(Even if you love me dearly, you are not expected to read this; it’s mostly for my future reference. Also: my birthday saddle is back from the saddler’s and the new knee pads and blocks have made it amazing. I sink into it and ride like a centaur.)

Colin’s daughter Sam McIntosh has moved back to New Zealand from Europe, and is spending a couple of weeks in California, so she took a bunch of us for lessons. She is a Big Deal, considered one of the prettiest and most correct Grand Prix showjumpers in the world. I was nervous as hell.

My usual Tuesday night lesson I was surprised to see that I was down to ride the big blood-bay gelding Dillon. I rode him once, when he arrived, and could not make head nor tail of him. He’s very tall and very long-backed and was, at that point, quite green. I couldn’t get him to go in a straight line and therefore I couldn’t get him to go around corners either. I’ve seen other friends ride him since and knew that he has no vices to speak of, so I wasn’t scared. But Tuesday night made it obvious that either he had improved or I had (actually both). He goes along in a nice light contact and is very responsive to my leg, not in a hot way, just in a friendly, forward, willing sort of way. I still had trouble getting him to track around a corner with his hind feet in the prints of his front feet, but Dez gave us a clever little exercise with a shallow serpentine from the quarter line to the rail, and that helped a lot.

Wednesday night I ran late, and I couldn’t find Dillon’s bridle, and my hands were shaking. I saw Beth and she said “How are you?” and I said “Nervous as hell, glad I am riding with you and Austin,” and then Sam, who was standing right there, introduced herself and I felt like an utter tool. And then I was late getting out and warming up.

And then I just stopped freaking out because, why. The sun was slanting through the aspens and Portola Valley is beautiful and there is nothing I’d rather be doing. We rode trot circles at the far end of the arena. Colin was watching and he chuckled: “They never sit up straight like this when it’s me teaching.” I sat as still as I possibly could, concentrating on keeping my shoulders back and my hands still and my bum in the (awesome new!) saddle and my lower leg quiet. We trotted and cantered poles and changed direction after and did figure eights with the poles in the middle. Then Sam gradually added fences.

This, of course, was the first time I had ever jumped Dillon. Being as long and thin as a noodle he has an enormous stride and is maybe the scopiest horse I ever sat on. The first exercise was the canter poles, then a hard right turn to a vertical, then back over the canter poles. Hard enough getting that turn, although I could feel my lower leg holding me still and my core balancing me on the landing side. Reassuring! Next we did a bending line over the vertical to a pole on the ground, then a more-than-rollback to the wall.

Then, the first course: the wall to the bending line, a rollback to a HUGE oxer (me biting my tongue not to say “That’s too big for me;” I checked later, it was only 2’9″), and then a one-stride both elements of which were also huge (2’6″:). I sank into my heels and kept my contact as light as I could. When Dillon tried to get fast, I tried to lift him back in front of my leg then leave him alone. As Sam said afterwards, there were a few mistakes, but it was effective. My lower leg was there, my balance was there, and the speeding up and slowing down came from that. My confidence has improved as a direct result of my improved fitness and strength. And from my point of view, there were a couple of moments where we hung in the air like planes over San Francisco airport, like ringed planets. I had time to think, “This is going rather well,” before he landed. It was like a dream. Music of the spheres.

Then we jumped the whole thing going back the other way! He got much too fast over the one-stride to the huge oxer and I dropped him in a dreadful spot, but did I mention how scopey he is? He overjumped it, and I stayed on. He bucked, which is more than fair, but I got him back in hand nicely for the last three. Then we did it again, and Sam pointed out that he actually needed more canter going into the double so that I could rock him back for the oxer. I tried it that way and he jumped it perfectly.

Sam’s very different from our usual trainers, in that she’s quiet and apparently very shy, and doesn’t say anything while you’re actually on course, just lets you figure it out for yourself. Makes me feel much more competent and independent. What really impressed me was how she increased the difficulty of each exercise while building on what we’d achieved in the exercise before. There was a huge amount of narrative logic to the lesson.

Colin said: “I’ve never seen you ride that well before.”

Utterly illogically, I was even sicker with nerves the next night, Thursday. I was hideously early and warmed up in the dressage arena for about half an hour, until my feet had gone to sleep because I was forcing my ankles so far down at the walk. Sam said “We’re going to ride in the big ring,” and my heart sank with my dead feet into my boots. It was a long walk out there.

And of course as soon as I put Dillon into a trot, the circulation came back into my feet. I could feel all the work I’d put into my lower leg, all the two-point and sitting trot with toes pointed up. I could feel the new muscles in my core. I didn’t need to haul on the reins because he likes a long low contact, and he is honest and kind and mellow and will come back into my hand if I so much as think of collecting him. All this without being the slightest bit lazy. By this time, of course, I loved Dillon with a desperate passion.

“He really likes you,” said Sam.

Pole on a bending line to a vertical with a ground pole before and after, then four strides to another pole. Easy uphill, much harder downhill and we kept missing it until Sam told me to add a stride in the first part. Then he popped through it, five, vertical, four, pole. The vertical kept getting bigger and bigger, by the way! Oh, that feeling of having him collected under me, his short stride, his calm competence. That was key to the whole lesson.

We added an oxer (that kept getting bigger as well), then we did exercises, and finally a course bigger than the moon: panels to a water jump, inside turn to the original vertical, another vertical, a picket fence, a one-stride. We sped up and sped up. Second time through, we crashed through the first two fences, then managed to get it together as we went along.

Finally, what Sam called a jump-off: water and panels going the other way, very sharp turn to the black oxer, winding back through the other fences to the original vertical, jumped at an angle, then the one-stride going the other way. I knew I had to balance him going into the water and panels – the opposite problem to what I’d had the day before. And I found that popping canter again, as I had done in the five strides after the pole. He popped over the water and the huge panels like they were nothing. I felt my seat deep and square on the sharp turn into the oxer, then put my leg on and took off and landed like we were one being. I found my line across the vertical at an angle, then as he wanted to race into the one-stride I caught him and made him add the extra stride, and he was full of joy and so was I.

“He goes really well for you,” said Toni. I couldn’t wipe the huge stupid grin off my face.

I remember looking at Beth and Austin in the sunset light, Austin with the look of eagles on his face, and thinking “Let me keep this. Let this be one of the memories I get to keep until I die.”

I sat in Cafe XO this morning contemplating my pain au chocolat and my coffee and my unopened Lionel Shriver novel and my forthcoming riding lesson, and I experienced perfect happiness.

Now I am at home after a great lesson and my cat is draped across my collarbones like a mink stole, purring like fule, and Jeremy and the children are off seeing Kung Fu Panda 2 and I am contemplating the hot shower I am about to have.

Rest of my life’s going to be downhill after this, is what I’m saying.

This was not very good on horses, and not very good on the war. So, um. He seems like a nice person?

Also! That’s a Western (as in cowboy) show halter on the horse on the cover! I just. Gnnrh.

Really ace weekend. Dinner at Brenda’s Friday night – crawfish beignets zomg – and then Source Code, which was epically popcorn. And then drinks at Yoz’s, where he pulled out his phone and said, “About this blog post: is Juniper Arwen Anemone Sagan Donner Hermes really a real name?” and we said “Oh my God, haven’t we introduced you to the Ximms yet? You’ll love them, they are lovely!”

Saturday I mostly slept. I slept late, went to the farmer’s market with Salome, which these days is mostly sitting outside Sandbox eating beef piroshki and drinking De La Paz coffee and talking about our lives. Then I went home and napped for hours. Then we took the girls swimming and Jules went to Azucena’s party and Claire and Jeremy and I had yummy vegetarian Indian. When I got home Bebe lay on top of me purring and saying “You remember how you slept late and then had a long nap and I got to snuggle with you all day? That was aces.”

This morning I rode Omni with Toni and Colin and jumped VAST FENCES, possibly as high as 2 foot 9. I have undeniably improved. I visited Salome on the way home and played with the boys while she tidied up, then we went back to my place and collected J and the girls and walked up the hill and had lunch in the garden behind Progressive Grounds, and bought books at Red Hill where I took a picture of a job ad for Rose, and visited Good Prospect Community Garden and picked lemons, and met Kathy and Martha out for a walk, and went to Holly Park, and picked up dinner at Avedano’s and now we are home and dinner smells awesome and I am fond of my life.

That said, I read a book about Bruce Davidson winning the 1974 World Championships on Irish Cap. He was pretty green himself at the time and humble with it, so he watched the great riders of his day to figure out what they did right and he did wrong. He noticed they rode with short stirrups and crouched over fences.

I think I’ve told you that I’ve been riding shorter lately and that my lower leg has greatly improved as a result. It turns out that for human corgis like me, long-bodied and short-legged, the mythical straight line from head to hips to heels just isn’t. Your leg needs to sit further forward. So I wondered what would happen if I tried crouching as well, to get my weight in my heels and stop anticipating fences.

What happened was that Dez said: “Oh my God, I love your position over fences today! What are you doing that’s different?”

It was a brilliant lesson. We ran over the hour and I wanted to keep going. I’ve been in a warm and happy haze ever since, which has made me much more patient with errands and children, which is nice because I was pretty awful to the kids all day yesterday. Got myself caught in that horrible cycle of disliking myself for being snappy, and then immediately turning around and snapping at them again.

I’ve actually been stricter today, giving them only healthy food and refusing to turn on the TV so they have to go do imaginative play. But it’s been mellow because I haven’t felt the need to excuse or defend my hardass-ness. I simply make decisions and refuse any further engagement. A curious game, bickering with the kids; the only winning move is not to play.

New horse in the barn. 15 years old, longtime show horse, purebred Oldenburg gelding. Lesson with Colin on Sunday morning. Colin rode in the Seoul Olympics. It is at once shaming to be the worst rider in the lesson by far, and inspiring to be in the lesson at all. Colin always has something trenchant to say, like a Zen master. This time it is that I am hanging on with the backs of my thighs. If I stop doing that, my heels should sink.

Which reminds me of an exercise we’ve been doing lately: three-loop serpentines at the rising trot with no stirrups. The point is to make you stop hanging on with your legs. Of course when you think about it, if you can’t hang on with your legs, and you don’t have any stirrups, the only way to rise to the trot is by periodically levitating. Which is impossible. We do it anyway.

I bounced around on Archie’s back at the canter until I suddenly found a place to sit like a centaur. I should have bookmarked it, because after every fence he stuck his head between his knees and bucked. I only just barely stayed on each time, but kept going out of childish pride. The challenge was to keep my heels down and my hands quiet. I tried. Colin said: “I can see that you’re trying, and no trainer can ask more than that.”

Afterwards I said: “I was pretty sure I was going to eat dirt.” “You had me worried a couple of times,” he said, grinning.

Francis asked what it’s like to have lessons with an Olympian versus with a regular mortal, and the answer is: they’re the same, only the jumps are higher and you’re expected to do everything to a much higher standard. But we walk, trot and canter on each rein exactly like beginners. It would be very boring to watch.

I rode Archie again on Tuesday night and he didn’t buck much. I had more trouble getting him to move off my leg. But I also got a little bit of nice work out of him. I forgot to blog one particularly good ride I had on Omni, where I started to get a feel for keeping the reins alive and having a conversation with him through them. I tried that on Archie as well (smarting from a comment of Colin’s, perfectly fair, that I let my hand go dead sometimes) and he seemed to respond.

That feeling of surging forward into contact, with the horse round and soft under you and no coercion anywhere, just flow: it’s good. I went a whole hour without mourning the tsunami victims or being sick with fear for my family. It’s an unforgivably elitist pastime, I know, but nothing’s better at forcing me to let go and live in the moment, attentive to the phenomenal world.

Archie is a hugger. He will rest his head against your chest and you can put your arms around him and hold him and breathe into his mane. He reminds me, a lot, of Alfie and Noah, the best horses ever. Sarah says he’s too nice to stay in the lesson program long, and not to get too attached. Check.

Rode Omni today. Big Roman-nosed true black Thoroughbred. He’s the one I call “The Professor” in public and “Black Beauty” in the privacy of my own dork head. I was hungover and underslept, and he likes to carry his head on one side, and buck, and go into reverse without warning; and sometimes all three at once.

But I didn’t fall off. We rode a pretty intricate little pattern, circling into one fence and rolling back to the next and jumping that on an angle to cut inside another fence. I jammed my heels down and kept my hands low and when he got antsy, I tried not to react.

It works best when I establish a good rhythm, let the obstacles come to us and keep my chin up on the landing side. Isn’t that always the way?

Right now I am aching all over. How I know I am getting my money’s worth.

Claire in the back of the car with a notebook and pen. “Hey mama, guess what? The eighteenth binary number is 131,072.”

Sitting in the sun at the barn as a Dopey the half-Clydesdale is led past me, and seeing him as he really is: a huge strange alien beast with a vast wise eye. Like a dragon.

Going out on the harbour with Badgerbag in the Daisy, and the marine battery failing, and us having to row back to shore. Two fortysomething Internet feminists, in a boat, marooned, capable, happy.

I thought I’d been dropped in the deep end. My first ride back, after three weeks away with only two rides in Sydney, was on Manny, in the indoor arena. But he’s a new Manny. I rode as light and soft as I could, and he did big blowy sighs (which is a VERY GOOD thing; it means the horse is happy and relaxed) and the first time – the first time! – I asked him for some lengthening in the trot, all I did was unclench my diaphragm and he immediately stepped his back legs under himself and lifted his shoulders so he could reach his front legs further out. It was MAGIC. Then we did a canter and I collected it just by clenching my diaphragm, and there he was, uphill and happy and bouncy and fast-but-controlled. A Ferrari in third gear!

We didn’t really jump, just did patterns over poles on the ground and a couple of teeny fences, but when the big white dressage horse was being lunged next door and bucking on the end of the lunge rein I knew he was going to infect Manny’s mood. So I concentrated really hard on staying the same and not riding defensively – keeping my hand and elbow and shoulder unlocked, letting him move forward, and jamming my heel down as far as I could so I had a strong base to follow him. And Manny was perfect; soft and happy and responsive. And he did pick up the white horse’s mood, and he did buck, and it didn’t matter because my heels were down and my core was strong.

It’s Manny that’s improved, far more than I have. We were talking about it afterwards and Toni said “It’s like he’s looked around and taken a deep breath.” He used to get complicated because he was over-anxious to please. Now he knows he won’t be punished for mistakes, he has relaxed and is able to enjoy himself. Every horse that comes into this program gets better: fitter, happier, more delightful to ride. It is an awesome pleasure to behold.

I was hoping to get a good instructor. Sandro trained in Germany and at the Pessoas’ barn in Brazil, so that worked out okay.

Sandro picked up exactly the same issues that Erin and Dez always ding me for: close my fingers on the reins. Keep my leg aids consistent, not on-again off-again. It’s as if there were an international language of good riding which I am just now able to have the most basic conversations in.

It was surprisingly difficult to ride in jeans and a too-tight helmet and no gloves. I was sloppy, especially in a couple of the transitions. But the horse had done dressage and was as sweet as sugar. By the end of the ride I had him cantering over a crossrail in a good rhythm and moving off my inside leg.

This barn is exactly ten minutes from the flat, as opposed to 35 minutes door to door in San Francisco. So that’s nice.

Then I got home and set off the burglar alarm and locked myself out of the flat for three hours. OH WELL.

When we arrived at Currawinya everyone was already out on Mum and Dad’s new screened-in back deck. The horses next door were walking through their paddock. Drawn to them as if by a magnet, I purloined an apple and went down. The horses had no interest in the apple, had clearly never been given apples as treats before, but were happy to stand with me and breathe their warm breath into my hair. Thoroughbreds in beautiful condition, their muscles hard, their skin like silk, their trimmed hooves hitting the ground at precisely 45 degrees. Curious and friendly and respectful of personal space. Handled by people who understand horses and like them.

Ross and Julia came down to meet us and the horses and I walked over to the fence. “Their heads are big,” said Ross, as the horses inspected him and Jules. “Yup,” I said. “Make them go away,” he said. “They’re freaking me out.” I pushed their shoulders and they ambled off, then I piggybacked Julia up to the house where my Mum gave me a glass of champagne. The sun set, gloriously.

Dad made pappadums, bhajis, rice, dal, beef curry, tandoori chicken and his own potato curry. Everything was perfect, and there’s enough left for dinner tonight. Port wine trifle for pudding. As we got ready to leave I realized Mum and Dad don’t have a dishwasher, so I filled the sink and my brother Alain picked up a teatowel and we washed up together like two halves of a whole, as if we had done it a thousand times before, as if we had done it, in fact, with these exact plates and pans, all our lives.

Today we will learn about feel. This is another important skill in riding that I have been wrong about all my life. Turns out it’s not about keeping your hands still relative to the horse’s withers. It’s about keeping your hands still relative to the horse’s mouth.

Play along at home! You will need:

• 1 seven-year-old girl with long hair, or similar

If you don’t have a seven-year-old girl, find your most over-scheduled and under-slept friend and borrow theirs.

Now, take your seven-year-old girl. Pick up a strand of hair from each side of her head. The strand should be about the thickness of a rein (that’s 15mm for civilized people, five-eighths of an inch for Americans.)

Ask your seven-year-old girl to throw her head about like a cantering pony.

You need to maintain the exact same gentle, consistent pressure on her hair. Too loose and the pony will run away with you. Too tight and the pony will get angry and buck you off (and your seven-year-old girl will speak sharply to you, or cry.)

You may notice that this is impossible, and requires precognition! Keep working on it. I am.

Turns out I’ve been riding turns on the haunches wrong, all my life. You don’t halt, like you do for a turn on the forehand. You walk into it, open the inside rein, apply the leg aids, and Bella rocks back onto her hocks and does almost a half-pirouette. And then, when you are trying to ride a square corner at the trot, you try the same thing, and it works even better than a pure half-halt for getting her soft and collected. And then you try it at the canter, straight after and then straight before a pole on the ground, and athletic sweet pretty willing Bella is suddenly uphill and light as a feather in hand and turning on a dime, and you’re grinning so hard it hurts.

Bella is a bad horse! (1)

Bella is a very bad horse! (2)

She teleported sideways last night – alarmed by antics on the sidelines, not actually her fault and if I’d had a better seat, I might have stayed on. As it was I ended up flat on my back, looking up at her forelegs as she twisted in midair to avoid landing on my face.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t frightened at the time, and am not frightened in retrospect. If I’ve fallen off Bella twice it’s because I ride her more, trust her more and push myself harder on her.

So I got back on! As they say! The rest of the lesson was fun.

(1) Bella is a good horse.

(2) Bella may be the best horse in the world. Research is ongoing.

I read Cryoburn, which was okay, and then I went back and reread Cordelia’s Honor, which is by far my favourite of the Vorkosigan novels, because Cordelia is my favourite character. I like what Aral says about her: that honor pours out of her like a fountain; but even more, I like that whenever she faces a dilemma, she always chooses the most generous option.

“I’ve always thought—tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No,” said Vortala.

“Yes,” said Vorkosigan.

“I’ve always felt that theists were more ruthless than atheists,” said Ezar Vorbarra.

“If you think it’s really wrong,” said Cordelia to Vorkosigan, “that’s one thing. Maybe that’s the test. But if it’s only fear of failure—you have not the right to refuse the gift for that.”

“It’s an impossible job.”

“That happens, sometimes.”

I mention this because people have been firing similar observations at me for weeks, which is both irritating and awesome. My self-deprecating schtick has reached the end of its useful life, and circumstances require me to want more, to be greedy, to be ambitious. It’s part of what’s been going wrong with my riding. So Dez had me riding perfect Bella on Thursday night, and she got me tilting my chin up to look ahead over fences, and suddenly I could count the strides in and see how to keep my balance on the landing.

And then today I was on Manny, and Erin had us warm up and nothing went wrong, and then I jumped a crossrail and rolled back and jumped it the other way and nothing went wrong, and then she had us do the same exercise over a huge vertical. Which was clearly impossible, on the hardest horse I have ever ridden, in the depth of a slump, with the fence at the upper limit of what I’m capable of.

So I stuck my chin in the air and jammed my heels down and counted my strides and did it four times.

I was so relieved! I said to Erin: “Can I quit on that?” Erin grinned and said: “No.” She added the skinny hay bale and another rollback to the wall, and Manny of his own cognizance added some huge spooks in the far corner. We jumped around it twice. It wasn’t pretty, but I didn’t fall off. Erin said: “You’re an educated rider now. You can’t go on thinking that you’re just lucky, that you just had a good day. You have to ride like you mean it.”

But I am never sincere about anything, ever! But I have carefully schooled myself to only want things I know I can have! But I don’t take emotional risks!

To refuse the test is to refuse the gift.

Erin is leaving to take a fantastic job in Florida. Florida’s damn lucky to get her.

Little red mare gives me my confidence back. She’s not called Bella for nothing.

I had a second disastrous lesson on Omni, so I am now officially In A Slump, which is great because it takes the pressure off for next time. I don’t like riding in the indoor arena and I keep nearly crashing into the other riders. That makes me tense up, and then Omni tenses up, and then we go backwards or up, or sometimes backwards AND up, which is Not Recommended.

Still, there was funny stuff. Colin had noticed me putting Omni’s polo wraps on before the ride. Afterwards, he was walking through the barn and said to a kid: “You looked good out there!” He saw me and said something like: “Bit rough today, eh?” I said: “At least the polo wraps stayed on.” Colin said: “Oh yeah. THEY looked good.”

Of course it makes me question what the hell I am doing. I will never be a professional. I may never be any good. I don’t ride often enough to improve rapidly. I tried riding more often, and it played hell with work and family time and then I got sick. What I am mostly doing is arresting the decline in my riding that took place in the years and years I didn’t ride: with the goal, I suppose, of one day being able to ride every day, at which point I might not suck.

It’s my retirement savings!

And then the riding. As you may have surmised, it has somewhat sucked of late because of the Virus That Will Not Go Away. This was extra frustrating on all levels: I had booked extra lessons through October. There’s a new horse in the barn, Manny, an ultra dark bay with a golden muzzle like a giant Dartmoor pony. Riding him was like being given the keys to a Ferrari. “HOLY SHI…!”

I asked Erin: “Is this what all fancy horses are like?” She said “Are you kidding me? This is where they START.”

Then the virus turned me into a crone and I kept having to drop out of lessons half way through because: exhausted. And then the rains came and lessons moved indoors and both Manny and Omni find the indoor arena VERY VERY EXCITING, and I kept nearly falling off. And my confidence took a massive hit, and I didn’t feel like jumping.

Until yesterday! When I got on Omni and Dez was teaching and made me trot, trot, circle, hold the outside rein, vibrate the inside rein, bend him around my leg. And he softened and his back got swingy and he started to come through. I used to think of Omni as The Professor, because if I touched him with my heel he would stop and put his head down and pigroot, sometimes with a little girly squeal. Basically exactly what Jean-Paul Descoeudres used to do to a first-year archaeology student who used Encyclopaedia Britannica as a source. (Not me, but I watched and had the fear of God put in me.)

Like all the horses that come into the McIntosh program, Omni has blossomed. It’s remarkable what top-quality hay and regular exercise will do to a horse. Bella has turned out nice; Omni is turning out super-fancy, and hot! He needs the strong warmup to get him forward and listening and using all his energy for good; otherwise, if you try to bottle him up, he will fizz and pop. (Remind you of anyone OH HELLO MISTER NOAH?) He’d been doing a lot of up and backwards lately. He’s not mean at all, just full of bean. The challenge is to channel it forwards.

But I did it! I got some very nice round softness out of him, and I started to fix my tension over fences, and best of all I kept up the good riding for a whole hour. I remembered that I am not just a passenger, that I am not (yet) an old lady, that I can ride. Massive relief.

I didn’t come anywhere close to achieving my riding goals for the year (Anne Kursinski clinic, comfortable at 2’9″.) But I did fix some other things: my lower leg isn’t swinging so much. Um. That’s it, really, and a big part of that was raising my stirrups a hole. I get discouraged if I let myself think about it too much; except that, though I am not progressing very fast (at all?), I am not actually regressing, which I did every year that I wasn’t riding. Still sucking at harder things, on better horses.

Just because it hasn’t been all Bella, all the time around here doesn’t mean I am ever thinking about anything else. Oh, I know, I have children and a great job and, oh yeah, Optimal Husband, and the Legion of Optimal Friends Forever (LOFF), and yes I adore you all &c.

ANYWAY. I’ve been riding regular Sunday and Tuesdays with Hard Taskmistress Erin, who for example requires us to post to the trot with no stirrups, or transition between “crossrail two-point” and “five-foot-fence two-point”, or canter from two-point, or from the walk. God help you if you don’t have a secure lower leg, which I still don’t, despite all our hopes and prayers and wishes to the contrary.

In fact, and in keeping with my life’s generic conventions as post-slacker romcom (probably directed by Lisa Cholodenko and starring Tilda Swinton), my lower leg is now ironically inclined to be too far forward. More irony! I have a sudden and serious problem with tiny crossrails. I can jump a decent 2’6″ vertical in respectable form, and then I can drop Bella in a shocking spot in front of a jump she could step over.

This is the story arc this season. I worked on getting Bella into a more uphill canter by engaging my core muscles, and I ended up hunched and pumping with my shoulders. I wasn’t releasing over fences, and then I was throwing the contact away and leaning over her forehand. My two-point ended up all weird and crouchy. I finally figured what I was doing wrong through all of this. Dudes, I am trying too hard.

It was very clear this morning, when I was working really hard on my posting-trot-no-stirrups, and then my hip hurt so I tried to relax and just do it minimally, and Erin immediately said “That’s better.” And again, when she had us drop our stirrups at the canter, and as soon as we did, my leg was more secure. And again, when we were doing a canter pole to a vertical to a canter pole and then four strides to a crossrail, my distances and releases improved the moment I started counting strides aloud. The more I don’t do anything, the more I don’t think about it, the better it is.

I think I’m at the slightly dangerous point of having improved quite a lot, but not as much as I would like to have improved, so I am reaching for harder things and in doing so neglecting the fundamentals: breathe, sit up straight, keep still. It’s the paradox at the heart of riding – maybe anything difficult. You have to sweat to create the muscle memory, and then you have to distract yourself, meditate, transcend, absent your thinky monkey self so that the muscle memory can actually work. I get to control the direction and the pace, and then I have to let Bella handle the actual galloping and jumping over the fence. She’s much better at that part than I am.

And that’s the thing. If you drive stick, you can probably remember having to think about changing gear, and then not having to think about it, and then maybe driving along something like Highway One between Jenner and Point Arena and being the car; drinking the curves and feeling the suspension as your own spirit-level inner ear. Riding’s like that – your proprioception expanding to encompass another entity – with this exquisite refinement: you end up with two souls.