I should take Sundays off and forego home schooling. The problem is that I can’t turn our kitchen into a classroom for the horses. If I brought them into the house, Pete would object, saying, “They’re livestock.” He didn’t object when I brought Ranger inside, and I suspect that if one of the ponies was seriously ill and that the kitchen addition could accommodate them, they’d be inside. When Raudi was young and ill, spent some time in a garage and lived to tell about it.

So I go with the weather – if it’s bad I cancel class. Today we had decent weather – the sun disappeared behind the clouds mid-morning, shortly after I sanded

the horse pen and the driveway. So I took advantage of the weather and the fact that I had a visitor to get some work done.

The visitor was Connie, a woman I met at the Animal Disaster Emergency Preparedness Class. She’s a Red Cross Volunteer – she appears on scene immediately after fires and assists people in getting their lives back in order.

At the very end of the two-day course, she said that she’d like to come out and see the horses. I said sure. Today was the only day available on her full schedule – I was originally going to work with Sarah and Spiffy, but I ended up having Connie come out here. Connie said that she had no horse experience at all but wanted to feel more comfortable around them. She was very insightful and observant – she noted that my horses ARE big – they just have short legs. She was initially as nervous around my horses as I was around taller animals.

I am moving along in my long-range plan, which is to assist others in making the horse/human body awareness connections. Today was revelatory. I had a plan and it worked fairly well. This was Tyra and Raudi’s day for homeschooling, so I figured we’d work with them. I first showed Connie how to do a bladder meridian sweep on Tyra. As I suspected, we discovered that she has tension in her shoulder joint. She released here and in a few other places. I next did human leg and horse hoof circles and followed this with carrot stretches. We then went into the Playground of Higher Learning, and here we made the biggest discovery. Tyra has a hard time turning to the right. It’s not that she’s being obstinate – she’s just put on the neural parking brakes. Now I would not have been aware of this if I wasn’t working with Connie on walking with the horse.

We next moved on to working with Raudi, tying her up at the hitching post so she could not eat. Connie began doing the sweep, and Raudi had several release-related responses. She pawed the ground, tossed her head, evaded Connie’s hand and licked and chewed. What this all meant was that, yes, she has considerable tension in her neck and shoulders.

We did carrot stretches and some agility work with Raudi – she was a lot happier about this. And Connie became more adept at walking a horse, which is no easy task.

I now must figure out how to further release the tension that both Raudi and Tyra are holding in their bodies. After Connie left I chastised myself for not being a better horse person, and not having addressed these issues a while back. But then I got to thinking that I’ve been making progress in my thinking. Today’s responses from both were not at all an indication that they’re bad ponies; but rather, that they are in pain. And though I don’t know yet how I am going to resolve these issues I feel like I’m on my way. I also am now telling myself that they would be far worse off if I hadn’t been doing the work that I’ve been doing with them.

Next: 323. 11/19/18: Hindsight