First let me say that Mum is in Sydney responding well to treatment and feeling much better, and that I will see her on Wednesday.

Still, though. One of the other great narrative arcs of 2013 is Jackson The Horse And Me: A Love Story. When I rode him on Sunday he was okay on the flat but so clearly uncomfortable over fences that we put him over a crossrail and let it go at that. Today when I turned up to ride, he was in his stall. Toni said he has a contusion injury on his suspensory ligament.

“They let us know when it’s time,” she said. “If he was in full work and this happened, you’d say, oh well. But he pretty much only works with you, so if he’s banging himself up under so little work…”

“I know,” I said, and I do: this whole past year I have been acutely aware that he’s a none-too-sound nineteen-year-old Thoroughbred. They’re going to see how he looks after a week of stall rest and hand walking, but he’s not going to be around forever.

Worse, much worse, is this news out of Ariad Pharmaceuticals. Beth, who is the reason I am at McIntosh Stables and whose horse Austin is the best horse who ever lived, was on the first human trial of Iclusig. The drug is keeping her alive. God forbid that the FDA withdraw it.

“The last four years have been a gift,” she said this morning. Damn straight. Every minute, every second of it.

I rode Olive, a dead ringer for the horse of my dreams. She is amazing.

“You have natural feel,” said my instructor, Avi, and I laughed my head off.

“Does it still count as natural if I’ve been working on it for years and years and years?”

I rode Jackson today. I’m trying to stay out of his face during warmup, so I trotted him in both directions on the buckle, reins looping down. I worked on my position instead of his: elbows in, shoulders back, hip angle open. Trying to make a square corner under the trees, I flexed my right ankle and sank into my seat.

Jacks lifted his back under me and came soft and round.

Not surprisingly, when we jumped I was tall in the saddle and he was forward and electric into my hand.

Toni and Colin came back from two solid months at HITS Thermal reinvigorated and with higher standards than ever. Christi and I have been riding with both of them quite a lot, and more is expected of us: faster, softer transitions, tighter turns, straighter and more precise approaches.

Luckily I spent the winter and spring riding Jackson (my Bella has gone back to her owners, I don’t want to talk about that) and we’ve built and built and built on the connection we made in the fall. Today was our third lesson with Colin in just over a week. He had us riding trot poles then doing inside turns at the canter into verticals. I would look at the impossibly twisty track and tell myself firmly, “We can do that,” and then we did.

My lug-eared, coffin-headed old Thoroughbred Jackson has taught me more than any other horse I have ever ridden. There is a place on his back where I feel strong and safe and secure. I sit there like a little fat Buddha and I can use my hands and legs independently. In one memorable flat lesson, Jackson taught me to weight my outside stirrup on a small circle. In another, just after I got back from London, I visualized myself as a haggis, sinking into the saddle. To get that tight inside turn, I just weighted the outside stirrup and sat like a haggis. We nailed it.

He is both fussy and lazy. If you mess with his face he gets pissy and sucks back behind your leg. If you use your leg more than he thinks is fair, he does huge clumsy stupid bucks. Between the two extremes is a place where you can move him forward off a quiet leg into a soft, living contact, a conversation between his mouth and your hand, and if you can stretch up from there and wait, wait, wait, he can jump anything.

Today we jumped nearly everything like that, forward and uphill off a positive leg into a positive contact. The one exception, of course, was the fence where we missed our distance, he ran out and I toppled off his shoulder. I wasn’t hurt, except in the dignity area, and I got back on and regained our mojo. But I had arena sand down my pants.

Who cares? The April sun hot on my back, the white sand and green leaves of our Grand Prix arena, Jackson listening and hunting the next fence, confident and bright. Colin was unfussed by the fall and called it a momentary lapse of concentration, which is exactly what it was. Everything else, he said, was awesome. I like it when he praises my riding, but I like it even better when he says: “That horse is so much happier and healthier since he’s been in your program. He’s enjoying his work.” I tried to think of a compliment that would mean more to me, but I can’t.

Hampton, a photo by yatima on Flickr.

On the one hand, I’ve jumped ahead of him, my reins are too long and the line from my elbow to the bit is way broken.

On the other, my heels are down, I’m looking ahead and I am jumping a 3′ oxer on a giant Warmblood I’d never ridden before.

A great ride on Jackson. I tried to sink into the saddle three strides out from the fences and feel the takeoff in the base of my spine. Christi said he jumped beautifully, snapping his knees over the poles.

To Salome’s new place to see Cecil B. de Milstead in his new home. Cecil and Milo lay on cushions in a patch of sun. Milo gazed into Cecil’s eyes but it was impossible to tell where Cecil was gazing. His eyes really are beautifully crossed.

To Adventure Playground in Berkeley, where the first people we saw were Yoz and Dex. Jeremy had raved to Yoz about the place yesterday. Apparently he sold it well. It’s a playground built by kids, for kids; haphazard and magical, with boats and piano parts and a zip line. The kids can earn hammers and nails and pots of paint. Julia painted a fort green. Claire made a sundial.

California has been so sunny and beautiful and my friends are so dear to me, but I am missing Mum and Dad and Sarah and Iain and Alain so very much. I wish I could be in two places at once.

My phone fell out of my jeans pocket and into the toilet yesterday, which is kinda tragic as they just don’t make decent hardware-keyboard smartphones any more. I’d known this for a while, and the phone was on its lastish legs anyway, so I felt rueful every time I looked at it. (“I love you, neti pot. Too bad you’re already broken.”) After its brief immersion it turned on valiantly twice before starting to light up in wrong places. Now I am charging Jeremy’s old phone, which he bought at the same time as mine, so it has a comforting familiarity that feels illegitimate, like making out with your boyfriend’s fraternal twin.

I haven’t been writing because I’ve been obsessing about horses, obviously. I had this stretch of weeks in the late fall where I was riding Bella and Jackson and spending time at Salome’s barn with the girls, and it was excellent. The weather held on fine much longer than anyone could have hoped. I had a ride where Jackson stopped at almost everything, and it turned out that he had a giant stone in his hoof, and upon reflection I realized that he had jumped around most of the course for me even though the stone bruised him every time he landed. That changed our relationship in two ways: I trusted him more, and he found out he could stop. We worked on the stopping problem for weeks before we finally had a ride where we flew every fence.

He’s lovely. The whole three months of riding him and learning his quirks and ironing them out one at a time, and getting to the point where we can do beautiful forward soft round flat work, and then jump a 3′ course without breaking a sweat (he enjoys the bigger fences much more) has been one of the greatest treats of my life. Christi keeps rolling her eyes at me because he doesn’t have his flying changes, but he’s my big rawboned Thoroughbred snuggly bear and I love him. Christi: “YOU’RE SO EASILY PLEASED.” Guilty as charged.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this at the time, but it was watching Gilbert enjoy himself at Jeremy’s fortieth birthday party up at the Big Yellow House that revealed to me the secret of a happy life, which is to have friends you unreservedly like and then to play games with them. Since Salome has been teaching and riding at Sun Valley, she’s taken to calling me with reports of her rides, as I not infrequently give her reports of mine. We spent a long time today discussing natural horsemanship and in what contexts it is awesome and in what contexts it is bogus and arguably a tool of the patriarchy, and the horses available to her and which of these might best meet her riding goals, and indeed, what exactly those goals might be.

I was just thinking how lucky I am to have a friend who shares my most arcane and indefensible passion, when she said: “I am so glad to have you to talk to about all this, because you get it.”

I said: “I don’t think I tell you often enough how much I like you.”

She laughed. “You tell me every time we talk to each other that you love me.”

“Yes, but I love you and like you, and that’s so rare!”

Yeah, so I kind of dropped the ball there in terms of updates. A lot happened. A lot happened, most of which I will have to gloss over here. Combots was super awesome, and my mother-in-law revealed a hitherto unsuspected bloodlust in rooting for the giant killer robots. I harvested tomatos from our garden and I snuggled with Tiger Lily the pony at the school fundraiser. I got an extremely welcome phone call out of the blue. I ran a party for a dozen seven year olds, and I even baked a cake, and it was delicious, but seriously: giving a major keynote is a lot less stressful. Also incredibly stressful: a fundraising deadline for my beloved nonprofit, the Ada Initiative. Once again we hit our goal, but once again we were saved at the last possible minute by extraordinary acts of kindness.

Sunday night I called Kay and Kelso to make sure they knew where their nearest hurricane evacuation shelter was (they didn’t) and that they had a go bag packed (nope.) Kay and I were laughing our heads off over the phone: “This is a matter of life and death, missy!” Then when Sandy fell on lower Manhattan like an asteroid, a building around the corner from their apartment collapsed, and it didn’t seem so funny any more. They’re fine but have no power or cell service.

All this and two tragic, heart-hollowing, impossible-to-make-sense-of deaths in our extended circle, and I volunteered for another nonprofit because look at all this free time I have, and something about our metropolitan area sportsball team, and Jackson and Bella are shiny ponies and I had a big breakthrough with Jackson on Sunday, finding my balance so I could sit his bucks and send him forward again as soon as his hoofs hit the ground, and he was perplexed into obedience, and I am haunted by images of the evacuation of the medical center in New York, and Claire started a new swimming class and her glossy head looked like a seal’s in the pool, both awesomely fierce and terrifyingly fragile, and if anything is the message of the tumultuous last ten days, ten days that were like a roller coaster that has been swept out to sea, it is this: that in the end there is only love, nothing else, only love.

An old buddy is Facebooking about his mountain biking adventures on the same Ku-ring-gai Chase trails Alfie and I knew so well: the Perimeter Trail, the Long Trail, the Cooyong-Neverfail Trail. I got to remembering what it felt like to let Alfie go. He was blindingly fast well into his twenties. He outran a 3yo QH filly once, I remember, my grand old Arabian king. Yet I don’t ever remember being afraid sitting on his back. I held the rein like a gossamer thread.

I realized in my body, in a way that’s hard to put into words, that I need to find that same feeling of openness when I point Bella and Jackson at fences: the same light contact, the same absolute lack of fear.

IMG_20120929_125536.jpg, a photo by yatima on Flickr.

This is Claire on a Welsh cob and I am pretty sure I daydreamed the whole thing.

I just love this guy. Subtle and perceptive.

It requires almost a lifetime of riding to acquire really educated hands, because by “educated hands” we mean hands which are fixed on the reins with a resistance exactly equal to the resistance of the horse’s mouth against them, and hands so sensitive that they can yield the very instant the horse yields to their pressure. To continue that severe a pressure in the horse’s mouth even an instant longer than is necessary is to continue a punishment after the horse has yielded.

Also kind of totally Zen in a “you will never perfect this; deal with it” way.

In riding, you have got to feel. You cannot, and you must not, look. When you look down at your horse all you will see are your own mistakes! To keep from making those mistakes, keep your eyes up and focused on some definite point or some definite object.

The book is 62 years old but could’ve been written yesterday.

Remember, it is the horse’s job to throw you forward and upward, when posting with the motion. All you do is sink down in the saddle. The forward movement of the horse will then carry you back into position. Much of getting too far out of the saddle, twisting the upper body in mid-air before coming down, collapsing on the horse’s neck, or, in the other extreme, being thrown too far back so that the legs shoot out in front of the rider, is caused by the rider’s trying to do the horse’s work for him. The horse throws you forward and upward. You sink down. The horse’s forward motion carries you back. And until then—Wait for him!

Don’t just do something! Sit there!

Woke up this morning thinking, worst case scenario, Bella’s still sore and I have to ride Jackson in the Grand Prix arena. Then I thought, I’ll just jump smaller jumps. Done it before, can do it again. (A couple of months ago when Bell was being naughty I was busted down to crossrails!) And sure enough I had to ride Jacks in the Grand Prix, and we jumped smaller jumps, and it was FINE.

I’ve been spending cycles thinking about how I can improve my riding given that it’s just not practical to spend more hours in the saddle. Three things came to mind: first, have a better attitude; second, read more books about riding; and third, use visualization.

Attitude: I need to make the most of every minute in the saddle, which means paying attention every minute of the lesson, taking criticism gratefully, letting go of my ego and accepting that making mistakes is part of the process. Books: my Kindle is now full of equitation textbooks and I’ve already gleaned a ton of ideas, such as visualization and having a better attitude. Visualization: before every course now I try to not only learn what jumps we’re jumping, but also to feel how the course will ride, what rhythm we’ll need, where the sticky parts are, where to sit still and go forward. What it will feel like. That, surprise! Is helping me develop my feel.

Salome came to cheer me on and we talked without stopping for several hours, about horses and children and love and art. We sat in the sun at the Crissy Field Center watching the shadows move across the Golden Gate Bridge, and I felt so, so happy and lucky.

Another week; they flicker past. The big trade show of the year tired me out so much that I would come home and lie down on my bed for an hour after work. The first day I didn’t do that, the girls were surprised. A coworker said today he never thought of me as the sort of person who worried about client meetings. I said “Ever asked yourself why I do three hours prep for every hour face to face?”

Claire has a new violin. The school is giving lessons, free, so we rented this half-sized instrument from a place on Market. It’s adorable. I want to learn myself. The feel of the bow across the string is tantalizing.

Speaking of, Bella has a sore foot and I have been riding Jackson. He’s a big sour old Thoroughbred, scary sometimes to watch because of his repertoire of evasions. But when I ride him with my best self, I can get him forward and soft. I can only get it for a minute or so at a time: hence, tantalizing. I want to stretch out the nice moments so they get longer and longer. The trainers talk about the feeling of being “on rails”, when the horse’s hind legs are pushing along a straight line and the reins feel like train tracks and everything feels preordained. I’ve had that a couple of times on Bells, and now I can get it a little on Jacks. It’s quite a feeling to ride this huge horse over fences, fearless. Lopity lope.

When I get off him, it’s another six inches or something before I land, versus getting off little Bella. My eyes are probably sixteen hands or so off the ground, but his wither is above the top of my head. He’s vast and gentle.

I’ve been intermittently organizing around the house and I made my folding desk into a proper workplace for myself, with paints and sketchbooks and pens and pencils, so that even if I only have half an hour I can make a sketch or a watercolor. On Labor Day Monday I was in a bad mood for various reasons, but I did a painting and it helped me to feel better. I am completely amateurish, which is the point: I am letting myself learn to fail more. Julia loves to paint with me. Claire likes it but is also enjoying her piano. We’re the Austen sisters around here, I tell you what.

Speaking of, Claire has mastered the rice cooker and the kettle, and tonight’s stir fry with chicken, broccoli, green beans and carrots was mostly her work. She taught Julia to make the rice. Claire likes to bring me cups of tea, and has been offering to make me gins and tonic as well. Kid knows her mother.

Jeremy’s lovely but between his new startup gig and wushu, and my promotion and the horses, we sort of terrorist fist-bump in passing. But he did get a haircut and is looking totally awesome. I wonder if he would go out with me.

I’ve had some discouraging rides lately, feeling like I will never not suck, etc. Remember how Colin asked us to rethink cadence, and I forgot how to ride, and then I realized that Bella just needs a bigger canter to get over bigger fences? What I elide with a neat little narrative like that one is that the epiphany itself is almost beside the point. The stories I tell in my blog, like the running commentary in my head, are post-facto rationalizations of choices my body had already made. And muscle memory doesn’t have epiphanies, not really. You get a feeling, then you lose it, then you struggle to get it again, and you get a little worse, and you beat yourself up for sucking and being lame (which are sexist and ableist slurs, so… don’t do that, anyway.)

But you keep trying, if you’re me, in your half-arsed, forty-something, adult amateur way, as if riding ever so slightly better, not hanging on the reins, not squashing the movement with your stiffness, not blocking on one side – as if those things had some kind of moral weight, or any meaning beyond just exactly what they are. More rationalization, I guess. The truth is I want to ride because I just, I just want to ride, I always have. It’s beyond wanting to jump classes or overcome obstacles or transcend my earthbound whatever, although it is all those things as well. What it fundamentally is is having glimpsed something very good – that feeling, very occasionally, that I am moving with Bella, helping not hindering, that the two of us together are something more than the sum of its parts. And being unable to forget, or to effectively reproduce that singing moment, that plain canter with the horse moving straight under me, outside hind to inside fore, and nothing in me stopping that, my body like water, like light, like part of her body.

I had that, in glimmers, last week, and on Friday. Today we rode with Colin again and the thing about Colin is that he puts the jumps higher for us than any of the other trainers do: that’s his privilege, because it’s his name above the door. He was actually pulling them down because Toni had been jumping Coneli at a solid 4’6″, but even taken down they were 3′ or so, and the oxers were wide, and there was a hogsback.

I looked at them and knew that I could be afraid and let the fear stop me, but I could feel Bells sound as a bell underneath me, and I knew that Colin wouldn’t overface me, so I did that thing where I pretend to be the rider they think I am, and I felt the tension ebb away. That “chill the fuck out, I got this” feeling. We jumped the massive course and all I thought about was Bella’s rhythm and my line. I made mistakes but I fixed them. There was a huge oxer I thought would be a problem but when we rounded the corner to it I saw my distance and showed it to Bella and she jumped it. And then there was a white vertical five strides before the hogsback, and I turned her to it and saw the five and we jumped through it all forward, on the lightest possible contact; and it was very good.

“She goes well for you,” said Colin. “Cranky old mare.”

You will not be tested on this material.

Showjumping is the sport I do, but eventing is the sport I follow. Eventing has a narrative: there are teams, and there are three phases (dressage, cross-country, showjumping) such that after three days of competition everything can hang on whether a horse taps a rail with a hind foot or not, and if so, whether that rail falls. It’s VERREH EXCITINGE. I’ve been enmeshed in its DRAMZ since reading KM Peyton’s glorious books about it at an impressionable age, and it’s why Princess Anne is my favourite Royal, because she rode on the British team in Montreal.

This year’s Olympic eventing offers up maybe the dramiest dramz in, oh, ever. Let’s see: the US coach ran off with his mistress, who he had made the showjumping coach. Scandal! The US coach is also the father of a member of the British team, which member is also the daughter of the abovementioned Princess Anne and therefore the granddaughter of the Queen. The dad says he might watch his daughter ride, if he can find the time. For these and other reasons, the dad is widely thought of in eventing circles as a gigantic tool. Two members of his US team are former Australian Olympians who have switched sides, leaving Australia to scramble for other riders. Those Australian-Americans rescued one of the Olympic horses from a burning barn last year, by dint of punching out the fire chief who was trying to prevent them from running into the flames.

It’s a Jilly Cooper novel COME TO LIFE. Me, I will be rooting for Ingrid Klimke, for sentimental reasons as her father Reiner Klimke is still my favourite equestrian ever; Mary King, a marvellous English rider who is best thought of as Helen Mirren on horseback; Boyd Martin, a punk kid who is one of the heroes of the barn fire; and Hawley Bennett, a Canadian who is based in California, because I saw her ride at Woodside last year and she was awesome.

Most of all, though, I’ll be hoping that everyone gets around with no injuries whatsoever, not even a loose shoe. Eventing has a filthy little secret: it’s sometimes fatal. So that’s my Olympic dream: that just this once, everybody lives.

ETA: Gold medal: German team, including Ingrid Klimke. Silver medal: British team, including Mary King. BOO YAH.

Colin asked us all to rethink cadence and I forgot how to ride.

I can see Matador’s cadence. He is an Argentinian Warmblood and he bounces around the jumps like a ping pong ball. I can see Ruth’s cadence: she is a huge hunter and her flat-kneed stride is about a hundred feet long. She is so scopy that she would rather jump out of a long spot than add.

What’s Bella’s cadence though? Sometimes she tranters, conjuring an extra footfall from thin air. And sometimes she seems to swoosh from jump to jump. She can jump out of any old stupid spot I drop her in, but how do I find the rhythmic canter that she can jump out of without constant emergencies?

We had a lesson where Val asked us to jump the five to five, do a more-than-rollback and come back up the panels to the oxer. We got the five to five but Bella bucked like a banshee as I tried to haul her around the corner, and I stopped her and realized that my hands were shaking and I was scared.

We ended that lesson jumping six-inch crossrails. I flew to Boston on business and brooded on my troubles. I realized how much of my recent good body image comes from the knowledge that I can ride better than I used to, because that good body image abandoned me with the worry over my riding.

We came back and I remembered that Bella wants me to let go of her head so she can use her front end, and to sit in the saddle so she knows I am not going to come off her. We rode around another huge (three foot!) course in the Grand Prix arena and I checked in with my seatbones three strides out from every fence, letting her jump out of her rhythm.

There’s her cadence. It’s just that at the height we’re jumping now, it’s faster than I am comfortable with. And when I’m scared I go fetal and come out of the saddle and hang on the reins. And then she bucks, because, what the hell, Rach.

I have to sit back and let go and hurtle forward at vast speed and let her take the fence in her own way. It feels like dying, but it is correct.

This, for the record, is what I ride to learn.

This is an awfully nice illustration of what I’ve been working on for the last couple of years. Jeremy took the first picture; the composition’s not ideal but you can see my position, which is the point of this exercise. You can see my thigh muscle, such as it is, just sort of sitting there like a lamb roast, with my lower leg dangling off it in a pendulumish fashion. You can see how hunched my shoulders are and how I have tipped forward ahead of Bella’s motion. As a result she is jumping very flat. You can’t imagine her getting over anything bigger in this sort of form. Luckily, this picture was taken almost two years ago.

This next shot is a couple of weeks old. Not to brag or nothing, but check out how much rounder and more athletic Bella looks. That’s because I am not riding her quite so much like a bag of puddings.

aIMG_6644, a photo by k0re on Flickr.

Much remains to be done! My ankles are still deplorably weak, especially the left one, which I broke, and I still need a stronger core and to sit more quietly. My hands need to be a hair lower to make the line from my elbow to the bit perfectly straight. But I have improved a heap. This makes me quite unreasonably happy. Living out your childhood fantasies: I recommend it.