Blurred Vision

Maintaining focus is one of the most important aspects of riding...and living. Distractions abound.

Recently a spring time cough has gone through several of our horses. I know that it is a reaction to pollen and the spores that become active as the ground warms up. I know that for some horses it can lead to a secondary infection that must be treated.

I also know that it comes every single year, sometimes worse than others, but never with any long term impact on the health of any horse. Yet it still hits me hard to hear a horse cough. I will never understand how after all of these years I am shocked every single spring at how green everything becomes. How could my mind not accurately remember this? The same way that part of my mind can not accurately remember that the cough comes, and it goes.

Still it wears on me.

Exhaustion comes with each changing of the clock. In the winter I generally wake up between two and three am. In the spring that means that I am waking up between three and four am. And when I wake up at four am there is not sufficient time to do the things that need to be done each morning without rushing. Few things are more exhausting than rushing. It does not help that in addition to being Deputy prosecutor for Isle of Wight county I am serving as a special prosecutor in a neighboring jurisdiction. Every year, as is happening now, I fall very far behind on answering emails and making blog posts. Eventually things start to fall together and by summer I have gotten back on top of things.

Still it wears on me.

More and more I find my self wondering if I have finally gotten this program on sound enough ground to turn it over to someone else, or to several others jointly, to run without me. The lure of being responsible for only a handful of horses and no other people is strong. To get up on a Saturday morning and to only have to be concerned with the tacking of my horse and my own safety in the saddle is a thought that sometimes actually makes me giddy. I realize that when it is all boiled away, the success of the program depends on me--not because of any talent or virtue that I have but simply because there is no one else on the scene who is in a position to give up everything else in their lives to do the things that keep us together. I also recognize that my big girls are not yet old enough to exert the kind of leadership by benign neglect that is necessary to maintain harmony among such a diverse group of program participants.

But still it wears on me.

But then I recognize that we have had a tremendous number of successes recently with which I have had to do nearly nothing--great teamwork on a monstrously successful fund raiser,garden going in, a significant number of horses trained well enough to be ridden in the woods, new horses being picked up and delivered completely without me having to do anything to get it done, and Jen and Elise are taking care of nearly all of the morning chores. And our program is growing. We have more participants than we have ever had. Our facebook group page grows weekly and through our program scores of people are introduced to nearly extinct strains of Colonial Spanish horses.

And these things restore me