Relaxed & Forward Blog

An Affirmation of a Life Shared with Animals.

It's springtime in the Rockies. The time change was last weekend, so I'm waking up at three am now, but...
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Trainer Love: In Memory of Seri

Seri died this week. She was never my horse, but she is part of the trainer I've become. Seri was...
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Resolutions and Horse Dreams

It's the twilight zone between holidays, meandering like a long, slow-motion hangover. I have no idea what day it is...
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Euthanizing Your Horse: How to Trust Yourself

It's colder now. The leaves are gone. The wind charges at us from the north, and the temperature drops ten...
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Book Launch: Say Hello to ‘Undomesticated Women’ by Anna Blake

  It's before dawn on a Friday morning and I'm in an RV park in Amarillo, Texas. I've been mud-wrestling...
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Undomesticated Women. Anecdotal Evidence from the Road

30 states, 2 oceans, 14,000 miles, 8 months Welcome to our year of living compactly. My dog, Mister, and I...
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Letting Edgar Rice Burro Get Old

Edgar Rice Burro runs with a gang of misanthropes. A goat whose broken leg healed stiff, so he has an...
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A Message from Heaven (for my professional friends)

I am a woman who possesses an interesting range of enviable skills. Getting surgery is not on the list. One...
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Training Tip: Improving Your Eye

Sometimes we look back at how we kept horses as kids, and it seemed so simple then. None of them...
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How to Measure the Heart of a Horse

Have you experienced this? Someone says something that is a throw-away comment, not meant to be anything, they toss it...
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Nube: When He Came Home

I was forty-nine years old with gray hair, calloused banged-up fingers, and chronic lameness in my left foot. He was...
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Nube: How We Met

one year later... I was forty- nine years old, and my upcoming birthday was hanging in...
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Loafing in Limbo: Hibernation as a Training Aid

We are in Limbo. It's that week between Christmas and New Year when nobody knows what day it is. Not...
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Silent Night: The Truest Words Aren’t Words At All.

I was standing outside of a hotel at five in the morning waiting for my limo. Obviously, several things had...
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Things We Should Refuse to Train Horses To Do

Warning: Loudmouth Party Pooper Rant. I think we all know whose side I'm on in this horse training reality show....
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The Season of Letting Go

The autumnal equinox is about change. There's a miserable fog today, dense and so uncommon on my high prairie. Chilly...
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Being the “Good” Horse Isn’t Easy.

People want to tell me about their challenging horse, the quirky one, the scary one, the kill pen (scam) horse....
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Are You Having a Midlife Horse Crisis?

I got an email from a reader last week. She had a hard question. She acknowledges she was naive, but...
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