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But Respite Sessions soon took on a life of their own. Creating non-riding sessions in a public riding school offered a sort of allowance that had been lacking up to that point. Respites permitted people, permitted the farm, to take a step back from the traditional obligation of a “riding lesson.”

Let’s normalize groundwork in our riding schools.

Don’t be like my grandfather in Russia. Take some time to learn the horse’s alphabet, and then their words. Allow the horses to guide you. And after a dutiful time of learning, you’ll figure out how to speak sentences that you and the horse fully understand.

Thanks to the talent of Jessica Marie Berggrun, the owner of Cobalt Production, we have a new logo that truly represents the look and feel of the farm’s mission.

There is an overdue paradigm shift happening in the horse world. I’m proud that Bramblewood Stables is at the forefront of that change. I no longer make excuses for what we do. Our riders leave the barn with relaxed nervous systems and some tools to better conquer the world.

This is a story about spending the night nursing a sick horse, but it is also a story about grace. Maybe the horses signed up for this job to save us on the other side of growth and progress, the place we’re at now where all our tools can’t keep our stomachs from cramping with stress. Maybe they knew with that big-hearted, intuitive knowing, that we would need their hooves and their strength, to show us how to live again in the natural world.

But horses showed me that energy moves in all sorts of ways. Forwardness was an aspect of movement, but I hadn’t spent much time taking into account the other directions energy flowed unless I was dealing with a problem: an explosive horse, a balking horse, an avoidant horse, a sidestepping, a startled horse.