Just A Pilgrim On This Road

A living mind should never be stagnant. My mind has not been stagnant, but for years it has been a slow moving stream, obstructed by false alarms, smoldering embers, brush fires and full blown conflagrations of flame and smoke.

At my age, perhaps the best way to deal with life is to build an intellectual firebreak and spend time reading and learning, as I did when I was young. For a time in my twenties I sought to read three books a week. I tore through subjects that interested me as if they were a seafood buffet--taking little time to chew in order to be able to swallow more. Between 1979 and 1987 I read everything worth reading about the history of the people of Tsennacomacah, and their relationship with the Jamestown experiment. From 1980 to the early 90's I inhaled books on Biblical critical analysis and scholarship. During the same period of time I read everything worth reading about both John and Bobby Kennedy. During the first decade of this century my focus was on absorbing the written word on natural horsemanship.

In recent years my reading has focused on the characters that contributed to Americana and Roots music. But that reading has not been as satisfying. That reading has come from some books, but mostly does from internet research.

Reading from the internet is not like going to a seafood buffet. It is like stopping by 7-11--sometimes I can find something that tastes good there, but the real reason that I stopped is to find something quickly.

Learning from the internet  allows one to accumulate a vast amount of information but is not conducive to reflection on that information. That matters--knowledge comes from the accumulation of information, but wisdom comes from reflection on that information.

Lately I have found myself drawn back to the road--to look for knowledge and wisdom as hard as I did when I was in my twenties. Perhaps this is merely a result of being nearly sixty years old and wanting to get things straight before I am gone.  More likely, the decline in our nation's morality and decency in recent years has caused more reflection.

At William & Mary my mind was on fire. My closest friend in my college years and best man in our wedding was Jim Comey. Jim was also a double major, mine was Government and Religion. I think that Jim's was Chemistry and Religion.  I was not used to talking to people smarter than me. At age 19 it was something that had very rarely  happened. Jim was smarter than me--not by much, but a touch smarter.

After you get a knife  sharp with a sharpening stone,  a steel hones it to an even sharper edge. Jim and I served as steels for each other's minds.

I want to regain that sharpness. Sanders, Niebur, King, Heschel, Amos, Luke and Malachi are starting to push their way back into the workings of my mind.

So now here I sit. I am on the Sabbath that I have about every 18 months to two years. I have the flu and as always I am enjoying it to no end.  It gives an opportunity for complete rest and reflection. The option of getting some work done does not exist. I am entirely too sick to even go feed up. So I can rest--and think.

 I am not too sick to doze off  as I compare Lincoln's Second Inaugural to Martin Luther King's letter from the Birmingham jail. And it is a wonderful thing to allow my mind to go back to being twenty two years old again.

When I was still young enough to be impressed by brilliance.

(The title of this post is from Steve Earle's great funeral song, "I'm Just a Pilgrim This Road.")

If You Must Anthropomorphize, Anthropomorphize Your Vet

After all, your vet actually is human. Your vet is not a guardian angel. Your vet has no magic power. Your vet is an incredibly hard working human trying their best to diagnose a creature who can no speak. Do not expect miracles.

Your horse can't talk, but your vet can. Did you listen to your vet when told that your horse is dangerously over weight, fed too much sugar and given nearly no exercise?

Do you even allow your vet to tell you those things?

When your laminitic horse, who weighs three hundred more than it should has to be put down, do you tell people that "the vet did not even try to save it!"

Has your failure to train and control your horse created an animal is a true danger to the vet?

 Do you get your horse care information from "people at the barn" or even worse, from social media for  opinions  on things like the effectiveness of diamataceous earth?

Where were you in the second grade when the teacher tried to explain the difference between facts and opinions?

Do you control your emotions while the vet is trying to make a difficult diagnosis or do you expect your vet to also be your grief counselor and emotional support?

I am a horse owner so it is my responsibility to stay up to date on medical issues involving my horses. The reality is, when I am confronted with a horse in serious distress and I am utterly at loss to know what the problem is, I have to recognize that there is a substantial chance that the horse is going to die. Of course, in such situations I immediately have the vet called out.

I hope for the best. I do not expect miracles. If one happens that is wonderful. If not, I would never dare complain that the vet, "did not do something." Over 1 in every twenty foals in a 2015 study died during the first 30 days of their lives.  Do you think that vets should have always been able to "do something" to prevent these deaths. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/nahms/equine/downloads/equine15/Equine15_is_Mortality.pdf

And keep this in mind--the vast majority of colic cases are idiopathic. (That means no one, not even your vet, can figure out what caused the colic attack).

Our vets are The Oaks in Smithfield, Virginia. They do spectacular wok and have never once disappointed me.

Perhaps that is because I only ask them to be vets, not gods.

The Blog Is Back

Regardless of how hard one tries there are some things that it is impossible to turn one's back on. For over a decade this blog has been the main way that people around the world have learned about the unique learning experiences in our program.  We simply have too much going on to put it all on face book.

Yesterday involved a lengthy conference call whose aim was to facilitate the breeding of more Corollas. I have yet to announce our exciting plans for "Choctaw Summer--2019." Our Ossabaw hog heritage pork program is bursting at the seams. Matt Thomas has turned the clearing of land into beautiful, functional performance art. Significant water retention programs have begun on the New Land. Construction of Native American structures to honor those who bred the little Spanish Horses into perhaps the best family and trial horses available on the planet today have begun. My Highland ox, Seven Leagues, has been promoted to Vice-President in Charge of Keeping My Blood Pressure Down and Reducing the Chance of Me Going Up Side Someone's Head. And a fine job he is doing in that role.

We will begin to offer vermicompost for sale and will be expanding our permaculture and soil and water conservation educational programs. We are looking to raise scores of heritage  turkeys in 2019 and expand our educational programs to include sheep shearing and wool and fiber  use. Our Americana and Roots music educational program, "Pasture #3" will have its first solo show on February 23, 7:00 pm at the Moonlight Hunt Club. We have a bumper crop of December born Colonial Spanish Goats and have had a beautiful pair of lambs born to our pure Hog Island Ram and a modern ewe (She will be replaced this spring with a Hog Island Ewe or two.)

Our most popular program innovation is Jackie Teeter's 8:00 am class on conditioning horse for significant mileage which will get us set quite well for our upcoming 60 Mile Ride. Renovations have begun on the Settlers Farm and countless hours have gone into repair of the path back to the tack shed.

Several tons of wood chips lay waiting  to be used in hugelkulture projects. In March we will have our first public educational program on developing hugelkulture mounds. We have several new, very enthusiastic participants in our program who not only want to learn to ride, they want to learn to do everything that it takes to make our program bigger and better.

We will begin planting trees from individual contributions marked for those purchases. Horse training continues to go well. Sally has become a wonderful trail horse and Long Knife will be in the woods soon. Washani is becoming a student favorite.

Beginning in April we will have a series of special programs every Saturday afternoon, weather permitting.

And we are getting our bills paid. That part is not easy but it is happening. I have been entirely too dilatorias in working on 501 (c) 3 status application. Always seems like too many other thing come up first before I get around to getting that done. However, flu is running rampant in our area and if I get laid out with the flu that will give me time  to get that paper work done.

So, you see, facebook is a wonderful tool for distribution of pictures and very short posts on what is going on at the horse lot. But to fully explain what is going on as we grow, this blog is a necessity.

Oh yea, one other thing, I am beginning to work up a testing instrument to be used to measure program participant's views on the proper role of leadership, control, use of power, horse on horse violence, fear of injury, fear of having a horse not "like" the participant, self assessment as a leader, projection of human traits onto horses and everything else that prevents a horse from feeling secure around humans. The results will be used to focus training on the emotional baggage that makes it very difficult to become a safe rider on a happy horse.

You see, it just won't all fit on facebook.

The Last Ride--Today This Blog Ends

Fifty seven years ago I began riding. Forty eight years ago I began playing music. Forty four years ago I began helping little ones perform on stage. Twenty years ago I began taming wild horses. About 15 years ago I began teaching riding and natural horsemanship. About twelve years ago we began our efforts to conserve and preserve the Corolla Spanish mustangs. A little over ten years ago I began writing this blog.

The blog has served its purpose and there are now over a decade of posts on a wide range of subjects that will remain around for anyone to search who might have an interest in doing so. The blog is ending because I have taken on a new, more important writing task-- I am a book with my youngest daughter Ashley Edwards that will focus on child abuse and sexual assault. (If you don't know about my daughter, please go to our website www.millswampindianhorses.com and look under the "news" tab for some great tv news stories and newspaper articles about her).

I am surprised at how little my basic views on preservation of the colonial spanish horse, the importance of using natural horsemanship to produce better people, the need for horses to be raised with natural horse care, the importance of understanding prey animals if one is to deal with severe trauma, that the highest and best use of a horse is to prevent suicide, that the future of our horses depends on our ability to attract novices to them and that efforts to impress the established horse world with the quality of our horses are doomed to fail, that perfectionism, ignorance, and anxiety are the three factors that hold people back from developing a close relationship with horses, that teaching kids to ride is of much less importance than inspiring kids to ride, that in every form of equine competition the real loser is the horse, that conserving soil and water is a sacred act, that being a riding instructor should be a calling , not a job and that, most importantly, whether dealing with people or horses the very first step in seeking to live an ethical life is to utterly ignore self interest.

The extraordinary consistency of those beliefs makes the continued wring of this blog a bit less important.  One can look to posts a decade ago and see how I feel now--and how I will feel ten years from now.

Bye.

The Soil Matters Most

Everything living must trace its existence to the soil. Everything dead returns to that soil. Conserving soil is a moral imperative and the creation of soil is a spiritual endeavor.

Modern farming practices destroy soil. About the only thing more damaging to the soil than modern farming is suburban lawn care.

We are going through one of  the wettest years at the horse lot that I have seen in my lifetime.  The weather has created a great deal of inconvenience to program participants. A few paddocks have succumbed to the mud. No one likes going into a muddy pen to catch horses. Some people do not understand why we do not move more horses into empty, drier pastures.

I understand the confusion, but the fact that the question exists at all shows that I have been an ineffective teacher. I have too many participants that do not understand that the land must heal. Under these weather conditions moving into a drier pen that has been without horses for months will simply create another muddy pen and erase the healing that is happening in those pens.

It takes a while for program participants to understand the importance of rolling round bales out in the pastures. To an uninformed mind the practice looks wasteful and messy. It took me quite a while to understand that rolling round bales was the best thing that we could do to increase the health and productivity of our pastures.

I suspect that for most humans happiness is dependent on creation--most particularly the creation of art. The art that I create is  soft, nearly fluffy, black soil loaded with earthworms, beetles, and millions of microscopic farm hands working to not merely conserve the soil--but to create it.