seahorses

I'm very glad the holidays are over. You may have noticed my absolute silence on the entire matter...this is always a difficult time of year. With neither religion nor children, both sides of the celebration are lost to me. I miss my family but I'm constantly disappointed by them. I'm coming out of my rabbit hole and allowing myself to feel again, finally. I rode Miss yesterday and will again today, I had a little chat with my trainer and we're both committed to having me on her back as much as possible.

To start the year off right, here are some more (horse-related) pictures from St. Lucia and a couple new ones of me and Miss at the bottom (notice her new sign?).


This young boy and his yearling creole came down to play in the surf almost every evening at sunset.





















































D and I on our creole-thoroughbred cross horses on the beach.














Coming back out after a swim.

Blogging St. Lucia

Hard to believe we've already been home for almost a week, I guess that's a good thing, the vacation seemed to go slow and the workweek went quickly. Here is the long-overdue post about our vacation in the West Indies.

The island of St. Lucia sits almost at the bottom of the chain of islands we think of as the Caribbean, third island north of Venezuela, some 1,500 miles south of Miami. It has been independent since 1979, before that it was a British protectorate, but it changed hands 14 times between the British and the French for 150 years. The French named almost everything on the island but it definitely has a British flavor to it. You drive on the left, the British Queen is on the money, all the school children wear uniforms, our resort even served high tea every afternoon. School is taught in English but everyone also speaks Patois, a Creole language. At least 85% of the people at our resort were British, it is heavily marketed to them and Virgin flies direct from London. Surprisingly for a couples-only resort, there were many older couples there, some with their adult children. It was a little strange having an all-white guestlist and an all-black staff, but the staff were amazing, they even put on two variety shows. Between three bars on the property you could get a free drink from 9AM until the "last couple retired". Food was excellent, we ate at our resort exclusively other than the day we drove down to the other end of the island to one of their sister resorts to go snorkeling.

The people are beautiful, especially the young men - dark-skinned, small-waisted, broad-shouldered, washboard abs, either bald or with dreadlocks - you either work in the tourism industry or you do manual labor. As with any third-world country, there is a huge gap between the rich and the poor, with very few in between. Most people live in tin or wooden shacks on small parcels of land, but we never saw any evidence that they weren't making a living and weren't reasonably happy.

As far as the island itself, you run out of superlatives. The water begins at the shore with pure white foam, moving backwards from clear to cerulean to teal to royal to cobalt to navy to indigo at the horizon, the perfect temperature above soft white sand. There are lush jungles and mountains, the roads windy, narrow and for the most part, without lines. I've posted a sample of the over 300 pictures we took, these were all taken at our resort. More to come.