To Share the Experience

As I laid in the arena, watching Jake and Dutchess nap in the sunlight, I stopped to think about the journey I had taken with this horse. I once described it to someone as a roller coaster, it had its ups and downs, and its moments of breath taking fun and the stomach dropping defeat as it spirals faster than you want it to control. As of yet no person has brought me to such extreme emotions as this horse had.

Good morning Beautiful

It was hard to believe that this horse had come from the poorly trained, crazy and unobservant creature, to the one that choose to nap by me instead of with his equine friend. Now to some, this may not be much of an accomplishment. Through the years he had been raised a pastured horse, always preferring his equine company to human, he got up from laying down if anyone got near and always walked away to lay down and roll. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy human company, he was curious enough that he would come over and see what you were doing, check out and items you may have, and may try and grab a drink from your soda. Yet it always came down to the end result, if it was a human or an equine he would always choose the equine. Now I don't expect any horse to choose me over their horse friends. Jake still would prefer to be with his horse friends, but the difference is how he acts around me. The way he perks up when he sees me come into view, how he raises his head with ears forward, how he will leave his friends to walk all the way across the arena to join me, the nickers that he occasionally gives when my car rolls into the stables. Now some people say its food, you feed grain when your there. Well honestly I feed grain at the end of the day, so I'm not too sure how he associates my car to his grain when there is  2-4 hour gap in between. I may be looking into it more than I should, but for the first time in the 8+ years I have owned him I can say that he does enjoy my company. Love is a relative subject when you think of horses to humans. I don't think Jake loves me or that he misses me when I am gone. But it makes me happy to know that he enjoys being around me.

As the elation of my realization of this change sunk in I began to think, we really have a story here. Our partnership hasn't been easy, there have been more fights than accomplishments and I can say that I have been in situations where I could have died on this horse a few times. I am going to be honest, I was a very angry person for a lot of my life and the only being that saw it was Jake, some of it isn't pretty but its time that I have come clean and look towards a new beginning. Are accomplishments are outweighing our fights, and I am no longer the rider that I was. This isn't supposed to be a magical tale of love and winning in the end, its about my change as a person and the change that was brought by a stubborn crazy horse. A horse that my dad got for $25, and a horse that I didn't want.