More about "A story about horses."

            I have now shared two parts of "A story about horses," and I also want to share a little background about this story.
            This story is as true as I can make it. Memory, of course, is a funny thing. Some things I remember very clearly, with images and feelings and scents and sounds. Other things, I only remember because of how they made me feel, but I have lost the details. The memories I have recorded in "A story about horses" are particularly clear ones. They are what I think of as defining points in my childhood relationship with the horses I knew.
            It seems like every child wants a horse. I was the lucky person at my school who had a horse, but I was not allowed to ride most of the time. I was also not taught other basic things about how training horses works, but I was freely allowed to spend time around the horses. So I learned many things by figuring them out on my own. I trusted in the horses to be kind to me, and I loved them with all my heart. Between these things, I grew up comfortable around these animals, mostly unconscious of my small stature compared to theirs.
            And when I think about it, I am still not very large compared to a horse. I am a small person. I only weigh a hundred pounds after a big meal. But one of the magical things about working with horses is that it doesn't really matter how big you are, because what you use to handle and train a horse is your brain. My body may be tiny, my muscles may be unkind to me, but my brain is still working most of the time. The things I did not learn when I was younger? It doesn't really matter that I didn't know them. I am learning them now. And I feel better when I am able to use my brain to communicate with a horse's brain. The ways I have to move my body to do that are good for me. My body feels better when I have spent an hour ignoring my cramped muscles and instead thinking about presenting myself to the horse in the way that will tell the horse how I want them to move.