Sesame Street is forty years old! H/t to my friend Erica, whose FaceBook posting reminded me of the Twiddlebugs! I hadn't thought of the Twiddlebugs in at least thirty years. They're a family of bugs that live in Ernie's window-box garden. They're not terribly bright, but they get an "A" for enthusiasm in everything they do.
And the Twiddlebugs then reminded me of the Yip Yip aliens, who always scared the crap out of me. They still creep me out a little.
Throughness (Durchlässigkeit): the flow of energy through the horse from front to back and back to front. The musculature of the horse is connected, supple, elastic, and unblocked, and the rider’s aids go freely through the horse.
Relaxation (Losgelassenheit): the second level of the pyramid is relaxation (looseness). Signs of looseness in the horse may be seen by an even stride that is swinging through the back and causing the tail to swing like a pendulum, looseness at the poll, a soft chewing of the bit, and a relaxed blowing through the nose. The horse makes smooth transitions, is easy to position from side to side, and willingly reaches down into the contact as the reins are lengthened.
Willow is pretty big, especially for a mare. I think she's very close to 17 hh. Additionally, she has a long back and a long neck. Her favorite thing to do when I first started her was this:
Long and low, baby! We are going to get tens on our stretchy circle! (And fours on everything else.)
Obviously, it took some work to get Willow up in front. And then once I got her to understand "up in front," it took even more work to get her to let me shorten the reins. (Her response? "You can have shorter reins. Or you can have me go forward. You can't have both.")
So, in the past year, we've made a lot of progress. She's more up in front. She allows me to shorten the reins without losing the forward. She's no longer a mullet. But something was missing; something that I've always been able to get in every other horse I've worked with. Relaxation. Throughness. Letting go through the jaw, poll, and ribcage. I was having luck getting her to be softer and less heavy, but it still wasn't the right feeling. She wasn't through.
One afternoon about three weeks ago, I spent about 25 minutes warming Willow up in walk. I did lots of circles and serpentines. Suddenly, she just let go, and I felt it. Throughness. I took her up to trot and the feeling remained. I couldn't believe it. I have no idea what I did to cause it, but the light bulb went off for her. She started responding the way I've wanted her to respond for three years. She was balanced. She was bendy. She was light and soft, but still connected. She halted from my seat. She moved away from my leg. Hey, Willow, you're a dressage horse!
OK, I'll admit we still don't have this feeling in canter. But we have it, reliably, in walk and trot! Canter will come. I'm just so relieved to know she can do it, because I was starting to doubt I was ever going to get that feeling with her. I was saying to myself, well, she's just so big and long -- maybe through for Willow won't feel like through did for the other horses you've ridden. Now I know better. I can't wait to see what happens next!
A habitual bolter or a habitual rearer: which is scarier? It's a tie as far as I'm concerned. But there's something worse: flippers. Sometimes horses rear, lose their balance (especially if the rider pulls on their face), and fall over backwards. That's not flipping. A true flipper does what this horse does (BTW, pay no attention to the "Man dies!" description. It's perfectly obvious no one is even hurt.):
I'd never actually seen a true flipper in action. You can see from body language that both the groom and the jockey have a pretty good idea of what's coming, although it's interesting that the horse never really lays his ears back. Is it possible to rehab a horse that does something like that?
My mother visited a couple weeks ago, and we spent a Saturday driving up to the town of Sisters and back. Sisters the town is located near the Three Sisters mountain peaks. We picked a great time to go; the fall foliage was spectacular. I had no idea there were giant lava fields ninety minutes from my house.
I have to admit the whole idea of living somewhere with volcanoes and lava freaks me out a little. Yet, tornadoes don't, so I am just an irrational person.
Mom and I hiked up to Proxy Falls. Everything was so pretty, and the photographers were out in full force to capture the colors.
This is Mt. Washington, a dormant volcano. The helpful signs at the lookout say that it was heavily eroded by glaciers, and that most of the trees are dead due to a 2003 wildfire.
In other news, I've had an honest-to-goodness breakthrough with Willow. So much of dressage is just slogging away day after day, knowing what you're after but recognizing that the horse doesn't have the same understanding. So you just keep repeating the training over and over, keeping the faith, and suddenly a light bulb appears above your pony's pointy little ears, and dressage happens! More on our breakthrough in a future post.
