Decode Horsemanship

06/17/2026

No Reins — This Saturday, June 20th

A few spots left for this Saturday's No Reins workshop.

Half a day, 10am–2pm. Ground-based, no riding. Small group, women only. No sharing circle, no agenda — just time with a horse who can't be fooled by a good mood you're faking or a bad one you're hiding.

If you've been the one holding everything together for everyone else, or you used to love horses and haven't been around one in years — this is built for that.

Saturday, 10–2. A few spots remain.

No costume. No one to perform for. Just you, and a horse who can't be fooled.

06/17/2026

Found her on the ground by an open stall door. Tired. Maybe she'd come in trying to find her way out and just couldn't get back to the air.

I picked her up. She sat in my hand for a long minute, eyes closing, breathing.

And then she went.

I think about how often the right answer at the barn is to just stop, hold something gently, and wait.

06/15/2026

We hadn't formally taught Glitch the word "whoa."

But she'd been listening. Mustangs always are.

After a session, I looped her lead, said the word, and walked away. She stood. Ten minutes later she was still standing — even when another horse and rider went through the gate beside her and headed off to the arena.

She just stayed.

I tell people all the time: a horse who pays attention will teach you what they've been learning when you weren't watching.

She knew the word. I just hadn't asked yet.

06/12/2026

The truck is at the shop with a blown transmission. The horses are at home with normal-sized appetites.

So I picked up a load of alfalfa in my Jeep.

The Jeep will recover. Eventually. When I am also dead and someone is cleaning out my car for an estate sale, they will find hay.

06/10/2026

Three photos. One topic.

Slide 1: A horse — name redacted to protect the guilty — put a hoof through this trough. Hoof-shaped hole. Beautiful work, honestly. Ten out of ten craftsmanship for chaos.

Slide 2: A trough I filled and walked away from, only to return at the exact moment it crested perfectly full. The water-running-while-everyone-forgets joke is universal in horse barns. This time, I won.

Slide 3: One of our horses, Ethan — and his mother — have a habit of finding small dead things in their water buckets. We call them the savages. This mouse will not be the last.

Owning horses means having strong opinions about water containers.

06/08/2026

We don't live at the barn. But sometimes the barn becomes home for a night.

The kids slept in tents. My oldest drove out to join us in his car, parked it like a true drive-in patron, and we projected Twisters onto the side of the building.

The horses, who do live at the barn, watched from a distance with the calm bemusement of creatures who have seen humans do many ridiculous things.

This is one of the ones that was worth it.

06/05/2026

First photo: a young rider, leaning into Misty's neck with her whole heart, before getting on for the first time.

Second and third: she's up. She sat. She breathed. She got off.

That was the whole goal for the day. Not a ride. Not a lesson. Just: someone got on Misty, and Misty was okay, and the rider was okay, and the moment ended on a good note.

Big things are made of small ones.

06/03/2026

First photo: Glitch wearing tack for one of the first real times. Western saddle, watching everything, sorting through it.

Second photo: same horse a while later. Bridle on for the first time. Standing like she's done it a thousand times before.

She hasn't.

What she has done is pay attention. Mustangs who pay attention learn fast, because every piece of new information gets filed away instead of feared.

Watching her decide to trust the work — that's the part I do this for.
saddle

06/02/2026

First night with us. Camera caught what I couldn't see standing next to her.

Her foal is in there. Moving. Real. Check out near 18 seconds and 23 seconds.

I watched this clip twenty times before I went to bed.

06/01/2026

Desensitization work doesn't always look like what people think it looks like.

Sometimes it looks like a stud c**t standing patiently while bubbles drift past his face, his ears flicked half-forward in mild interest, his entire body saying "I do not understand what is happening but I have decided it's fine."

That last sentence is, honestly, the goal of most desensitization work.

This is BlackJack. He's getting better at the world.
**t