Two weeks ago, Jay hurt his back. That means that he can’t ride very much. So, when he comes to Time Out Farms, he has been using me as a kind of a substitute, combining training of the horses with teaching me how to ride his western-English-Natural Horsemanship mix. Some days, I’ve ridden four horses in a row, and unless it has rained all day, I’ve not ridden less than two.
After a day of stable work plus all that riding, I’m dead tired, but it’s totally worth it. It’s like I’ve found my way back home, to the joy of communicating and cooperating with a horse. That special feeling that I got with Ofelia, the pony I rented for a couple of years in my teens, the feeling that I later on lost, riding all the different, lazy and tired and ill ridden riding school horses. I didn’t feel comfortable having to force the horse to do as I wished, but there wasn’t really any other way, not with the horses at the riding school who were ridden by so many different people. They had to get used to all the contradicting signals from all the different (often not very good) riders, so in the end, most of them ended up being quite numb.
But with Jay, it’s all about simplicity and lightness. It’s about asking, not forcing. And it’s about understanding the horse, how it thinks, and working with it, not against. And, as if there wasn’t an end for how good things could be, Jay’s also a great teacher and an amazing person even without the horse knowledge.
Oh, I could stay here forever, just to learn everything that Jay has to teach.
Katja Malmborg 
Kiva että saat ratsastaa kylläksesi. Milloin sulle voi soitta skypellä. Moikka