Ahh, the end of January. The longest month of the year. I don’t know why it feels that way, but it seems hard to believe it’s only 31 days long.

What begins with such hope and promise somehow dissolves into a melancholy of gray that matches the pallor of the sky. What happens? Where does the energy of all those resolutions go?

“Umfph,” I grunt as I heave the overloaded wheelbarrow forward out of the divot it created sitting in the soft ground.

Don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall.

The mantra plays on repeat in my head as I pray for traction in the slick mud the consistency of something between snot and clay.

This time of year is not for the faint of heart owning outdoor animals. Fall’s glorious color is gone, crushed on the ground in drifts of leaves that like to startle the horses when the (seemingly ever present) wind kicks them up in a gust, as if they wish to return to their original lofty places. The rain is now settling in. Cold, damp, all the way to the bone.
The blankets go on the horses one day, off the next and back on a day later. Everything becomes hopelessly dirty, whether it’s wet or dry that day. The floorboard of the car wafts odors that are better left outside, but cling to the boots no matter how much they are scraped off.

No way around it, horse care (or any animal that requires being outside) this time of year becomes hard.

And what a gift it is to “have to” care for the animals.

“There’s too many cooks in the kitchen!” The dogs scrambled back into the living room, achieving my goal, much to my surprise.
It was out of exasperation, and desperation, that I had yelled the above phrase. Not one of my proudest moments, and yet at the same time a stroke of genius, or luck. What’s the difference at that point?

The trouble was that the back door of the house was through the kitchen. The very tiny galley style kitchen, where there was no room for dogs underfoot, let alone, two people trying to make dinner. So “out” didn’t work, that was the signal to go to the back door. I didn’t want them at the back door, I wanted them out of the kitchen.

Still stunned at the effectiveness of ‘too many cooks,’ I continued working on the meal. From that point forward, “Too many cooks” became the request to the dogs to remove themselves from the kitchen, and “out” could still remain the clear cue to go outside.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

I’m feeling a bit melancholic lately. The time change never sits well with me, and I can feel the sun weakening even as it has been shining so much lately. It’s been a California fall, and I’m not complaining one bit about that (it’s also kept my rain anxiety away, which is a relief at the moment).

And as I watch the leaves scatter in the wind that seems increasingly cooler by the day, I’m reminded that nothing blooms forever. Why we get it in our heads that we can be otherwise, I don’t know, but it’s not helpful.

Everything has it’s season (turn, turn, turn), and we would do well to embrace that for ourselves in whatever way feels good. Our animals do it naturally, changing their habits with the seasons.

The most important thing I’ve learned from all of the animals is understanding how to energetically be in my own center.

It’s easy to wander through life being buffeted by all of the forces around us. The dog is barking excessively. The person that cuts us off in traffic. The weather. Work is asking for more than is humanly possibly by one person (and barely paying one person’s salary). The political scene is swinging wildly. There’s more on the to do list than could be accomplished in fifty life times.

The list goes on and on and on. And if we don’t know where our energy is at any given time, we’re going to be tossed around life a leaf in the storm.

The animals have taught me that it’s of utmost importance to know firstly where my energy is.

So many times our reaction to our pet’s behavior is instantaneous, without thought.

The dog barks, we tell them to shush.

They pull on the leash, we immediately pull back.

Our horse paws impatiently and we scold them.

The cat claws the furniture, we yell at them.

These responses aren’t inherently wrong - but without thought, they are often a response because we are uncomfortable with our pet’s behavior. The dog is barking for the fiftieth time in an hour and we’re just over it.

The problem is that when our response is unconscious and comes from a place of our discomfort with our pet’s behavior then our pet senses that discomfort. Unfortunately it often gets translated to “my human is uncomfortable, so I should do the thing more to make it go away,” which is generally the exact opposite of what we want! Oops!

“Now don’t you feel better?” I know his energy, whether there are words or not.

Being chastised by your horse is always a dose of humble pie. It’s been a long day, and I’m finally working through some things that have been weighing on me for a very long time. As I am settling in to sleep running my energy as I always do, Storm’s energy comes in. “Now don’t you feel better?”

Our animals know whenever we have something ‘going on.’ It doesn’t matter what it is, but they are very aware when something weighs on us, is eating at us, or in general just ain’t right. There’s nothing that we can hide from them.

The challenge is that sometimes they don’t understand what exactly it is, and often they don’t know how to support us in that moment, so they do the best they can with whatever information they have. And that can result in behavioral issues that add just One. More. Thing. to our already overloaded plate.

The weather has finally cooled to a point where the windows can be open again.

 I'm grateful for clear skies and some sunshine after 2 weeks of solid gray and rain. (Apparently a precipitation record at the airport 🙄) While meditating this morning, a bird chattered just outside the window.  When I tuned in, the message that came through is “this is what we’re doing now.”

It’s been a raw almost weeks since Helene changed the environment of the mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia and beyond.

This is what we’re doing now.

You know how it goes: you set a goal, start working on it in earnest, make a little progress, and then BAM all the sudden things get hard, and you quit, discouraged, frustrated and resentful of yet again failing.

There is not anything that I have found that doesn’t follow this trajectory.

The difference is when you know The Hump is coming, you can prepare for it.

If worked on your goal and got 1% better every day, you would be 37% better by the end of the year.

I suppose I haven’t formally assessed any of my goals, but I have a sneaking suspicion I’m not 37% better than I was a year ago on most of my goals.

James Clear talks about this in his book Atomic Habits. What struck me about this concept is so often we want to be AT our goal and spend most of our time thinking about how we’re not there yet.

It’s so easy to fall into this trap with our pets. We have a dream in mind, the reason we decided to get a pet in the first place - be it doing agility or fancy tricks with the dog, riding peacefully down the wooded trail with the horse, or curled up on the couch with the cat. And somehow the distance between where we are and that dream never seems to change.

I’ve never been a rule follower. Well, that’s not entirely true. I don’t like to follow rules that don’t seem to make sense to me. If you don’t give me a good reason why I should do something, then I’m not all that interested in doing it.

My smart watch tracks my sleep, and sometimes I get annoyed at it because it likes to give me a lower score because I slept “too long” according to whatever rules it follows. 🙄 That’s stupid. Some nights I need a lot of sleep. It’s just the rules that my body likes to follow. I don’t make those rules, but I sure do follow them!

I’ve learned that the same thing applies to pet relationships. There really aren’t any rules. Sure, a lot of people will try to tell you that it’s got to be done this way or that way or some way, but if you ask them, most of those people don’t even know why they are following those rules to begin with!

What is energy?

What does it mean to put your energy into your feet? Or to not have your energy in your body?

These questions can feel vague and impossible to wrap your head around, until you get it. And once you know, you know.

Everything is made up of energy. Think about people - there are some people that you would say have a calming presence. Or are exciting to be around. Or someone walks in the room and it feels lighter.

I sat down to write this blog post, and there were no words coming, so I laid down to meditate.

By now, I’ve learned enough to know that the best way to find answers is by getting quiet (not that I employ that technique often enough, but at least I know it).

My thoughts were bouncing all over the place, and I was shown/felt a moth being caught in a spider’s web. Not one of the pretty neat flat webs, but one of those messy webs in a corner and strung all over the place in all directions.

Stuck, fluttering, trapped.

And then I had the sensation of simply stepping out of the web. As uncomplicated as that. Just stepping out of the entrapment.

That’s the difference between the humans, and the rest of the universe. We have free will.

The question I get the most is “Please make my pet do/not do ___”

The blank can be filled with anything: stop barking, stop jumping, quit whining, not destroy ____ (another fill in the blank), “behave” (whatever that means), etc, etc, etc.

The trouble is I can’t do that.

When you spend as many hours as I do working the horses on the long lines, it leaves you with a lot of time to think.

There are 168 hours in a week.

If you train with your pet for only one hour per week, that leaves 167 other hours that they are doing whatever it is that they do.

Playing

Sleeping

Running

Romping

Being Curious

And generally being a pet which does not involve automatically conforming to the human world.

If you are only going to spend one hour per week working with your pet, that one hour had better be of the highest quality possible to make up for the other 167 hours.

My horse, Storm, and I struggled over the years, too. Storm is 17.3 hands, which means about 6 feet tall at the shoulder. He is one-quarter Shire, one-quarter Thoroughbred, and half Percheron horse. This means he’s ¾ draft horse, with a quarter of speedy-spice, and all large and in charge. I wasn’t looking for a boss horse when I bought him, I was told the ponies pushed him around. So much for that story. He walked into my life and took over every herd he has ever been with from day one.

Our relationship was rocky from the start. He was BIG and had a habit of spooking and bolting when he didn’t like something. He is huge, and was lightning fast, and no match for wee little me. His behavior scared me. I was hoping I’d get a nice quiet laid back sweet draft horse, and what I had on my hands was 2000 pounds of dynamite with a short fuse. Not a great blend for an inexperienced horse owner.

But if there’s one thing I am, it’s stubborn, and I don’t give up easily, despite the fact that our relationship probably had more tears back then than anything else. We were stuck in this cycle of him getting scared, which would make me scared, which would make him more scared. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The Mama bird can’t flap the baby bird’s wings.

I’ve said this before, but this point got driven home again for me (again) in my lesson with Kirsten Nelsen this past weekend.

As it turned out, we started to work with B first, since she needs lots of support right now to start figuring out the ‘language’ of better movement. She’s making progress in leaps and bounds even though we are still doing work on the ground (the amount you can accomplish on the ground with a horse is probably a topic for another day).

It was HOT that morning, and walking with B was taking a toll on me as much as anything. We stopped to take a break, and realized we didn’t have a whole lot of time left in our hour together. Instead of saddling up Storm, Kristen suggested that we explore the same exercise of hand walking with Storm.

She knew his riding was going well, and wasn’t all that concerned about his progress. What we discovered was that without the support of me riding, he was still struggling a little bit to find his balance and efficient movement.

He wasn’t owning it.

Today’s blog post is brought to you by two broken muck forks.

If you want to ruin a horse person’s day, break the muck fork.

For real, there isn’t much that’s worse than a broken muck fork.

And now I’ve got two. The first one lost a tine months ago, so I ordered a second one. Two days ago, the second one broke across the top. If I keep using it, it will be wobbly, and will likely just snap in half at the first stress in bumpy ground (which is pretty much all I’ve got).

Grab the one with the missing tine, and keep working.

Except I looked down and noticed it was missing a second tine! As if one wasn’t bad enough, now there’s TWO giant gaps in the fork.

An animal communicator can be a powerful aly in your resource list for supporting your pet, and you, together. So when is a good time to work with them?

Ideally, when you and your pet begin your relationship. So the next best day is today!

The benefit to establishing a relationship with an animal communicator when nothing is going “wrong” with your pet is that it helps to establish a baseline. The animal communicator gets to know your pet, and you, and learns about what your every day “normal” life is like.

Life lately as been, well, life-ing. It’s finally a “normal” Monday for the first time in two weeks. Not that it has been bad, but it’s been busy. And that’s been challenging.

There’s been fence to put up, my parents came to town, and we took a quick getaway to the beach. So much packed into such a short amount of time, that a lot of other things have had to slide. The horses haven’t been worked in about 2 weeks between the weather and the schedule, and the cats are irritated that they haven’t gotten their usual snuggle time. Specter has been reminding me that I haven’t been taking care of myself as well as I could (nothing like your pet to insult your efforts when you thought you were at least doing ok at something).

Here’s the deal. There will always be bumpy roads.