Relaxed & Forward Blog

Riding a Princely Trot

Is your horse uncomfortable in the trot? He might toss his head or maybe his strides are short and choppy....
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Photo & Poem: Coyote Run

Ancient mountains send coarse sand and sharp stone down, just pebbles at a time, to leave us unsteady on our...
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Walk, The Queen of Gaits

  Some riders keep to the walk, a sweet sashay that's almost a lollygag. They want their horse to stay...
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Escalation: Finding the Thing Before the Thing.

It feels like you wake up in the middle of a movie, one of those thriller-action plots that have too...
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Photo & Poem: Natural. Magic.

  The young visitor stared at the bay mare’s mane. “Would you like to brush her?” I ask. Sending the...
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The Next Horse: Remounting after the Hardest Fall of All

    This perfect horse of yours has been with you since he was young, or you got him near...
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Calming Signals: Sleeping with a Reactive Dog

    I don't mind bragging; I've slept with some very fine dogs in the course of my long and...
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Calming Signals: Yoga Mind/Equine Reality

The Dude Rancher and I practice yoga. We started years ago; he was having way too many headaches and my...
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Photo & Poem: Secrets

She attended church with joyless obligation, lip-syncing hymns that praised suffering, with dentures that never quite fit, never a genuine...
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What the Nightmare Revealed

Everyone did what instinct dictated. The beach was so peaceful. Deserted with not so much as a footprint when they...
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Photo & Poem: Second Cup

Second cup of coffee while waiting for light, a second cup while waiting to head out. The horses have thick...
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Cantankary: If Not Now, When?

Expecting New Year's resolutions from me? Nope, I'm not the type. I am so thrilled to have survived another year...
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The Future for Horse-Keepers: Isolation or World Change?

It's what we do: We keep horses. Sometimes a foal too young to be ridden, so we show patience and...
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Part One: The Future for Horses, a Different Narrative about Herd Dynamics

The first story I remember about herd dynamics was that stallions lived on the rise above the valley to watch...
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Calming Signals: How to Show Love

"How do you show your love for horses, then?" A clinic participant asked me at the end of a long...
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Life Coach: The Goat Version

It was a beautiful end-of-summer afternoon, just about feeding time. Cupid had been with us a few months by then....
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Photo & Poem: Holiday Place

  You had a plan for how this would go when you left home. Longing for a thing different than...
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Calming Signals and Color: Do Horses Understand Laughter?

  Every week new research comes out, some more ethically tabulated than others, about science proving horses are intelligent; an...
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