My Knight
Photo credit Kayleigh Guthrie www.rawphotographyimages.com
This week I’m excited to bring you an excerpt from my book! Keep your eye out, it will be released very soon!
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.
One day he (again) spooked, right outside the barn, where he had been a million times. And there was nothing there that he should have spooked at. I broke down, crying, and looked at him and yelled, “YOU’RE scaring me! It’s YOU I’m afraid of! Nothing here will hurt us, or ever will, but you are making me afraid.”
All the air rushed out of my lungs and I felt like I’d been deflated like a balloon. He stood a few feet away looking at me, and licked and chewed, and dropped his head a bit. All the fight was gone out of both of us, with just that statement hanging in the air.
It was at that moment that we gained an understanding of each other. Through my tears I realized that we were both causing each other so much pain. I didn’t blame him for not wanting to be around me if I was afraid. Horses are herd animals, and are innately going to want to get away from that kind of energy - to them those situations are life or death, and they’ll do everything in their power to flee from the danger that my energy was screaming about.
But I just couldn’t manage my own fear levels when he got scared. He went from 17 hands high to what felt like 20 (we even called him the giraffe when it happened because it was so normal…), towering over me and capable of moving faster than I could think to react.
As my tears slowed, I realized what I needed was a Knight. After all, the Percheron breed is from an area of France that was once called Perch, and they were bred to carry the knights into battle. Capable of not only carrying a knight in heavy armor, they were also brave, but spirited. I needed a knight, not a bunny rabbit. I shared all of this, letting it pour out of my heart, knowing that he would understand somehow.
From that day forward, we had many conversations about what it looks like to be a knight. How knights behave, and what they do. That was the beginning of a major shift in our relationship that started to build the trust we had together. I had lots of work to do on myself, but together we shifted our perspective so that we could support each other, instead of spinning off each other’s bad energy.
