Escape

The past few days my little province has been in the news. Some discontented white man went on a rampage, wreaking carnage and heartbreak over a 13 hour period before being killed by cops. While I don't know anyone personally, I am, like all of us, reeling from this horror. There are no words. Well, except for fuck.

Frankly, between this and Covid-19 I am so done with 2020. I can't even watch the news anymore (and I am usually a news junkie). It's been hard to be motivated.

On monday, Mother Nature graced us with a beautiful sunset

I am old enough to know that sometimes you just have to put one foot in front of the other. After work yesterday I decided that I needed to ride. I decided to see if I could set up my phone to take some media. And it worked.

Carmen was more energetic than our previous ride, looking for evil. I was pretty sure that she was feeding off my own negative energy. So the goal was to get her to bend and be soft. Not that it was easy. However, when I looked at the video after she didn't look as bad as she felt.

poor Carmen I had trip hazards everywhere

In this video you can see that she's wanting to throw her head and come to the inside. I do my best to not buy into the tension and get into an argument. Instead I stay calm and help her to relax. The smartest thing I ever did was attach a grab strap to the saddle. This helps me to be confident in relaxing the rein and not get dumped.

Carmen felt like a ball of energy so I decided to move her into trot to get her moving and relaxing. Whatever else she has taught me, I have learned to be tuned into her body language to figure out where her attention in and what she's thinking. I've noticed that, when she's worried about the outside, she tends to shift all her weight to the inside. It's not that she's actually tilting but more like she's carrying more weight on the inside. I work on getting her to shift her weight to be even. Does that make sense? have you ever experienced that? How did you fix it? I've been asking her to shift to the outside with my weight. It seems to work. 

I don't know if you can see it but she's got more of her weight
on her left then her right. 

Since we had so much energy it seemed like a good time to work on simple changes through walk.  I was pretty happy with them- although a couple she tried to to just barrel through them and not sit on her hind end. I was pretty happy with this one. 

I also practiced our trot half-pass. It's got a long way to go but I was pretty happy with it. Her reach is nice and she clearly understands the ask. To be honest, in some ways it feels better than her leg yield. 

My goal is to not stagnate without lessons and it feels that I'm making progress. I think that this set up might work to set up a virtual lesson. We'll see. But it's nice to have something to look at and not just how it felt and/or my memory. 

Even more importantly, for about an hour I wasn't dealing with all the fall out from current events. For that time it was just me and Carmen working together.