The Transylvanian Horseman is so adept at making history come alive.

His description of his nomad ancestors and the history of the part of England he and his wife-to-be now call home, makes me think of the rich history of my own homeland.

I can't tell you how many times I--a woman who can claim to be Scottish and Cherokee--have ridden my white Andalusian horse Caprichosa down the Pojoaque creek, through villages that at one time were the home of the Pueblo Indians, thinking about what the first sight of a conquistador astride his Iberian war horse must have looked like to the locals. After all, hundreds of years later, I'm riding the same path, still hoping that somehow our paths will cross. (Although would he just pull out a sword and wollop me? Mother of two in faded blue jeans found impaled on creek bank by Spanish sword of priceless antiquity? Is there a Black Irish connection? News at 7.)

I've read that the Pueblo Indians at first thought that horse and man were one creature.

That must have been terrifying.

I watch the History Channel, if there's nothing good on Sci Fi. I love my books, prefer them any day. But a white Andalusian horse is my four-legged conduit into a history I can almost smell and taste. It's so close. Just beneath the shimmering off of the hot sand.

I often find myself astride Caprichosa, whose ancestors were great warhorses and from whom she gets all that bravery, thinking about the myriad of invasions over the course of human history. The Spanish over the Pueblo Indian, for example. Especially when the horse is all blown up to what seems like twice her size, with her neck arched, rippling, lifting her hooves in round soft arcs. And there's always another group clambering to be on top.

Occasionally, I try to pull one out of Finney's great time travel book Time and Again, and think if I could only get myself into the right mindset, I could ride that white Andalusian horse right across time, but that's just the romantic in me. (You'd think at my age I'd have given this up by now.) Sometimes magic dissipates into a sense of a flawed and imperfect world as the mare trots through the creek, splashing water. I'm not hoping for any utopias. I'm not looking for cities of gold, although if you ride high enough up into the barrancas, you can see the neon lights of a casino by that name.

Whatever governments or politicians may claim about being able to implement a perfect world, maybe even a Brave New World, I have recently found myself afraid, it's a wild and wooly and beautiful and messed up place we live in. As tangled up as the cottonwoods and the Chinese Elms in the bosque. A pirate's garden. Like a whole mess of Kudzu vines, although that's a different geography from mine.

I don't think anyone has described or captured this feeling about the mingling of the past and present for me as well as Southwestern poet Jimmy Santiago Baca (check out his books here)--

“Invasions”
by Jimmy Santiago Baca

6:00 a.m.
I awake and leave to fish
the Jemez.
Coronado rode
through this light, dark
green brush,
horse foaming saliva,
tongue red and dry
as the red cliffs.
Back then the air
was bright and crisp
with Esteban's death
at the hands of Zuni warriors.
Buffalo God, as he was called,
was dead, dead, dead,
beat the drums
and rattled gourds.
The skin of the Moor
was black
as a buffalo's nose,
hair kinky
as buffalo shag-mane.
No seven cities
of Cibola gold were found.
Horses waded the Jemez,
white frothing currents
banking horse bellies,
beading foot armor,
dripping from sword scabbards.
I wade in
up to my thighs
in jeans,
throw hooked
salmon egg bait
out in shadowy shallows
beneath overhanging cottonwood, and
realize
I am the end result
of Conquistadores,
Black Moors,
American Indians,
and Europeans,
bloods rainbowing
and scintillating in me
like the trout's flurrying
flank scales
shimmering in a fight
as I reel in.
With trout
on my stringer
I walk downstream
toward my truck.
“How'd you do?” I ask
an old man walking past,
“Caught four—biting pretty good
down near that elm.”
I walk south
like Jemez and Pecos Pueblos
during 1690 uprisings,
when Spanish came north
to avenge their dead.
Indians fled
canyon rock shelters,
settling in present day
open plains.
Trout flails like a saber
dangling from scabbard stringer
tied to my belt,
chop-whacking long-haired weeds.
Peace here now. Bones
dissolved, weapons rusted.
I stop, check my sneaker prints
in moist sandy bank.
Good deep marks.
I clamber up an incline,
crouch in bushes
as my ancestors did,
peer at vacation houses
built on rock shelves,
sun decks and travel trailers—
the new invasion.

Posted by Kimberly on May 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bitter cold Pecos Mountain morning. Standing in the middle of a snow-covered pasture with horses galloping all around me.

Fat Red Dawg and Lila Jane getting their exercise.

Posted by Kimberly on December 23, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2)

This is part of the process of how vaulters learn to mount at canter. You run beside the horse, matching his stride. It takes a lot of tenacity, courage, strength, and breathe. Eventually, you'll grab the surcingle handles, punch forward with both feet, and allow the momentum of the horse's canter to swing you up onto his back.

The first assisted mount I did at canter, I was given a boost by a 60+ year old man, who'd been a vaulter since he was a child, and who had lost one of his arms to childhood cancer, although that didn't seem to slow him down one bit. While I didn't know him very well, I understood he'd spent a large part of his lifetime teaching special needs kids to vault. I wonder if he has any idea of the gift that he gave to me so many years ago, when he boosted me into the bright blue ether with his one good, strong arm until I landed safely astride the horse, grasping the surcingle handles, sitting the rhythm of the big gait?

I was kind of a special needs case who was pushing herself to get back out there, to not give up, to learn another way, although it was hidden so deep inside, I suspect that only the people who knew me very well understood that I'd been among the walking dead. It may sound silly, but being able to do this, to spring up onto the back of a horse at canter, was part of my resurrection back into life. The end of aimlessly roaming in error ...

Do we truly understand the impact of our lives upon others? Even if our paths cross for only couple of hours?

If you know what in yourself will die, though you have lived many years, why not look at yourself and see yourself risen now? ... Everyone finds a way, and there are many ways, to be released from this element and not to roam aimlessly in error, all with the end of recovering what one was at the beginning. The Treatise on Resurrection

Posted by Kimberly on November 9, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you." The Gospel of Thomas

This is my religion—

You huddle beneath the stars in the middle of your little horse herd. The moonlight is reflected in their clouds of breath, their whiskers, their soft eyes. The silence is brilliant. It tinkles in your ears like chandelier crystals somewhere way above your head, until it’s punctuated by the sound of a stamping hoof.

You pull your goose down jacket closer, look back at your ranch house where your family is inside. You’re off to see the horses, you announce, and they know you’ll be a while. They understand your hunger for the stars, even though you’ve all just finished dinner. Yellow light pours from the kitchen windows into the inky night, and you can almost hear the talk and the laughter going on inside, the clank of dishes in the sink.

You think of that Native American woman you read about in a story once, and how because she had no living male relatives, she was forced out of the tribe, out of her home, and had to seek some warmth, some shelter among the horses on a winter night just like this. A night so cold your breath comes quick and the emptiness of it all makes you almost dizzy. By the morning, the story goes, she had frozen to death.

You stamp your feet to get the blood flowing and understand why.

You made a diorama in grade school once. Of a winter scene like this, with a cardboard house and a barn and the mountains, white cotton for snow, and black paper for the night sky into which you punched lots of little holes with your No. 2 pencil. To let the light from your penlight come in from the other side. You see the big dipper suspended above you like the celestial mobile you hung from your daughter’s bedroom clerestory window when she was five. The constellations you wish you could name. The Milky Way in all its glory.

And just as you are being grateful for the lack of light pollution way out here, you have this hunch that the light is trying to get through. Right now. At this moment. That it’s pushing against the construction paper, that it might very well shake loose and spill out all over the mesa through the holes someone’s punched in it in about a million places. And they are punching more. You shiver slightly and lean against furry Toby to soak up some of his warmth, and as he regards you with the full force of his draft horse calm over his shoulder--you hear it.

I love you.

The words are as clear as a bell. You gape up in wonder up at the stars. Take a couple of steps forward, to try and hear better. As if that would do any good. Because your ears are not involved.

I love you.

Like the old school bell you ring on the front porch of the house when you want the kids to come in. Like the one they rang for you when you were a girl yourself who liked to run wild in the woods. You stand in your barn boots with your feet planted firmly on the frozen ground that’s reeling.

The stars burn.

I love you.

Toby sighs.

You stand out there a long time, clutching the hem of the lady's black velvet gown. Listening to the silence. Until all of a sudden they are ringing the bell outside on the front porch for you to come on back inside. And it's a couple of minutes before you do.

Posted by Kimberly on October 23, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know an eleven-year-old horse girl at my house who would love one of these! (I know a mom as well, but you know how these things go ...)

Check out Marek's creations at Trilobite Clothing. Very nice. Clever design.

Posted by Kimberly on October 15, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't own an "arena". I have a round pen. Sometimes in a pinch, I refer to my round pen as my arena, but that's not what it really is. This means that I have spent most of my time schooling my young horse Toby in the wide open. Wide. Open. As in no fences. If I feel the need for some confinement, then we move to my 1-acre chain-link fenced back yard.

I am schooling Toby around the pinon trees. I want him to learn to anticipate my cues and where I am going to ask him to turn, especially when it's not clearly marked for him by a fence. (My daughter's Andalusian I can ride on a light, loose rein through the corridors of trees, using only my legs. But we've been doing this together a long time. My husband's little Arabian will find a path through the forest where you'd swear almost on your life that one couldn't possibly exist. Sometimes she will find one when you don't even ask her to. There's no falling asleep or daydreaming on that hot-blooded critter who's up to taking the initiative in the event the rider checks out.)

Toby is trotting his big trot through the trees, and I am turning him with my legs. We are doing pretty fine. And then we are presented with a big, tall pinon, the sturdy branches of which are high enough for him to pass beneath, but not me, way up here in nosebleed territory on his wide back. I jiggle the left rein, push him over with my right leg (that would be my outside leg for this momentary arc of the circle), and we pass so close by the grandfather, that the pine needles brush my shoulder and I can smell the sap.

Suddenly, we are out in the open and I feel an immense sense of relief at not having my head knocked off.

I think I offended a woman at the dressage barn the other day. And I didn't mean to. Really, I didn't. She'd strolled over from the dressage barn next door, and as I was holding this huge vaulting horse, standing with him in the shade of some centuries-old pinon trees, waiting for our presentation, she came over to chat with me. During the course of the amiable conversation, she mentioned that she preferred this barn that she was visiting to her barn next door, because people actually rode outside here. Then she continued to talk about how much she enjoys riding outside. I agreed with her. Me too, I said. I really like to ride outside. (A strange conversation I'm thinking to be having about riding horses, who are, last time I looked, animals ... outdoorsy types.) And then I opened my mouth and galloped forward by making the genius statement that I don't know how the horses of people who ride them in circles all the time don't go crazy.

Well, that woman didn't say anything, but you could see by that flicker in her eye that she'd taken offense. And she'd just been describing some nice-sounding rides outside of the arena ... (Maybe she'd been exaggerating with all that big talk about outside?)

I'm not sure I'd do well with all of the barn politics.

I suspect that very nice woman has no idea how much I'd enjoy, love, simply relish being able to school Toby in an arena--inside or out.

Posted by Kimberly on October 11, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the mystery of life and its masks. What're you going to do when the thing breaks, and it starts winding down? Are you just going to become an old dog getting older and older, sinking back into your body? Or in the moment of the full moon have you made the jump to the solar light? -- Joseph Campbell

When my daughter was much smaller, I made her a Pegasus costume for the mythology fair at school, complete with feathered wings and a white-horse mask I bought on the internet. A white cotton bodysuit I painstakingly painted with silver clouds, stars, lightning bolts, the moon. Yards of snowy yarn for the tail. When we arrived at school, I remember holding the hand of the pint-sized mythological creature as we walked across the playground. I had to re-adjust her wings a few times, because the tips were nearly dragging the ground. One wing caught on the playground equipment, from which a teacher and I managed to extricate her.

When my now 11-year-old daughter J. and I arrived at the Dressage Barn on Saturday for our vaulting exhibition, we made our way across the property with its well-maintained arenas and barns. The equestrian center was filled with middle-aged dressage women bustling about in their jodphurs and tall black boots. As we strolled past the stalls of Hanoverians, I felt suddenly very conspicuous in my boot-legged spandex pants, tank top, and gymnast shoes. Nothing very flashy, mind you. It was a pretty conservative get up. But the uncomfortable feeling was almost overwhelming. Like I was in one of those childhood dreams where you show up for school in your pajamas.

Or worse.

Continue reading "The Solar Light" »

Posted by Kimberly on September 24, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I came across the word picadero in my reading some time ago. It means “temple of the horse”. Essentially, a picadero is a small, square ménage or riding arena. Over the years, I’ve come to think of my round pen as the “temple of the horse” here on my little ranch. It is the place where I work with my horses and hopefully achieve harmony there. In vaulting, we work on a 20-meter circle. I’ve come to view that circle as a bit of a temple as well.

Yesterday, I spent a good while with my vaulting coach remembering to use my breath as I sat on her Irish Draft Shakespeare on the 20-meter circle and practiced some compulsory moves.

The exercise we went through was this—

Inhale, filling your lungs and abdomen with breath and then exhale, lengthening up through the pelvic floor, the abdomen, the sternum, the chest, the neck, the head. You feel the breath circulating up and through your chest as your shoulder blades widen down your back and flutter out.

Like wings. It occurs to me. Like the wings of an angel. And I'm not speaking of the Hallmark angels, the one on the top of the Christmas tree, or cherubs with arrows. I'm talking of something else, but about which I can only ask questions.

Is this part of all of this recent interest in horses and spirit in a lot of the content that is being generated in the equestrian world? As riders and as vaulters we pay attention to the breath. And isn’t the breath a mystery? The very life within us? And from that springs this gift of human consciousness? I think the answer is yes.

When meditating, one breathes in and out, circulating the breath into the lungs, into the abdomen, and upon exhalation, the breath travels from the base of the spine up and out. It’s a way to pay attention to the very essence of ourselves, to that “I” that has nothing to do with ego. To that “I” that is the authentic self. Who I am without all of the outside trappings or my ideas about who I may think I am.

I think of the exchanges of breath that occur between two horses meeting for the first time. It is an almost ritualized greeting. I greet my horses this way many times. I've passed this along to my kids. I sometimes see them standing nostril to nostril with a horse when they go down to the pasture. What is it that we are sharing with each other--horse and human during these exchanges?

Breath. Pneuma. Spirit. Sometimes experienced in the simple act of saying hello to an equine friend or on the back of a horse when sitting the walk, trot, canter.

This is why I often think of the work I do on horseback as occurring within a temple. The Temple of the Horse. I can sit on the horse’s back and have an encounter with the divine through the direct experience of the breath and other things I have no words for. In the Temple of the Horse I have experienced gnosis. It happens that I am sometimes carried on a broad equine’s back into the unknowable, ineffable mystery. It is the deep knowledge of experience that words can barely describe. It is no longer the faith of a little child. Nor is this the knowledge of smug, self-assurance and dogma.

I am in awe when it happens.

Posted by Kimberly on September 17, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

When my young Percheron X Toby and I are riding out in the wide open spaces bordering our little ranch, and things begin to feel slightly out of control, when the powerful horse feels the need to rush forward out of the sheer joy of all that blue sky and four long legs, then we do what the classical riders suggest -- we return to the circle where we work out the kinks and get our brains and bodies back in synch. I sit deep in the saddle, think long long muscles, looking ahead, remembering to breathe, as we progress around the arc with some degree of softness. I remind myself to keep my hands still, to advance my inside seat bone, use that outside leg. And for heaven's sake, not to stiffen up or I'll be bouncing all over the place and his spine will drop. He seems to appreciate the effort and bends around my inside leg, although I can feel him drifting, oh so sneakily, he thinks, the first few times around at least, towards all those open acres of pinon and juniper that are calling his name. Eaaaasy, I say, to the horse and to myself.

How many circles are safe places? A circle of friends and family. A quilting circle where the air is riddled with idle chit chat and soft laughter. In the circle of a lover's embrace. The circle I drew in the sand with the toe of my sneaker during a late summer night game of kick the can when I was in the fifth grade? Where you were safe and no one else could get you? When the choir sang from the hymnal, "Oh the circle, won't be broken ..." The Native American healing circle.

20 meters. We've come full circle, then.

What else?

Posted by Kimberly on June 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just as the ranger from the Questa District promised me over the phone earlier this week, the envelope she’s mailed contains neatly folded maps of the Valle Vidal.

I spread them out on the dining room table. Smooth the creases in the paper. Imagine the map to be a sprawling plain alive with herds of American Buffalo and elk. Wild turkey dot the grasslands and roost in the low branches of the pines. A mule deer drinks from one of the clear, cold creeks marked by a squiggly line that bleeds off into a smudge mark at the bottom of the page where I've spilled my tea, her ears twitching as she lifts her head. At any moment a bear or a mountain lion might roam by.

Valle Vidal means The Valley of Life. The 100,000 acres in the northeastern corner of New Mexico is virtually unspoiled. Although I haven't seen it yet, this clearly delineated piece of geography beneath my index finger on the map is reputed to look like the west did 100, 200 or even 1,000 years ago.

I've read somewhere that signs at both of the Valle Vidal campgrounds warn, "Buffalo Are Wildlife." I wonder how my young Percheron horse Toby, who seems about as big as a buffalo to me, would react to seeing one of those massive hairy beasts. Would he freeze in place like a statue on four pillar-like legs, snorting and blowing through his nostrils, shuddering beneath me in excitement? Or would he merely glance at the bearded giants as we passed by, too eager to explore all of that wide-open space?

You’re supposed to need some orientation skills if you intend to roam this expanse of wilderness. It says so in the literature the ranger sent along with the maps.

There’s a glaring absence of any hiking trail legends. That’s because there’s not any. If I go to the Valle on my own, I might get lost. I’m no backwoods woman by any stretch of the imagination, and I would possibly wind up being one of those fantastical news stories on CNN. You know, the one about some poor fool who’s been lost in the wilderness for days after what was supposed to be a two-hour trek into the woods? Usually she’s found after several days of on-the-edge anticipation and increasingly shrill testimony from family about how God works all things for the good, even if they find her crumpled in a heap at the bottom of a canyon. In all of my years in Northern New Mexico, stories like this come too close for comfort.

Continue reading "What Horses Teach Us About Freedom: The Valle Vidal" »

Posted by Kimberly on March 1, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Women are often told to be extra careful and take precautions when going out at night. In some parts of the world, even today, women are not allowed out at night. So when women struggle for freedom, we must start at the beginning by fighting for freedom of movement, which we have not had and do not now have. We must recognize that freedom of movement is a precondition for anything else. It comes before freedom of speech in importance because without it freedom of speech cannot in fact exist.
– Timmins and Area Women in Crisis Website

I’ve just found out about it. The Great Santa Fe Trail Horse Race. An 800-mile endurance ride over a 13-day period starting in my hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and ending up in Independence, Missouri. It will trace the historic Santa Fe Trail that was in use from 1821-1880. My colleague mentions the horse race as an aside during a chat in the hallway, and I rush to my computer to Google “Great Santa Fe Trail Horse Race.” Before you know it, I have a complete map of the horse race route in hand and an application form folded up in my purse. I am bursting at the seams when my husband picks me up from work at the end of the day in his pickup truck. I dig the folded papers out of my purse, and present them with a flourish, grinning from ear to ear.

“What’s this?” he asks.

“Read it,” I say. “It’s a horse race. I’m going to enter.”

He reads and rubs his forehead beneath the brim of his black Stetson hat at the same time, frowning slightly. “Uh, sweetheart,” he is pointing to the map, a quizzical look on his face like I’ve gone absolutely mad, “this is … 800 miles? Do you have any concept of how far that is? Even if you are on a horse?”

“Toby and I could do it.” The words come out of my mouth, and I realize that I sound about ten years old. I’m speaking about my young percheron quarter horse cross. The draft horse breed is noted for its endurance. The big black horse is no Arabian (although those hot beasts rank among his ancestors), but Percheron horses are known for carrying medieval soldiers and armor at a 7-10 mile per hour trot all day long. I’m staring out the passenger-side window beyond the adobe houses and pinon trees to where I can only see Toby and me trotting through them relentlessly. Without tiring.

“Darling, you and Toby have never gone 50 miles together in one day, let alone—“ he’s rattling the papers on the steering wheel, spreading them out as if to make his point, “… this.”

This is the same man who’s supported my starting equestrian vaulting at 40, and who went to the Santa Fe Horse Park to cheer me on as I squeezed myself into a jewel blue unitard and leapt upon the back of a cantering Iberian Warmblood horse to a fairly decent amount of applause from the stands. He’s seen other moms high-five me at equestrian vaulting events, telling me, “You go, girl!” after I perform a few remedial level gymnastics moves on horseback. I suspect their response is not because of my gymnastic prowess, but because, at my age, I’ve put myself out there and I don’t not care, at least not too very much, if anyone wonders, even out loud, what in the hell is that middle-aged woman thinking, doing a shoulder stand on the 20-meter circle? And that’s at a walk, thank you.

I’m starting to get a little irritated at the lack of enthusiasm from my usual partner in crime who can almost always be counted in as a co-conspirator for these types of big dreams, and then I suddenly realize that I probably am crazy. I’m shaking my head from side to side, saying, “What am I thinking?” I take the map from him, stare at it hard. “You’d need a whole string of highly conditioned Arabian horses for this.”

We drive out of town towards home doing the math and figuring out just exactly how many miles a horse and I would have to cover in a single day. It’s excessively far. This race is definitely for the pros. But then again, I read in the local newspaper about some fellows who are just normal guys who actually have never even been on an endurance ride (I’ve been on two training rides with a German scientist whose ridden his Arabian horse across entire deserts) and who are putting together a team for this race out of Tucumcari, NM.

To be continued ...

Posted by Kimberly on February 5, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the most recent issue of Yoga Journal. Starting Over by Phillip Moffitt. I realized that she was pointing to a radical attitudinal shift in which you cease to be reactive when you are knocked off your intended path. Instead, when you discover that you have lost your focus, you just begin again without getting caught up in emotional stories about why you can't achieve your goal, or judgments about how unworthy you are or why the change you seek is impossible. ... I set about developing "just start over" into my daily practice. www.marinsangha.org

I started practicing yoga years ago after I broke my back in a riding accident, and I read Yoga Journal every month. As I get older, I learn to take things more in stride, but I like this idea of "just start over." It means I do the very best I can with what I have at this moment in time. Maybe I want to be able to do a shoulder stand on the vaulting horse at a canter. (Right now I'd settle for a good mount at the canter.) Well, instead of having some grandiose resolution about how I'm going to condition my body each and every day to reach my goal and then chastising and disliking myself when I fall off of the exercise wagon, I can just start over. When I am practicing on the vaulting barrel for the first time in several days, I don't have to berate myself for my lack of discipline, I'm starting over, right now, this moment. I may not be perfect, but it sure is an interesting journey. And it helps me be compassionate to myself.

I find the same thing in training the horse. If the horse isn't understanding, you start over. You don't get invested in the outcome at the moment. You work with what you've got right now. And with training horses, you're surely going to start over again and again. And again.

Funny how horses can teach one to flow.

Posted by Kimberly on December 18, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Donna over at Velvet Cage talks about The Roots of Riding, and traces hers back to an aunt.

Here’s a photograph of my aunt Anne at about age 10 standing on the back of Prince, with the mare Jessie in the background. Today she raises Arabians and her daughter also raises and trains horses.

This wonderful photo reminds me of my own big-spirited, horse-crazy ten-year-old!

Read it all.

Posted by Kimberly on September 1, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I tighten the girth of my old Steuben saddle. My eight-year-old son’s quarter horse mare Piñon casts a white-rimmed eye back in my direction, her good manners rooting all four of her hooves to the ground. I put my left foot into the stirrup, hop on my right (a couple of times because she is so darned tall), and swing up into the saddle while the mare stands still, blowing through her quivering nostrils. Catch a glimpse of horse and rider in the Sundowner’s dressing room window, trying to reconcile that strong, capable-looking woman in black breeches and boots, with me.

We head down the drive. Piñon swings into a trot as the other four members of the herd who’ve been left behind show out in a big way on their side of the pasture fence, bucking, snorting, romping, whinnying, following us as far as they can go. And then we are on our own.

Piñon gathers me up with her into an easy canter. We whirl and eddy around the pines, her hooves chewing up the dirt of the old railroad road, as we gain momentum, springing into a hand gallop. I feel myself perched on top of the mare’s long spine, then sitting deep in the saddle. I wonder what miracle keeps me with her—my legs long, heels back, balls of my feet light in the stirrups. She is running full out now for the sheer joy of it.

We are standing still. And we fly.

Posted by Kimberly on August 18, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Check out destinyuk's Flickr photo stream of a British Driving Society event.

"To me it seems that part of being in the ever-present ‘present’ is to enjoy life as it comes and to know that I can’t step in the same river twice. "
~ Marsha on Ageing Gracefully at Emerald City Gnosis

Her post is wonderful. Read it all.

I love to see women drive. A horse and cart, that is. In their driving hats and skirts, they are to me the epitome of grace. The skill and mastery needed for this disappearing art requires a certain level of maturity and experience, in my humble opinion. My daughter J. and I are dreaming of the day when we will drive our Percheron horse Toby at the New Mexico State Fair.

J. will drive. I'll ride gunshot. Sporting a hat with feathers.

These superb horsewomen are beautiful, capable ladies all.

Posted by Kimberly on August 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I do yoga this morning with Matilda-the-tenacious-heeler lolling on her back against me, freckled paws in the air, grinning. She licks my face during each downward-facing-dog part of my sun salutations. Grrrrrrrrrs at me, a taunt. I rub my head against her belly and grrrrrrrrrr back.

Down at the barn, Charlotte Gray stares up at me from her hidey hole in the hay feeder, green eyes luminous in the dawn. I bend down ever so slowly in hopes of touching her just this once, but the aloof feline scampers across the paddock in a frizz-tailed frenzy, followed by her feral teenaged siblings.

My daughter’s white Andalusian horse Caprichosa swaggers up to me, demanding to be fed. Breakfast. Immediately. You’d think she was starving to death. J. and I just gave her a bath on Saturday, so she still gives the white clouds hanging over the mesa this morning a run for their money, with the exception of a few dirty spots here and there. White horses, I grumble.

Continue reading "More than ..." »

Posted by Kimberly on August 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

These beautiful arabian photos are by Kramerton.

She is selling off her entire herd of Arabian horses because she’s dying of cancer. Not too far to go now, she says. I wonder if she's talking about the distance to the barn or months to live.

Dennis and I slog along behind the woman wheeling her oxygen tank through the mud, concerned that she will melt away in the rain in her tired gray sweat suit and wash down the nearest arroyo. I try not to stare at her protruding stomach that’s bloated from the illness, her breasts sagging with gravity and the weight of each step forward, wet hair hanging in rivulets down her back. Have to fight the urge to ask her if she doesn't have a wheelchair or something or if she will at least let me and Dennis help her down the path.

“We don’t have to do this today,” Dennis says, grimacing up at the leaden sky and then back at me, but the woman waves her free hand at us and plods forward. I cast an anxious glance back at the house, wondering why her husband waited behind where it’s dry and warm instead of coming out to the corrals with her. Or for her, for that matter. In between gasps for breath, she tells us she has several colts she needs to sell as soon as possible. The four boisterous youngsters are already lined up against the fence, looking at us with bright-eyed curiosity.

I make a mental note—trouble.

Continue reading "Hot blood and spirit" »

Posted by Kimberly on August 11, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am the light that is over all things.
I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained.
Split a piece of wood; I am there.
Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.
~ Gospel of Thomas: 77

Zen is boring.

So is waiting out a late afternoon thunder shower with a couple of muddy horses. But a lovely kind of boring.

Posted by Kimberly on July 19, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had a thoroughbred once. She was tall, lean, gregarious, kind, heart-wrenchingly exquisite, a natural athlete, and not too smart.

We named her Shiloh. Per her Jockey Club papers, her registered name was Spoon's Baby, and she'd won not quite $2,000 during her short racing career. But most of the time, we affectionately called our great big beauty The Super Model (pronounced Sooooooooooooooooooooper Model).

Continue reading "Rooting for Barbaro" »

Posted by Kimberly on July 18, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The practice of equitation is a valuable lesson, as it requires the exercise of all human virtues.
~ Nuno Oliveira

The Equus Projects. Now this is dancing with horses. Doesn't this look like fun? Do you ever feel like this inside when you ride or see some beautiful riding?

This reminds me of my 9-year-old daughter, gamboling around the pasture, flitting through the pines, with our young Percheron trailing along behind her in absolute wonder. Maybe he's thinking, who is this energetic little butterfly?

Continue reading "Dances with horses" »

Posted by Kimberly on July 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

For Marcy.

She asks the tall, lanky teenage boy if he has ever cantered on horseback before.

He stares back at her from behind the slightly bewildered gaze he wears most of the time.

“In Germany,” she tells him crisply, "and we will be doing only European-style vaulting here,” she reminds the rest of the group before returning her attention to the boy to see if he’s listening, “there are only two vaulting gaits―walk and canter.”

From astride the big draft horse, out on the circumference of the roughly twenty-meter circle, hands lackadaisically grasping the vaulting surcingle handles, Joseph’s dark eyes are hooded with heavy lids, rimmed with coal-colored eyelashes. His shining black braid swings to a lazy halt as the mare squares up and stops beneath him from a walk. His voice is barely audible as he shakes his head slowly from side to side, like he’s just been bombed out of bed after twelve hours of dead-to-the world, teenaged-boy sleep, and finally answers with a dull-edged, “No.”

Continue reading "The Sorceress" »

Posted by Kimberly on July 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

For women certainly, there is an underground tunnel running between the deepest wells in her life – an elemental connectedness between how she relates to her body and how she relates to all things divine and transcendental in the universe. Plug up her access to the first and you might as well close down the second. Charisophia

Sometimes riding a good horse is better than having great sex. ~ A friend of mine (who shall remain unnamed)

My neighbor's twenty-five-year-old Ebony was an old-style Morgan. Over sixteen-hands with a draft build on long legs of onyx, he was a classically trained dressage horse who could translate your thoughts into action almost before you realized you'd even thought them. Too hot for any of my little riding students at the time, I would often put a kid on my youngster (4-year-old) appaloosa Lacey, who took excellent care of all children, and borrow Ebony for myself for our cautious trail rides up into the barrancas.

Continue reading "Something hot and fiery" »

Posted by Kimberly on July 7, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

My appaloosa mare Teyla is made of Snowflake Obsidian, Lace Agate, Fossilized Jasper, Jet.

We’ve just weathered a hailstorm with a good three hours still to ride through this steep country back to the trailhead. The temperature has dropped at least twenty-five degrees in the last five minutes. The kids’ eyes have become the size of saucers, widening with each piercing roll of thunder reverberating down the mountain trail. I’m doing the mental checklist—oilskin coats buttoned up, helmets fastened, a layer of polar fleece, sturdy boots, cinches tight, everyone’s fed, you don’t come up here unprepared—and the horse tosses me this look over her shoulder, across the Bar N that some damned fool carved there, like, Sister, you have no idea the trouble I’ve known. But I have a hunch that the spotted horse could carry me through the bowels of hell without missing a single stride. After all, she’s had a lifetime of practice. Until we brought her home. Her gaze is unwavering. So just sit light in that saddle, give me the reins, and I’ll carry you down this mountain. Her intent is clear, I’ll lead every one of you home.

Continue reading "Stone" »

Posted by Kimberly on July 5, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our bodies are amazing. Check out the exquisite photos of the female form posted by Juliana at Charisophia—Bart Weston (U.S.) 1979 and Aram Alban - Female Nude (France). These images prompted me to tell the following story.

And Bwong's photographs of these young, vibrant top-tier vaulters (a few of my favorites pics shown here) capture the sheer and thrilling beauty of the sport of equestrian vaulting.

The order of things in equestrian vaulting is always from tallest to smallest. Tallest to smallest we say to each other as we prepare to practice the compulsories on the barrel. Tallest to smallest the coach sings out as we line up for freestyle exercises on the horse.

As I am today unfortunately the tallest in the group, and tradition-bound, I lead our little band of vaulters out onto the bright green hunter/jumper course at a choreographed jog—brandishing the long vaulting whip in one hand like a tribal banner as our names pour out over the loudspeakers. After all, we have just spent the previous two hours at the horse trailer while our Iberian Warm blood vaulting horse gets her mane and tail braided up by the grooms, grooming each other, brushing out our long hair, applying hairspray like lacquer, wrapping the silken strands tight around our fists to affix them into shining chignons at the napes of our necks with hairpins and jeweled nets, applying lipstick, gloss, eyeliner, blush, and all manner of sparkly things. At this point, although we’ve come from all over and some of us have never met before, we are purely consanguineous—of the vaulting line.

Continue reading "The twenty-meter circle" »

Posted by Kimberly on June 27, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ten Commandments for reading mythology
2. Read myths in the present tense: Eternity is now
~ Joseph Campbell

It's amazing to me how the divine is everywhere. In the 80-pound bale of hay you lug to the horse feeder. Baling twine. Dirt. The barn cat's meowling. Hummingbirds. A blue heeler dog's wagging stub tail. Cottonwood trees. Hungry horses. A New Mexico sunrise.

We're trail riding today. I'm chomping at the bit to go here. (I can hear it now— my husband gritching at me, "Kimberly, you don't tell everyone in the world where your favorite hunting spot is, for crying out loud!"). But it's above 12,000 feet, and we're concerned there still might be some snow on the trail. We'll stick to the lower elevations for now.

Today will be an adventure. Maybe I'll see you there!

Posted by Kimberly on June 10, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's nothing like drinking an ice cold Corona with your beautiful Arabian gal after a long ride.

Continue reading "Horse + Man = Energy too!" »

Posted by Kimberly on May 29, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I look at her and wonder what it must be like to be 9 years old, sitting on a white horse on the edge of a mesa where you can see for hundreds of miles into a cerulean sea of potential.

Posted by Kimberly on May 29, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Found over at Of Horses and Art─
I saw a child who couldn't walk, sit on a horse and laugh and talk. I saw a child who could not crawl, mount a horse and sit up tall. I saw a child born to strife, take up and hold the reins of life. And that same child was heard to say, thank you God for showing me the way.
~ John Anthony Davis

We actually managed to show up at school for Show and Tell on Friday with a sparkling clean white horse in tow ...

As my 9-year-old daughter gets ready to introduce her Andalusian horse Caprichosa to over fifty of her schoolmates out on the sandy schoolyard, I can almost see the words she’s been working on so hard during the week come spiraling up out of her head and evaporating into the ether. She looks to me for help, speechlessly imploring. I do my best to maintain the attitude of groom and horse handler instead of M-O-M and smile at her encouragingly, as if to say, “This is your day, remember? Come on. You can do it!”

Continue reading "Show and Tell" »

Posted by Kimberly on May 22, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes when I longe my daughter’s Andalusian horse Caprichosa ...

Continue reading "White horse cave" »

Posted by Kimberly on May 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Feed horses. Haul dense bales of hay. Curse misplaced leather barn gloves. Grunt. Wonder—how the hell heavy can these get?

Fill round feeder while chasing enthusiastically hungry draft horse off. Scrub and refill water tank. Cajole under-the-weather quarter horse mare to finish icky powdered antibiotics concealed in sweet feed and applesauce. Stand beside her. Rub her neck until she eats it all.

Produce two cans of dog food from overall pockets, pop open to chorus of meows, spoon onto plate in a glob. Feed barn cat and four kittens. Sit cross-legged in straw. Do best to convince feral kittens you will not eat them for breakfast. Finally hold one. Eyes wide open. Tiny heart pulsates.

Continue reading "Rapture" »

Posted by Kimberly on May 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I step out of the Post Office into a bare-bone empty New Mexico afternoon─sun blaring on the red rocks, red dirt, red crumbling adobe, cold-in-the-morning and sweltering-by-mid-day trailer houses with tires stacked on top to keep the roofs from blowing off in the wind. Begin sorting through the stack of letters in my hands, when I see him. Again.

Riding up around the corner of the old Victory Bar. Past the corpses of three or four generations of cars and pickup trucks, a rotted-out Coca Cola machine (when was a Coke a nickle?), half of a wrought-iron bedstead with a cactus growing where a mattress ought to be, piles of firewood, and one dour