What started out with a fifty four pound weight loss, a plan to adopt one blm mare to breed to a blm donkey to produce a mule that would be able to perhaps trot comfortably enough for me to ride it alone in the woods, thinking that that was all my spine could safely take, has grown over the years to one of the world's largest Spanish mustang preservation and natural horsemanship programs.
I never imagined this. I did not plan for this. We are moving into a new phase in which we will grow much bigger. On July 1, I will give the "business" to our nonprofit organization, Gwaltney Frontier Farm, Inc. I chair the board and am Executive Director. I will lease the horses, the land and my tack to our non profit. Tom Crockett is guiding us through this process. His help has been invaluable.
I only have one criterion for those who want to participate in leading this organization--that they understand and care about what we are doing. Tom understands and cares.
It will be good change. No one hates change more than I do. I do not even like for people to get new hair styles and have nearly never seen anyone look better from changing their hair. This will be one of those less than 2% of the time events when change actually results in improvement.
Why am I optimistic? Because I know more about what will happen than does anyone else. I would love to see programs like ours become the wave of the future, but wave or not, we are about to be a much bigger ripple in the pond than before. I will spend more time training, writing, speaking, and promoting and less time watering animals.
Today we reached 300 members on our little Facebook group page. That is about three times the number of wild Corollas in existence. We have a lot of work to do.
And we will get it done.
From a year and a month or so of involvement, the difference is appreciable and startling, both in myself, my girls, and the program.
ReplyDeleteI do not understand much of the business side of what goes on, nor do I particularly feel the need to, Quite a few very talented, dedicated, wonderful people do, and that is enough. What I do understand is that the horses are better trained, healthier, and happier this year, and that the hogs got watered yesterday.
When I was asked a few months back to write an article for the HOA winter newsletter, I was very flattered to be asked and included among the folks that have been caring for and preserving the Colonial Spanish Horse for years and years, and it sort of spurred me to take a harder look around, to take a deeper view of all of the strains, and the people who keep them. There is a fire burning there, it is a small one, but it burns brightly, and with the ferocity of the sun. (Best horse name ever..Dance Inside the Sun)
or maybe a better analogy is in the music of Chris Ledoux, when he sang, "He's still there, you just can't see him from the road." It is well beyond the time now, when folks must be able to see us from the road. Not in the sense of the hyper commercialized Horse World (tm), but in the sense of welcoming people who are fed up with the complexity of modern life..folks, they are out there by the millions, there is a very very strong current of people between extremes, politically, socially, financially..pick a statistic...people are searching for simplicity, for real food, for less noise signifying nothing. People are searching for the earth, there is a resounding movement of everyday people who simply want to live and be left alone, to find what peace they can, and there is not a better place to start than right here. Sure, our focus is on the horses, but you factor in the goats, pigs, chickens, smokehouse and garden, the bits of history that one soaks up by asking a ten or twelve year old girl why One Bull is named One Bull..or asking me why Snow on Her is Snow on Her. (I will talk your ear off.) These are skills and ideas that people are craving..These great little horses are absolutely ideal for small homestead families, and families with growing children, and neighbors with growing children who could benefit enormously from their presence. In my digital wanderings, I can see it happening too..support for wild horses is growing, I see more and more folks with a positive idea of what mustangs really are...more and more people following the wild model of horse care, more barefoot horses...I am encouraged.
I opined awhile back on my facebook wall that I should start a college of practical arts...gardening, canning, preserving foods, using renewable energy, stockmanship, low impact sustainable agriculture..basically all those things that folks can learn for themselves if they can break out of cable tv and the wildly oscillating treamill of life to take the time to learn...The response that I got was posititvely overwhelming..and I was just flapping my gums.
It is out there, they are coming, we just need to keep the bait fresh, and the gate open.
I am inordinately pleased, and proud to be a apart of something so important that has such a tangible positive influence on so many people...two legged and four legged. -Lloyd