The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.

Some of us, anyway, Madeleine L'Engle...some of us.

Not me, evidently.

Hee hee hee. I was searching for an image to represent pain. Pain au chocolat. The sort of pain you get when you've eaten too many Cadbury's Creme Eggs?

Mariana by Millais

My pain - lower back. My hip joints were sore after a difficult lesson on Poppy De La Mare last week. Instead of learning through pain, I did my usual thing. Kept going. The pain has been migrating around my pelvis and lower back for a few days now. The pain is...painful pain.

This might be noble - to be dogged, resolute -  but it can also be idiotic.

Today, I had another lesson on Poppy De La Mare. She wouldn't go. For me. She would go for Tessa, whose body wasn't distorted and stiffened in a sub-conscious effort to protect it from further damage.

Half way through, I couldn't carry on.

Have I learned THIS TIME?

I doubt it.

Faeries, come take me out of this dull world, For I would ride with you upon the wind,

Run on the top of the dishevelled tide, And dance upon the mountains like a flame.

W.B. Yeats from The Land of Heart's Desire

Oh, how I love to let his words wash over me. I think if ever I were granted the wish to write like another, I would choose W.B.Yeats.

Today, June 22nd. The day after the summer solstice. Summer? I had planned a sunshine picnic. Instead, we have rain and wind. Alfie, Ripple, Serena and I were blown across the forest.

www.choctawcowboy.com

It was completely exhilarating.

I was going to say, we went out when most sane and sensible people stayed inside, wrapped up against the elements.

On second thoughts, WE are the sane ones!

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Yes, Bob Dylan. It may well be. But what is the question?

Here's one. Why am I at home in my office so early in the morning instead of out and about exercising one of my horses?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind! And also, I value my own personal safety, sometimes.

It is INCREDIBLY windy today. The horses are high as kites, galloping round the fields.

Wind-blown horse by Debbie Lincoln

It's not very funny riding a horse who is as high as a kite and wanting to gallop round the fields when you need her to be sensible in traffic...

So here I am at my desk.

It's less fun than riding.

But safer.

Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway.

Whoohoo! I was looking for a quote about courage, to apply to my riding today and look what John Wayne once said!

I wasn't actually scared to death. I was just feeling like a bit of a wimp. It was very windy and cold and all the horses were galloping round and round the fields - probably to keep warm.

My early morning plan of a nice peaceful ride on Poppy didn't look as though it was going to happen. Peaceful? You're joking! 

I sat there at breakfast and persuaded myself it would be foolhardy to take her out on the forest in these conditions. Then I imagined what the rest of my day would be like if I DIDN'T...

(I think that picture is of grasping nettles)

So I DID...

Poppy only fly-bucked twice

...and only threatened to bolt once but she pulled up when asked (eventually)

We both had fun! I feel good.

RESULT!

You'll never walk alone...

I do believe Alfie might be a Liverpool fan.

I am, for sure, although I hardly dare to mention that at the moment after the woeful season we've just had and the sacking of King Kenny. Sob.

I've been a Liverpool fan ever since, as an impressionable young thing, I fell in love with Steve Heighway. (He had such a lovely Sundance Kid moustache and seemed so much more accessible than Robert Redford)

For that reason, I went to Liverpool University. And here's you thinking it was because the English and Philosophy Joint Honours course was academically outstanding. It might have been - in fact, it WAS - but that's not why I went there.

Anyway - back to Alfie. Lately, he's been very nervous out on the road. Jumpy. Spooky. Sometimes scary. I've been keeping very calm about it all because the very worst thing for him would be to feel that I was nervous.

Tessa suggested I sing a song as I was going along and that the calming vibes would transmit themselves through to Alfie. I think she might have meant sing a song in my head.

However...

You'll Never Walk Alone about fifty times over seemed to do the trick.

I'm not quite sure what the good residents of High Hurstwood thought as we went by.

They didn't say. They just looked.

It's spring! We are so excited, we wet our plants.

Love that sign! (Well, apart from the missing punctuation. Don't get me started...)

Is it spring? Maybe.

This morning, I had the most beautiful sunny ride out with Poppy, who had spring in her hooves. She was dancing! The trees are all in bud, the grass is coming through that freshest green of all greens, the hedgerows are bejewelled with primroses and wild daffodils.

It was truly sublime.

When I turned Poppy out into her field, I exchanged her winter rug for a lightweight one. This might be a fatal error. If tomorrow is blowing a gale, freezing, sleeting or snowing...

BLAME ME!

If everything's under control, you're going too slow.

...said Mario Andretti.

My very first quote from a Formula One racing driver. (I was going to say 'deceased' because it seems to me that many from his era are - but he's very much alive. Sorry, Mario.)

There's a picture to encourage a whole new readership to my blog - and possibly turn away many others. You win some, you lose some.

Sorry, petrolheads. This is nothing about accelerators, engines, races, pit stops, wet weather tyres (and now I've run out of Words To Do With Cars)

Writing - yes - my writing is often absolutely under too much control and isn't going too slowly, it's at a complete and utter standstill.

I was thinking about control this morning, in a different context. "Am I a control freak? AM I?" I was thinking to myself, as I was beaming with pleasure at the yard this morning.

I can stand beside Poppy, say 'lift up,' quietly, and she'll raise the nearest hoof ready for me to pick the stones and mud out.

I can go to the field gate, call out 'Alfie' and he'll come galloping out of nowhere (admittedly because he's after some grub, but still...)

Roly will sit when I ask him to (mostly!) Oh - he's a dog, not a horse. Now that WOULD be something...

It gives me such pleasure, all that.

I don't think it's because I'm a control freak. I think it's because I'm so delighted that I have such close relationships with these free-spirited animals that they're willing to listen to me as much as I'm willing to listen to their requests and anxieties.

I think it's the best feeling in the world.

If only my writing brain and I lived in such harmony...

By letting it go it all gets done.

 "The world is won by those who let it go...
but when you try and try, the world is beyond the winning."

 Do you know what? I wish I could keep those words firmly in my mind. I remember them sometimes but most times I don't and I struggle and I strive and get nowhere. Then I use up all my remaining energy telling myself I'm hopeless.

Struggle by Jaeson Ma

"Lao Tzu taught that all struggling, all striving is not only in vain but counterproductive. One should endeavour to do nothing (wu-wei). But what does this mean? It doesn't mean do nothing, but to discern and follow the natural forces -- to follow and shape the flow of events and not to pit oneself against the natural order of things." Adapted from Lao Tzu - Father of Taoism

Yesterday, with all the time in the world for creative writing (for once in my life), I battled and struggled to finish the last few paragraphs of a short story.

I did finish but it felt like pulling teeth, it took all day and I ended up exhausted and dissatified. It remains to be seen whether I think the writing is any good today...

This morning, I had a lesson on Alfie - part dressage, part jumping. Lao Tzu was with us, though he seems to favour riding oxen.

I didn't struggle. I didn't kick or whip Alfie just to get him to move from the spot. (That makes me sound Very Cruel - I'm not. I just have a very resistant horse!)

In our writing workshop, Meg Rosoff talked about throughness (discussed, too, in her very excellent blog) - the English translation of a German dressage term, Durchlässigkeit.

In our riding today, Alfie and I had great long moments of throughness - harmony and flow.

This was us in the summer, side-by-side, in perfect harmony. Today, that was how it was when I was riding him, my beautiful boy.


NOW - all I have to do is achieve the same feeling when I'm writing. Without struggling to achieve it...

Alfie wonders if I EVER listen to the lessons he tries to teach me.