Among the wildflowers

I woke up this morning to a quiet house. I like waking up to find that everyone else is sleeping in every once in a while. I also woke up to an overcast day...it reminds me of England or Chattanooga or someplace else...and appreciated that. I tried to sneak around and fix myself some oatmeal without waking everyone else up, and succeeded (I think) and sat down at the breakfast table to eat my oatmeal. There were wildflowers in the center. So lovely. I began thinking about how I had a bag of wildflower seeds in my car, and how I want to go plant them in my grandmother's yard.

When C got up, he asked me what I was going to do today. I said that I was going to do some school work and just hang out...and he told me to go put my blue jeans on...which of course meant we were riding! SO of course I wanted to go and we got ready and caught our horses and saddled up and began. When we got through the woods to the field, we were standing there for a minute and C told me he wanted to work on getting his horse and my horse to be okay with each other, to be able to get close to each other's faces. He inched towards me, and I watched his horse. C told me that I needed to watch my horse's ears and not his horse, and when my horse shot her ears back I needed to pull back on the reigns and scold her a bit. So I tried to do that and felt good about it for a minute.

Well, as we rode, I noticed how nervous everyone else and their horses make me, and realized that I was focusing on the other horses and not mine...which could get me into serious trouble because there is NOTHING I CAN DO about what everyone else's horse is doing! Then I was grabbing on to the saddle horn and not sitting correctly in my saddle. C tried to help me think about how I needed to center my balance more with my feet and sit back further in the saddle, that really my hand could not secure me. THIS got me thinking. I thought about how I ride a horse the same way that I live my life. I try to pay attention to everyone else's horse and live defensively and self-protectively, and I hold on to so many false securities, thinking that if my hand is on them then I am in control. Such a facade.