Ditto was my first horse. I bought him from a training/riding facility in Los Angeles when I was 42 years old. A long wait for someone who has loved horses since she could put together the sentence: “I want a horse.” No opportunity presented itself for me to have a horse or even take riding lessons when I was a child, though I did get to occasionally sit on my grandparents’ working draft horses while they chomped hay in the barn.
My daughter Jenny was born when I was 39 years old. A “high risk” birth that culminated in a diagnosis of possible severe developmental disability. This was devastation and fear of the future such as I had never known. I couldn’t get my bearings, and I decided to take horse back riding lessons as therapy for me in between the numerous therapy appointments for my daughter. I signed on at a local hunter jumper training barn, and a new chapter of my love of horses began.
I nervously trotted through my lessons on wonderful “school horses” (most of whom should be awarded medals of valor for what they put up with from unskilled and often misinformed students) and a year or so later one of the Thoroughbreds owned by the training stable was up for sale. My trainer suggested I buy him. Though Ditto was far better trained and experienced than I was, we had a great initial ride together, and I think it was love at first canter!
I bought Ditto and the new chapter began. Ditto was a high strung, delicately built Thoroughbred with a kind but skittish disposition. I’m a bit skittish myself so we were a perfect match emotionally if not so perfect for performance! People would comment: “Why not choose a calm, more seasoned Quarter Horse? Wouldn’t that better suit you and help you get over some of your riding anxieties?” I ignored this advice as I was too much in love with this spirited horse, who sometimes was downright silly with his worries….as am I.
So….Jenny’s birth and horses: I often cried about Jenny. Wondering about her future, who would protect her when I was no longer here? How would she be received in the world? What could I do to give her a life? And it seemed a lot of this crying would occur in the car on the way home from my riding lessons or while just visiting Ditto and the other horses in the barn. What was that about? I asked a wise person and she told me: “It’s because horses and Jenny are both about your heart.”
I think for many of us who are “into” horses, it is about our hearts. Many animals are beautiful. But for us there is something so big and yet so delicately ephemeral about these creatures who challenge and enchant us simultaneously. There’s just no explaining it to those who don’t “have the bug.” A mother, who was at the training barn while her 11 year old daughter took riding lessons, told me she asked her daughter to explain the attraction to horses: her daughter replied, sticking her nose in her horses’ neck: “I just love the way they smell.” Maybe that’s it. It clearly defies definition or explanation. My daughter and my horses bring me much joy, but as with all things of the heart, they can also make me cry. They live large in my heart.