I will call her Squishy

“And she will be mine and she will be my Squishy Squishy…”

Severe Thunderstorms were blowing across the Missouri/Kansas border, but Nutmeg and I had a scheduled dressage lesson and by golly, we were going to get our monies worth.

We’ve made some really big break throughs over the winter considering how little we were actually able to ride.  Nutmeg has gone from a stiff board, pulling herself and me with her around the arena with very little influence accepted from me, to a much more manageable animal.  We started with getting her jaw unlocked and explaining that you can rotate your head on the end of your neck.  Next we got our half halts working a bit better and focused on allowing her back to come up in downward transitions.  Then it was time to unlock the shoulders and make them a bit more mobile.  I suddenly had a much more rideable horse and it was awesome.  Then Spring hit.

I don’t know what it is about spring, but it was like the last three months of breaks throughs were blown away on the very healthy continuous breeze.  We needed a lesson, if only to help me regain my sanity.  So of course, the sane thing to do was to haul an hour and take a lesson during a thunderstorm with straight line winds and small hail.

I’ll profess that I didn’t hear a lot of that lesson, but sometimes it isn’t about hearing the instructor.  After every lesson, we take the instruction and put it into practice; I just had to do it a bit quicker than normal.  It was nice to be able to puzzle through things with the confidence that if I really started messing up someone was watching and would stop me.  It made for a very different atmosphere.

I’m happy to report that even with all the distractions Mother Nature was creating, we were able to add yet another building block.  It’s funny.  I’ve been familiar with the dressage training for years and years, but now I feel like I am actually learning how to create each step on the scale.  Each lesson lays another brick by dealing with a different hole in our pyramid.

In this particular lesson, we spent the first twenty minutes or so suppling Nutmeg behind the loins.  We worked in leg yield head to the wall, then transitioned that to haunches-in.  I’m still struggling mentally with the concept of diagonal aids, but as always, I think it’s because I’m trying to over-do and over-think.  When mom’s confused, Nutmeg’s really at a loss, but it’s coming.  We actually had several good steps.  It’s just going to take some time.

Then we trotted.  Every single second we spent crawling around the arena step-by-step was worth it when we picked up the trot.  In a word, it was “squishy.”  Malleable, has never been a word I would use to describe Nutmeg but suddenly I was riding a pile of Jell-O.  Just the right amount of surface tension to create bouncy, but completely pliable in every direction.  I think my grin probably created stretch lines on the back of my scalp.

The bar has been raised yet again and I have a step-by-step plan on how to reach it.  This is such an exciting adventure.  Nutmeg is now my squishy and has earned herself a new nick-name, the FlufferNutter.  I may be making shirts.  I know it’s silly, but sometimes that’s okay.  So this Fresh Perspective comes from the FlufferNutter, “Sometimes you have to ride through the Thunder in order to float in the clouds.”