Pumpkins at Halloween

Halloween here is less about pumpkins, they're catching on though, in that artisan local farm products kind of way. I didn't't feel I had the right to have one without my landrover and sporting my Barbour jacket!  As a child we carved turnips but even then it was more about ghosts and ghouls than trick or treat.  

They were on my mind though, when tidying up I found a photo album with pictures of Palermo. He was a beautiful big horse I had the privilege of riding in America. He taught me so much. He was cheekily called Pumpkin by an eventing friend Karen because of his bright color and his tendency toward roundness in the middle. Neither of us appreciated the nickname but we were forgiving because Karens own horse always seemed to be stomping on her! 

Palermo was the pumpkin that sent out shoots, drawing so many great things into my life,  friends, trainers  and a learning that was truly life changing. I was so definite and determined in those days. So sure of who I was and what I wanted to do. Palermo changed that, in the best sense. He thought me patience, I'm not sure I had any at the time. I had stubbornness and stickability but he taught me how to half halt my brain. It was a turning point in my riding, taking theory and templates that didn't always work and look at how to honestly apply them.

It's where I met the trainer Hans Schmidt, while watching a lesson he berated me for not being on a horse. So I dutifully saddled up and it began in earnest. Hans and Palermo made me get comfortable going back to the beginning and evaluate the truth of the riding, not the doing, but the feeling of it. Being satisfied while messing up and there was surely some big messes. One in particular ended us up with two legs in the judges box and two still in the arena. We found our way, albeit it wobbly and that skill to analyze how the training fits the individual horse charted the rest of my riding and teaching. 

Pumpkin Palermo and I once cleared a warm up arena while we skipped merrily around, mostly on two legs. Learning to accept and find a way through for him then gave us some of the best moments of my life. Radical acceptance, it should be a teaching tool in the arena. I'm grateful for that, as an over thinker and someone who often gets stuck in the "what ifs",  this skill gives me a place to go. A place to feel soothed when I'm vulnerable, about my riding, or my horse. The joy to never feel rudderless in the arena with a horse. I don't mean always knowing what Im doing, far from it but always knowing how to break it down and get back on the path. It's a training tool I wish was more spoken about, more shared so we could all recognize how vulnerable we are with our riding. We might recognize what we all have in common instead of incessantly comparing ourselves, to each other and to perfection.