How Not to Choose a Horse

In order to become a fully evolved human being, one must make choices that help achieve the maximum amount of personal growth while maintaining a reasonable level of aliveness. In other words, one’s growth is predicated on one’s survival in the choices made to achieve such new levels of achievement.

Seedy, unkempt but willing to look you right in the eye….he was irresistable!

This when one is a seasoned, reasonably mature (ok, I was pushing fifty) beginning horsewoman, perhaps the best choice in acquiring her first horse would not be the unhandled, unkempt, questionably sound wormy little yearling. That the little fellow made direct eye contact with me in a weak moment during a (literal) field trip with the Equine Management student group outing I was attending should have had no bearing on my next move. And yet before moving to Kentucky – from inner city Chicago – I had envisioned just such a horse coming into and assuming a large role in my life. Granted, I was picturing one that would be immediately ridable – but this guy popped up before that connection was made. A firm believer in fate, I took a blank check credit card companies loved sending ‘good’ customers at the time and wrote it out for the full amount.

The little guy shown with Sean a rider at the Horse Park

Thus what could conceivably become one of the biggest mistakes of my life was initiated as I handed over the $1500 sort of not-real check thing to the breeder of this quarter horse type American Paint “black and white”  (more on color later) colt. Yet as I did so I was filled with an excitement as rich as a chocolate sundae and as large as a trip around the world. I knew I would be ‘walking a walk’ that was going to take me places I had never dreamed of.

Boy! Was I ever right!