As a side note, I feel like I'm destined to have a beer with Tom Petty at some point in my life. I think he could hang.

Today I got to work between the pillars for the first time!

It is a shame that the experience was so brief!

Also that, at the time, I was doing my best Beaker impersonation. 

The important thing is that neither I nor the horse hit either of the pillars (which look pretty substantial. Think: the sort of pipes you would find on the interior of a submarine sunk into concrete blocks below the (probably expensive, but not my favorite) footing.) As an added bonus, I stayed on! Through that, and also through a couple of subsequent opportunities for me to work on my best Muppet impersonation. Which was long enough for us to do some 10m & 20m circles in both directions, try a bunch of walk/trot/halt transitions, etc - "work through it", basically. Which also gave me enough time to reason the situation out. My thought process went roughly like this:

"The horse is counter-flexing like mad when I try to bend him to the left, and I don't give a flying fuck what the instructor says about my wall of aids, that isn't just my wonky rein management and ineffective legs. Dude cannot bend to the left to save his or my life, and he wasn't like that when I rode him a couple of days ago, and I don't give a good goddamn what the instructor says, it has nothing to do with stiff and hollow. Or even submission! This horse isn't right. And he's a powder keg looking for a match. And this instructor has a blind eye for this fucker that Stevie Wonder would scoff at. I am getting off and hand-walking him out. And no, I'm not gonna feed him sugar cubes! What, are you people nuts?!" 

I didn't explain it quite so eloquently at the time, and I'm sure I didn't look composed or classy, but I didn't let myself get browbeaten with the whole "you need to learn to ride through this" spiel. No, actually, I don't. I'm not the professional. I'm the one writing the checks. And everyone at that facility has had ample opportunity to see me ride and work with horses. They can draw their own conclusions. I will be there Monday morning as per usual for my lesson with Mr. Mustache and Thais the Good Egg, with shiny boots and a big smile. I've got ten more rides coming to me, and I'm going to take every one. Put me on the dead schoolie horses. Heck, put me on the sorta crazies. I don't care. But I don't need to learn this lesson twice.

I Will Stand. My. Ground. And I Won't. Back. Down.

And yes, Mr. Mustache and Thais the Good Egg are both fabulous, as are many of the other two-foots & four-hooves I've met over here. This particular equine/human pair aren't bad either. It's just not a good situation and I'm not going to play along with something that A) I think is dangerous, and B) doesn't seem right. (In the interests of fairness, I should point out that the instructor does have a very long history with this horse, and that, while the horses are all well taken care of, and there are a fair number of older guys still in active work, I don't get the sense that they've turned one of the back pastures into a horse version of Boca Raton for the retirees. So, the stakes are high for them. But I'm going to file that one under Not My Problem, since I'm a little more concerned about not having to figure out my health insurance coverage in the emergency room of a foreign country.)

I do swear up and down and backward and forward that, in the future, the angst and worry is only going to be about the trauma of shoulder leading in the leg-yield and "circle needs more round."

Speak to you soon!

-Beth