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GentlewoodFarms
January 31, 2018

Reflection ~

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This was the first day that Bonnie and I had a chance to ride since Christmas. It's been too cold, windy, and just miserable outside. But last Saturday was beautiful - no wind, and a nice warm 60 degree day. So I scheduled a lesson down in Norman with my coach, hitched up my trailer, and then took a big breath and exhaled.

Bonnie has trailering issues. I don't know why because for the first two years of her life, she loved getting in the trailer. I trained all my babies to load by feeding them in the trailer, so it became a place of happiness and safety. Bonnie got sold as a two-year-old, and I just got her back in October. The thirteen years between are a mystery. Kind of.

Horses don't lie. They are incapable of it. When you see a horse behaving in a particular way, it's because they've either learned to behave that way or because they are reflecting the owner's internal emotional state. Somewhere along the way during the past thirteen years, Bonnie developed a fear of loading into a trailer. She gets tight, tense, and worried as soon as she realizes that's the direction we're walking.

I know when I'm tense or frustrated, both my girls get progressively more stupid, silly, and hard to deal with. It's not that they're stupid. Or silly. Or hard to deal with. It's that they read my body language and it telegraphs to them how they're supposed to behave. When I'm relaxed and at peace, they are too. So when I am getting ready to load Bonnie, I have to take a deep breath, exhale, and relax every muscle in my body and empty my mind of everything that is related to time or the “get in the trailer” goal.

I tell kids all the time when I'm teaching a loading clinic, “Your horse doesn't know what your goal is, and she's not wearing a watch. You cannot get worked up about how long something takes because your horse has no concept of time. She doesn't know that this is taking too long. She just knows that you're stressed so there must be something about this situation that is stressful. Your horse is always going to be a reflection of YOUR emotional state."

Bonnie is getting better. Mostly because I don't make a big deal of how long it takes us to get loaded in the trailer. I know it's going to take longer than I think, so I always plan for it to take an hour, and that way when it takes 10 minutes, I'm ahead of schedule. She's learning to relax – she's not there yet, but she's getting there.

I took a photo of Bonnie's eye, kind of like that one that I took of Dolce back in August. You can see my reflection in it. And it's kind of easy to see that even though she's not *happy* to be standing at the trailer, she's not overly upset about it because I'm standing there with her, and I'm ok with the whole idea.

~ * ~

This is my final weekly challenge for January's Anything Goes Challenge. We were supposed to roll a pair of dice and use the two numbers to pick a sketch from the scrapbook dot com sketch gallery. I really lucked out with my sketch - it fit the photographs I needed to use for my Project 52 layout this week, and it allowed for exactly the papers that I had left in my Anything Goes counterfeit kit.

I made the rosette using a border punch and my score-pal. It's got a little flower punch on the top with a vintage military button and a piece of ribbon through the holes. I did the "doily" using a corner punch on a circle. It's an old technique that still gives lovely results. I even did a little hand stitching, using my StampinUp stitching guide square to get the holes in the right spots.

The white flowers are from HL. The papers - gads, most of them are so old that I don't even know where they all came from. All well past the discontinued status for sure.

Thanks for stopping by to visit!


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