Horseplay

yes, this is an entry about horses

I think my next book is going to be a horse one. I have been making progress on the book due Sept 1. Basically, every morning, Ori leaves with my phone and the plug for our wifi router, and then I get to work. It’s extremely effective. I am able to think when I don’t have the internet bumbling around in my brain. I have been experimenting with leaving my phone at home, more generally, and I also got rid of some apps, including TikTok, for now. It’s not permanent, of course: when I go back into book promo mode, or simply turn in this draft, I will probably need to download everything all over again. But for now, it’s blissfully quiet. This week alone I’ve written probably 20,000 new words. If you’re having trouble with your book, maybe quitting the internet for a bit will help you too. Try it and tell me how it goes?

The last six months or so, I’ve been riding at a barn that does a different discipline than my background. It’s been a huge learning curve, more than I expected. I’m not entirely sure I’m capable of making my body do different things on a horse, as much as I try. The jumping is incredible: I absolutely love jumping, learning to do that stuff again—I haven’t jumped since I was a kid, to feel like I am able to fly a little in the saddle. But I am also dealing with some health things: my feet tingle and go numb when I stand in the stirrups too long. I am having trouble finding a saddle that fits me in this discipline. Because I had covid again, I am struggling with my heart rate—I have POTS/dysautonomia, from the first time I had covid, and getting it again means my heart rate is suddenly very high. I feel a bit like the princess and the pea. In dressage, my “home” discipline, I am the sort of person who will ride in any kind of saddle, any kind of horse. But the jumping is new, in a variety of different ways. It’s so difficult. I want to do better, and I’m learning. But progress is so slow. I felt like I used to be the sort of person who figured things out quickly on a horse; it felt intuitive, or became intuitive since I spent so many thousands of hours on horses, starting as a child. Now I am asking too many questions, trying to keep up: does my leg go here or here? How do I grip with my lower calf? Where does my leg go when I go over the jump? How can I stand in the stirrups more effectively? How can I see the distance? In jumping, you have to be able to figure out when to ask your horse to leave the ground. Lots of horses make this determination on their own, but if they don’t know when or where the next jump is, you have to let them know what they’re doing. Part of you is trusting a 1200 lb creature, and the other part of you is directing them. I suppose it’s the same in dressage. I just don’t know how to ask, here. I am still learning how to ask.

Minus a week spent at home with covid, it’s been great to hang around with Zidane, the horse I’ve been riding lately. I’m so grateful to be able to afford to ride for now. He is a hunter, but recently we’ve broken out a few dressage moves, in part because the barn had a little dressage Olympics, where people learned the tests and then performed them. I forgot how much I missed dressage. I do not have to think when I’m in a dressage saddle. I know I have to make my lower leg quieter, to get stronger, but I can do a lot of things without thinking in dressage. It’s just about shifting your body, asking quietly, a thousand years of subtlety. The joke, typically, is that watching dressage is like watching paint dry. It’s probably true. Bad dressage is like watching paint dry, but there is a certain poetry in movement, in subtlety.

And he seems to like the dressage stuff: he’s almost 22, kind of an old man these days. We do a lot of long walking warm-ups, because I think it helps both of us. I was not ready yet for the dressage test itself: I was still recovering from covid. But I got to do a little bit of it, to remember what that’s like. And it’s so cool to watch the hunter/jumper folks do both hunters and dressage. There is such an elegance in the hunters, in equitation, that feels related to dressage, like a cousin to the type of riding with which I am most familiar. These are the new disciplines I’m trying to learn—to be more light in the saddle, to see the distance to the jump and plan for it (incredibly difficult for me, with my depth perception issues), to learn how to make things look effortless in the air.

The book is the book. I am working on it every day, trying to move it a little closer to the finish. This morning I sent it to Ori, to see what he thinks about it. Riding is like this: you practice over and over the same movements, for decades. The work is iterative, repetitive. It’s hard, the book: I am never sure where it ends, not exactly. I have to make a choice, to cut off the edges, make it more book-shaped. But it’s getting there.