Playing For the Most Important Audience

There is an opportunity to learn everywhere for anyone that keeps their eyes open. One can learn a bit about riding by watching Steve Earle on stage. (That's right, Steve Earle the singer/song writer, not some new horse clinician that you have not heard of). When I watch him on stage sometimes (often) it seems like he sees some little itty, bitty audience off to the side somewhere. He looks at them hard. He plays for them hard. He gives them his best notes. The audience of living people there get a great show, but the itty bitty unseen people get his best sounds.

Of course, there is no itty bitty audience there. When he hits his best notes, he play for himself and to himself. All performances of every type are an invitation to others to judge that performance. That is how it is. Period.

But for things that give us, or should give us, pleasure the audience that matters and the judgment that matters must simply be that of ourselves. When we ride we have to impress that little itty bitty audience that is in each of us.

I knew a young rider that was learning at a spectacular rate. She was doing great. Still she was not enjoying herself as much as she deserved because she was too much of a perfectionist. She was putting on a wonderful performance but she feared that it was not perfect enough for the audience.

That is when it becomes imperative to play to the itty bitty audience in your head.

Yesterday I was shocked to encounter riders in an actual fox hunt (fancy suits, english saddles. slick groomed horses, hounds--the real thing) when I was riding in the woods. I was riding Tradewind.

Perhaps there would have been some logic to allow myself to wonder what such people thought to see me in muddy clothes riding a 12.2 Corolla Spanish mustang as they sat immaculately dressed on their 16 hand horses.

But I did not have such a thought.

The itty bitty audience that is in my head thinks that Tradewind is a fine horse and that same audience sort of likes the way I look when I am attired in a manner a bit rufffled.

(This picture is of four of my riders that impress all of their audiences)