‘That’s great! Hoorah! But we don’t care! We want to read
about Bryan !
And what happened to Dixie ?’
I know, I know. And I want to write about them all. But
there is a context that must be framed before I write about specific horses any
more. And here is the last corner of the frame. I promise. It might take me a
couple of posts to write about it but bear with me.
I wrote before how I look back at my life sometimes and
think what the heck. It does seem a little strange that these ‘coincidences’
just seemed to follow, one after the other, through the years. But rather than
pursue that perhaps interesting but ultimately irrelevant metaphysical road,
suffice to say that there was one more gigantic confluence of fate that put me irretrievably
on the horse path that I had been placed on.
In 1994 we moved from Massachusetts
to North Carolina .
We bought an old barn and started a nice little teaching/training business. In
time I met Barbara Stender, a dressage rider, trainer, and judge and we became
good friends. Barbara is a wonderful mix of credibility, with a lifetime of
USDF involvement and judging and education, and woowoo, with the highest TTouch and
Centered Riding ratings that you could achieve. She is smart and funny and a
super solid horse girl.
In the course of our friendship she frequently talked about
this Mary person. This Mary person had developed a type of equine body work
based on Feldenkrais principles. Just like Linda. Every year, Barbara traveled
to Calilfornia where Mary lived and practiced, to learn more about Mary’s
approach. In fact, Barbara had been Mary’s very first instructor, all those
years ago when Mary was a little girl. They went way back.
But I was working with Maryann Olsen, a massage therapist trained by Joanne Wilson herself. My horses loved her and
I could always measure their improvement after one of her visits. I was still
doing the LTJ stuff but you know me, Miss It’s Best When It Can Be
Measured, and having a Jack Meagher/Joanne Wilson trained protogee come to my
house was great. I had my labyrinth and
my Wand/Whip and incorporated lots of Tellington-Jones ground work in to my
day to day. My various rejects and rehabs and clients were doing great. We were
winning at the shows. I was happy and
satisfied with what I was doing and the results we were having were solid and
cool and measurable. So I didn’t listen all that closely when Barbara talked
about Mary’s work
