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Dislocation

ponderosas

 

I am dislocated.  As from the medieval Latin, I have been moved from my proper place and position, my normal arrangement has been disturbed.  Synonymously, I have been disrupted, thrown into disarray, disorganized and confused.  These things have happened to me, my passive voice little more than flotsam on a strange sea.

We left our home.  The land we lived on for 11 years, the home we built and finished into contentment.  The place our animals have known as home for all or most of their lives.  It’s simple, really: we couldn’t find adequate jobs in the rural area we lived in, but we found good ones in the urban area we left over a decade ago.  So we did what so many do every day: we moved to find professional opportunity.

But that is the end of simplicity.  Moving is a nightmare.  Moving is stressful and exhausting and painful.  It’s certainly harder with livestock and ranch equipment as part of the mix.  So there’s that.

But this is about something else.  I knew it would be hard work to move.  I didn’t know it would pull my heart through my chest wall and leave it thrashing on the ground like a trout yanked from its stream.

I didn’t appreciate how passionately in love I am with our home.  I didn’t know the lining of my intestines would hum and surge in longing for the particular sound of the breeze in my pines.  I didn’t know my lungs would collapse every time I thought of the view out my living room window.  I didn’t realize my skin would recoil from the foreign air, the wrong wind currents, the landscape that is not mine.

Decades ago, I saw an arthouse movie about an indigenous man in an arctic setting who was captured and put in a jail cell.  It was his first sojourn in a solid structure and the first time in his long life he could not see the sky.  He immediately began to die.  I don’t remember the name of the movie or what happened to him, but I think of him.  Of what happens when you are suddenly stripped of the environment that held you.

I’ve never lived at any one address for 11 years, other than my childhood home.  I’ve never pitched my back and my heart into a place like we did in building our homestead.  I’ve never designed a house and then seen it emerge raw and ready for tending like a greasy newborn.  I’ve never spent my hours and days in the company of the same trees, a revolving but familiar cast of wild animals, and a reliable splash of brilliant stars for 11 years straight.  I didn’t realize what had happened.

I am of that place and that place is of me.  I wrote an essay not long ago, called In the Company of Trees, in which I mused on the reasons for the strange but tangible affinity I felt for my immediate natural environment.  I wrote that my body and the trees around me contain the same top five elements, giving us a kinship not apparent on the surface.  I wrote about my shedding a skin cell, which disintegrated and gave up its prime elements to the tree’s roots, while I breathed in its pollen and oxygen and particles of bark.  Over time, our bodies leaned toward each other.

Torn away, I am bereft.  Sick and empty in the middle.  I don’t think I’ll die of it, but I can see how it’s possible.  I can now understand the desperation of people pushed or ripped from their ancestral homes.  The anguish of thousands of refugees who are so much more dislocated than I, in such dire circumstances.  The land we love is another organ, the loss of which can lead to internal hemorrhage.

Over time, the pain will subside.  The connection will grow distant.  I will mingle my atoms with other places.  That fact in itself makes my chest clench.  Something that can be gotten over diminishes in importance.  I don’t want to get over it.

I will not change the name of my blog because in every important sense, I am still on Elk Meadow Road.  Husband and I will institute a new Thanksgiving-time toast: next year on Elk Meadow Road!  In the meantime, I keep Elk Meadow Road just as I cradle my liver.  I will slowly shed the atoms I picked up from my trees, scattering them in this new environment, but I vow to keep what I became there.

 

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“Stay with him and wait”

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Bridger was nervous in the arena.  He was worried about the trash cans outside the fence, where black cats once popped out right under his nose like Halloween Jack-in-the-boxes.  He was skeptical about the safety of the dais at one end where judges looked down on the proceedings.  And he was seriously concerned about the staffer hosing down the alleyway next to the arena.  The shadowy figure, the hiss of the water, the spray and fleeing dust were dreadful to the young horse.

I rode him through our lesson, round and round and across the arena, urging him closer and closer to the worrisome spots while trying not to push him to panic stage.

We were working on some small circling maneuvers near the hose man.  I was keeping Bridger’s attention focused on a minute task in the presence of something scary, trying to take his mind off the threat.  Someday, hopefully, Bridger will look to me in these cases and take my lead on whether there is danger, but we’re not there yet.  He complied with my directions, but stayed alert to the dangerous situation next to us.

Suddenly, Bridger tucked his enormous haunches under himself and launched forward and sideways.  He worked so hard at his instantaneous spook that he let out a huge fart as he went.

My brain lags at these moments — it took me a few milliseconds to realize what was happening.  By the time I processed it, we had jumped halfway across the arena and he was trotting out the end of his spook.  I was securely in the middle of the saddle, hardly a hair out of place.

Here’s what I loved about this.  I was not afraid.  I sat deeply in the saddle and held on to the gullet.  When he was back on four feet, I calmly gathered the reins to prepare to slow him down or simply go on to the next thing.

As he launched into the air with his gaseous assist, my brain spoke very clearly: “stay with him and wait.”  I wasn’t sure what he was doing but I had learned not to panic.  I knew I needed to keep my balance and stay on the horse and that the moment would pass. I learned this the hard way.

Last summer, when Bridger gave out a much less impressive quasi-buck, my brain told me something else: “holy shit! disaster! abandon ship!”  So I did.  I thought his minor upheaval was the beginning of mayhem without end, and I fled.  And got a broken bone and several lasting bruises for my choice.

After months and months of dedicated effort, including a volume of tears and sweat, my instinctive brain was finally able to say something reasonable and helpful.  And correct.  Stay with him and wait.  So I did and all was well.

And now I go forth, hoping to do the same in whatever life throws at me.  Which looks to be quite a bit in the near future.  I hope to ride the upheavals as they go and wait for the moment when I can right the ship.  And keep my bones intact.

 

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In Praise of Small Bites

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I’m a fan of the small-bites approach, to many things, but I suffer doubt whether it’s all that effective.  Our culture generally screams for the whole hog.  Go big or go home and that kind of thing.  Taking small, regular bites seems somehow weak, boring, un-American.  But now I’m convinced.

I used to go big most of the time.  Riding my bike up a steep section, I did it as fast as possible, both to conquer the challenge and to get the difficulty over with so I could rest on the downhill.  I cleaned the whole house in a flurry, and then did almost nothing for much too long.  I lived on an intensity-collapse cycle.  I got a lot of stuff done.

Then I started riding a young horse.  He freaked me out a couple of times with his power and independence.  When he was in a tough spot, going big was no longer an option.  Not for me.  If I bore down and pushed him through these things, he would likely have escalated further before we got through, and I was already past my limits.

On great advice, and with no other plan, I started on the small bite approach.  I worked with or rode him to the degree I could without going too far beyond my comfort zone.  That wasn’t very much at times.  Because it was emotionally so challenging, I couldn’t ride him for very long or do very much before I needed to regroup.  I noticed no change, my entire focus was getting out there and getting to that edge.

I was skeptical.  Small bites move slowly.  They are tedious.  Change is almost imperceptible.  Day after day, I still felt nervous, I still did small things.  The top of the hill stayed just out of sight.

The gradations of challenge with Bridger the colt go kind of like this: groundwork (unmounted) –> riding in the small round corral –> riding in the larger corral –> riding out on our 25-acre property –> riding out around the neighborhood.  At the start, I did 100% groundwork, and slowly started adding portions of the next steps.

Yesterday, I hardly did any groundwork, skipped the round pen, spent a few minutes riding in the corral and then spent most of the time on the road around the neighborhood.  I felt almost no nerves the entire time.  Suddenly, after all those tedious, tiny bites, change erupted.

I like small bites.  I clean my house a little bit every day (well, that’s the plan).  I tackle parts of chores and leave other parts for the next day.  I push quickly up the hill if I want my heart to beat faster, otherwise I stop and look around.  It really works.

 

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The Om in Horsemanship

Om

It’s pouring down rain, so there won’t be much horsing around today.  My goal of riding Bridger every day as a cure for our woes is on pause this day.  But there’s plenty of time for thinking about horses and life and stuff.

Horseman Peter Campbell says something like “the problem is not the problem, your attitude about the problem is the problem.”

My “problem” with Bridger is very simple — there are things he needs to understand better and ideas he has that I’d rather he didn’t.  This wouldn’t be a problem at all except that the process of teaching and redirecting him can be scary because I sit on his back and he is large and powerful.

But even so, it’s my attitude that creates the problem.  When Bridger gets fractious or lost, there are a couple options.  If I were Buck Brannaman, I’d ride him right through it without blinking because I would know I could.  Or, I could see the issue developing, mindfully dismount and address it from the ground.  Neither is a problem.

What do I do?  Fear grabs me, or maybe frustration, and right behind come self-doubt, self-criticism, dismay and a bunch of other complicated emotions.  My muscles tighten, my mind trips offline.  I’m lost in a feeling storm, useless for giving my horse the direction and confidence he needs.  If I’m not careful, I can start blaming Bridger for the whole mess.  And voila — a real problem.

FDR would have answered Peter Campbell nicely, adding, for example, that all we have to fear is fear itself.  Or anger or jealousy or despair.  My yoga teachers would nod sagely — notice where your mind goes when your body is challenged, they say, is it necessary?

How many times a day do we create problems with our emotions and reactions where, in fact, there is simply a circumstance?

Yoga and horsemanship point me in the same direction: stick with exactly what is for a while and let the rest go.  Next time I get on Bridger’s back, I’ll be really trying to do just that.

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Going Steady with Fear

I rode Bridger today.  You’ll understand something about that if you read this earlier post.  It means a lot.

Last summer, Bridger and I hit a big glitch in our progress.  I asked him for a little more than he was ready for, so he gave out a little buck, which was enough to unseat me, which was enough to crack my ulna.  Neither the buck nor the crack were such a big deal.  The killer was the fear that immediately colonized me.

Fear has not been a big thing with me.  Not on a conscious level, anyway.  I’ve had plenty of dicey moments on mountain bikes, on snow-covered slopes in the backcountry, with lightning on the alpine tundra, in class 4 river rapids after I fell out of the boat.  I’ve unexpectedly come much too close to male moose and grizzly bear cubs.  Each event had its adrenaline-soaked excitement and some hindsight shivers, but each easily became a great story to revisit over a beer.  Not so with my fall off Bridger.

I am inherently, helplessly scared of heights. I grow dizzy and watery too close to a precipitous fall.  I feel compelled to go over — if someone forced me to spend too long on a tiny ledge, I might have to plunge over.  So I do have that fear, but I handle it by simply avoiding the situation.  I tried rock climbing, which would have been a good match for my other mountain hobbies, but there wasn’t enough in it to overcome the visceral fear, so I left it behind.  I admire views from a safe distance.  I can’t leave Bridger behind or stay at a distance.

After my fall off Bridger, pictures of people riding horses made me queasy.  Being around my horses at feeding time gave me all-over prickles.  After my arm healed a little, I got on my older horse, Jack, who is as reliable, slow and calm as they come.  I felt sick and loose-limbed.  I shed tears.

I mostly got over it.  With the superb help of friends, a couple sports psychology books and patient Jack, it eased up and left me.  Meanwhile, Kathleen was busy helping Bridger get over his own problem.  Six months after the fall, I was riding Bridger in the backcountry on an unfamiliar trail, having a good time.

This year, we hit another glitch, but on a smaller scale.  You can learn more about that here.

Again, I backed up and brought Kathleen in.  Again, it got better after only a few weeks of focused effort.

So today, I went out by myself and rode Bridger.  I fought back butterflies before I got out to the corral.  I talked out loud to myself when he wiggled his head and slewed his ribs the wrong way and acted like there was a mountain lion in the bush.  It worked out pretty well, but I think I have begun a long-term relationship with fear.  For (maybe) the first time, I have a thing, and a family member, that cannot be denied or left behind and that evoke a new kind of fear.  I’m very happy I got myself out there and had a nice little ride today, but there is much more to understand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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This Horse Ain’t Broke

They used to call it breaking a horse.  Many still do.  Breaking his spirit, breaking his independence.  Taking something correct and complete and destroying it.  It’s fitting terminology for what it used to look like (and still does in some circles).

                 I was going to insert a video clip of a horse getting “broke” here but I just can’t do it, so here’s something cute instead:

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My colt Bridger at four months, correct and complete

I broke my arm once.  Just a little, hairline fracture.  It’s healed up now, but it will never be the same.  It can never be unbroken.

The horsemen I follow call it starting a horse.  Starting into a long education.

<Buck Brannaman explains how it’s supposed to be>

We ask the horse to consent to do what we ask.  We give him time and space to consider his options, and in the end, he usually agrees with our suggestions.  It’s a wondrous thing.

But what about when he doesn’t?  In his fifth year, Bridger suddenly started disagreeing.  Suddenly, that is, if one has failed to see the ripples and eddies forming on the surface of the pond.  Bridger has now decided to revolt against those things he doesn’t like.  The sweet, seemingly compliant kid has erupted into a surly teenager.

He’s a horse, surly is the wrong word.  He’s unconfident and worried and irritated and frustrated, by turns or all at once.  Maybe he wasn’t before, or maybe he just wasn’t showing it much.  Now he is.  His modus operandi is to rear up, which can be extremely dangerous.

 

rearing
This is not Bridger and me.  This horse is about to fall over backwards on that person, which could be the end for both of them.  I hope it wasn’t.

So now we have to convince Bridger to quit it.  We have to make him understand that his rearing idea — and his defiance ideas in general — won’t work out for him and he needs to find other ideas.

The plan, implemented by my teacher, Kathleen Sullivan, is to provoke the unwanted response and then show Bridger it’s not in his best interest.  If we pussyfoot around and avoid the tough spot, it will stay in there and solidify.

“If it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.”  Carl Jung.

Here’s the thing: correcting a problem can look awfully like breaking something.  Kathleen gets pretty vigorous with Bridger when he thinks about rearing up.  In my work with him, it can be the same.  Dust flies, there is sweat.  First he is quick and powerful and troubled, then, soon, he is docile.

I have to find the difference because I know we are not breaking him and won’t break him and can’t break him.  Right?

Here’s the best I can do so far:

  • Breaking: you reach for my french fries and I punch you in the face.  I have my fries and you resent and fear me.  Someday you may punch me back, if I ever see you again.
  • Correcting: you reach for my french fries and I block your hand; you reach harder and I block harder; I block as fast and hard as I need to in protecting my fries; our hands fly like a Three Stooges routine; you give up trying.  I have my fries and you recognize you won’t get any by grabbing.  Maybe you ask politely and I give you some.  Maybe you order your own.  We’re friends.

Sometimes I use the shorthand term “broke” because horse people understand it.  I tell people Bridger’s “broke to tie” or “green broke.”  I hope beyond hope I haven’t broken anything much.  It’s not the plan.

 

 

 

 

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Quiet afternoon in the life of a nascent writer

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Re-reading and tweaking the latest draft essay; reading Reading Like a Writer; reading other people’s essays and blog posts; reading one of Jane Goodall’s books because I may be writing about her soon; listening to a podcast interview with a poet I’ve read; wondering why I’m doing any of it; happy as a clam.

 

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What I Could Get Done Today

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I woke up at 2:30 a.m. in a clammy sweat, wondering if I have what it takes.  I have a young horse, about half-broke, who needs many hours of careful, confident riding to get to a steady state.  Between here and there, he may need to test the limits, maybe bucking with me, or rearing, or bolting.  We’ve done everything to help prevent that, but I’m 52 years old and not much more than a novice rider.  His need to test could be my undoing.

But I can’t leave him as he is; he could be a danger to himself and others.  I need to see this through, but I don’t know if I can.

I’m not alone in this, I have an excellent teacher on board.  She’s sharing the riding job with me and coaching me throughout.  But there’s an interface between the horse and me where only the two of us can go.  That is where we have to forge this relationship, just us.

The stakes are high.  Every day, we are building the house we will live in together from here on out.  It needs to be right.  Every day, there is some risk that I could be hurt, and I have less leeway for that kind of thing than I used to.  If I push myself too hard, I could implode with reactive fear and aversion.  If I don’t push us both hard enough, we could solidify in a half-baked, uneasy mediocrity.

My teacher points out how much I will learn from working through this.  About horsemanship, about my own limits.  She suggests that, when we succeed (as she has no doubt we will), I will enjoy a relationship and a sense of confidence like no other.  Ten years ago, that would have been enough.  Today, in the early hours before dawn, I wonder if I can learn these things anymore.  If I want to.

The mountain is too high to take in the whole.  Today, after we all had breakfast, I took the horse out and worked with him from the ground.  As I walked and stood alongside him, we practiced paying attention even when he was nervous about rustling bushes.  We practiced responding lightly to subtle moves of the reins.  We practiced fancy footwork on challenging terrain.  I put a penny in the jar, saving toward a well-educated horse.  That’s about all I could do today, and about all I had to.

 

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I’m a word nerd

I love words.  Take the word “neuter” (I know, that’s weird, but it fits into an essay I’m working on so it’s on my mind).  If you consider the derivation of neuter, you find that

OED
James Murray, primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary

between its various Latinate roots and its related cousins in other languages, somewhere in its ancestry it means “neither” — as in, neither gender — and it’s also descended from the word “also” — as in, this gender and that one.

So neuter is neither gender AND both genders.  At the same time.  Come on, that’s just cool.  It’s like a whole poem or mini-essay, sparking the mind to all kinds of possibilities.  In just one word and its family tree.

I’ve always been a word nerd.  When I was bored as a kid, I spent a lot of time with the Almanac of Words at Play, a book of erudite word games for adults, the kind of thing two literary types had on their shelves for their kids to find.

I’m coming out of the nerd closet.  One of the greatest things about passing 50 is I have little left to prove and time to indulge my passions.  Two hours with horses this morning and quality dictionary time in the late afternoon, what could be better?

 

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When Danny Colicked

 

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Danny is a very difficult horse.  For reasons that could fill a book — and will, you can make advance reservations here for a book you can have read to you in 2056 in your hospice room — he long ago decided humans are either contemptible or dangerous, or both.  He’ll accept petting and cookies, but he’ll turn himself inside out to avoid school or work.

The other night, Danny colicked.  The word freezes the intestines of horse owners.  A simple gastric hitch — maybe a clump of food that didn’t process well, an excess of gas, a bit of inflammation — can kill an otherwise healthy horse.

I don’t know why horses are designed with such vulnerable digestive systems.  Horses can’t vomit.  They have a single, small stomach, unlike cows.  Their guts have to digest very tough, fibrous material, so they are extremely long and ropy, twisted into torturous coils in the back halves of their bodies.  With only one way for anything to travel, and a densely packed container, the slightest disruption can cause extreme pain.  Wikipedia lists 16 types of colic, including “other.”  Unresolved colics can kill, particularly when the gut ruptures from the stress.

The other night, I went to bring the horses in from the pasture.  Danny, for all his resistance to my leadership, is always first to come in from grazing.  Because I serve a smidgeon of grain at this time.  When I close the house door to head to the corral, he whinnies at me from wherever he is on the 25 acres.  He comes running to get his nose first into the grain.  The other two horses saunter in as and when they feel like it, sometimes requiring additional persuasion, but not Danny.

This night, Danny walked in slowly, second in line.  He took his place by his bucket.  I looked over all three to make sure all the body parts were where they belonged and headed back to the house.  As I was leaving the corral, I noticed that Danny was just standing over his bucket, not eating.  I paused.  He stood.  I turned to watch him.

His eyes were staring and locked.  To my horror, he turned and bit at his belly, a classic sign of colic.  Before I could move, he suddenly turned and charged aggressively at my older horse.  This was so uncharacteristic, I began to worry in earnest.  I grabbed a halter and collected Danny, taking him into my small training pen.  I began walking him around aimlessly as I’ve been taught.  He was vacant in the eye, stumbling a little as we walked.  We would stop and his knees would buckle a little — either he was thinking of rolling or just unsteady on his legs, both bad signs.  At one point, I let him loose in the pen to see what he would do and he started manically trotting around in small circles with no direction from me.

To make a long story tolerable, we spent an hour and a half together, waiting to see what would happen.  I gave him an anti-inflammatory drug.  I walked him.  I loaded him in and out of the trailer, I had him stand with just his hind feet in the trailer (downward facing pony pose) and then just his fronts.  I walked him some more.  His frightening behavior lessened.  When he seemed a little more with it, I moved him around in small circles, asking him to bend his body laterally.  He immediately started farting and didn’t stop for long minutes.  The relief floated up from him, along with the offending gas.  As we walked back to meet the other horses, he let out a distinct belch and looked satisfied with himself.

So all was well.  The real story happened the next day.  I went into the corral with a halter to catch my young horse for some schoolwork.  Usually, Danny avoids me.  With a turn of his head, a half-turn of the the body, a slow saunter, or a determined trot, he goes away when I come with a halter.  This day, he didn’t.  He stood looking at me.  I approached him as an experiment and, by god, he stepped towards me.  I pretended to catch him, just to make my point, and petted him vigorously all over, before going about my business with the other horse.  The next day, he did the same thing.  The third day, I stood with Danny while he got new shoes put on and he was as peaceful and affectionate as I’ve ever seen him.

We are warned not to anthropomorphize our horses, even while we spend all our time trying to understand their psyches.  Of course we can’t help but anthropomorphize them — we have only our anthropoid eyes to see them with and anthropoid brains to process the data.  Pretending to be objective about animals is like pretending we only have eyes to perceive a park and the sounds don’t matter.  However, we can do our best not to project ourselves onto them, trying our hardest to see them with all of our senses as they are and not as we want them to be.

Did Danny decide I could be trusted after all?  Was he grateful that I helped him?  Did he form a Pavlovian positive association between me and those blissful farts?  Did he sense that I wanted to help and was willing to stick with him until he was fit again and appreciate it?  I’ll never know what happened inside him, but I know how it looked — and felt — from the outside.

20120506 Danny Kate