01/14/2026
what you water grows -
The other day, I had a few of my horses out in a public space tied to the trailer. There were a few other folks there fussing with their horses, calling them bird brains and dummies, and complaining about various aspects of their behavior.
One of these folks said to me, "You are so lucky to have such quiet horses. I feel like bird brains over here falls apart over everything, and he just needs to deal with life!"
I thought about that word - luck. If they'd have seen these horses a few years back, they might have called them such naughty words too. My horses struggled just as much as anyone else's might have for a time.
But things have changed. Now I am blessed to have peaceful horses who are confident inside. I'm not better than anyone else or magical in any way - there was a lot of work involved. I sought help outside my realm with some very good instructors, took them to clinics with the best of the best, and worked outside my comfort zone a lot. Sometimes I wasn't sure if they'd come around either, but I always hoped.
Work is important. On a retrain, you are untying knots and tying them again, and sometimes again and again.
But the work means nothing if you don't like the horse. If you can't bring yourself to give from inside yourself, what does the horse have to open up to? If we spend our time around them thinking negative thoughts about them, and pinning labels on them, how can the horse grow outside these parameters?
We can say all we like what we think the horse SHOULD deal with, what they SHOULD do - but as one of my teachers says, "good luck with that." It's like saying gravity should not affect me. And yet gravity does not care about my opinion, it does its thing.
The horse is going to continue looking out for himself if there is nothing we have to offer outside control and correction. I'm pretty sure none of us would willingly hang around a teacher, outside or coersion or psychological manipulation, who constantly criticized without offering much help - without teaching skills and paving the way for a better version of us.
So whether the horse SHOULD do something is irrelevant. What are they like now, and where would you like them to be? Our words and thoughts carry an energy. And our generosity of spirit is the water in the soil of tender shoots - we can blossom a horse beyond our wildest dreams, into something others can only label as luck, if we give it the right ingredients: work, time, training, persistence, yes - but an oppenness, a love for the horse, is final ingredient to carry us through to the horse.
