My favorite Christmas tree remains the one that got away.
All these years later, I long for its perfect shape and just-right pine needle scent. Just like the bad boy in high school whose handsome looks and charm were bolstered by the fact that he never became my boyfriend, this particular Christmas tree was one of life's flirty objects that resisted ownership. And, oh, how it broke my heart that winter, my 11-year old self bawling with a conviction reserved for devastating events. How it broke my heart that, even though the tree had been chosen and cut by us and therefore should have been erected in the Ballou home, it never got close to our living room. How it broke my heart the way it splintered and snapped into clumps of green across the half mile from the woods' edge to our barn.
In spite of what seemed like the truncation of a merry holiday season to this 11-year old standing mid-shin in a snowbank, the event did imprint me with a critical lesson. That lesson, gentle reader, was the spooky nature of horses.
In a Ballou tradition involving snowshoes, chainsaws, and a dose of parental bickering, my parents trekked with us into the woods behind our house every year around December 5. A few hours of squabbling later, we reached agreement about which tree to saw down and bring home. We all regarded this selection process seriously, given that it kicked off a season of no-holds-barred merriment and magic in our home.
To get four opinionated people to agree on the best elements of a tree is no quick task. My Dad always wanted to tallest one in the forest, never mind that it wouldn't fit inside the house. My brother wanted trees densely packed with enough branches and needles to hold up our impressive collection of ornaments. My mother, on the other hand, insisted on aesthetic balance and overall visual harmony. For her, the tree needed to be shaped exactly conical with a consistent number of branches (but not too many!) on all sides. Not too bushy, not too lean.
I, meanwhile, preferred the forest's sparse, short, and sickly looking trees probably because I felt sorry for them and wanted to bestow them with some lively joy and happiness that the rest of us felt during Christmas. Selecting a tree required compromise on every one's behalf, but mostly my father's. We never cut down a tree that was satisfactory in height for him. Even if the living room ceiling could have accommodated a 15-footer, the logistics of hauling such a behemoth home on snowshoes with two small kids in tow proved too much.
That particular year, though, my father brainstormed a new plan. Heck, we train horses for a living, he said to my mom. Why not get THEM to do the work? Why not drive Sunny, our best horse, up to the wood's edge with a sleigh and then leave him tied at the fence until we get the tree? Then, we could secure our tree in the sleigh and let Sunny do the hard work of hauling it home. Sunny had done a number of July 4 parades and competitions that involved all kinds of noise, standing around, etc., so he was the best choice for the tree harvest.
It all began quite well. We left Sunny tied to a fence post while we waded deeper into the woods through knee-high snow drifts hunting down our tree. Right on cue, the bickering started. My brother insisted we cut down one of the first trees we came to. I argued that we should wait for a more worthy one, a tree that required more hunting and effort. Then, we remembered Sunny. With a strong steed to carry home our tree this year, we all decided in a moment of selfless Christmas spirit that we should allow Dad to select the tree since his choice got voted down in past years. To this news, my chainsaw-toting father cheered up like a young boy.
Within moments, he found a healthy monster of a yule tree, a 16-foot wonder with an impressive number of branches. We Ballous stood in the cold snow beholding his tree. We each pictured how, once decorated and lit, its deep green needles and symmetry would be the envy of every party-goer at our annual holiday celebration. This was the kind of tree reserved for town squares and magazine covers. Our pride turned into giddiness as Dad fired up the chainsaw. My brother and I begged Mom to decorate it immediately when we got home. Mom, meanwhile, was too speechless by the tree's beauty to reply.
In radical departure from previous years' bickering, we all sang Christmas songs on the way back to Sunny. Dad dragged the tree with a rope harness while my brother and I trudged ahead breaking trail. We walked side by side stamping our feet hard into the snow to clear a path for the tree, so it could slide along smoothly without snagging branches or losing precious needles. It grew cold in the woods as dusk approached, but our reverence for The World's Most Perfect Tree slowed our efforts to a fine-tuned precision. When the trail cornered right or left, all four of us lifted and swung the tree around it methodically, as though this member of the forest just became our family heirloom.
Back at Sunny, we tied the tree into our Cutter sleigh, which had a flat section behind much like a pickup truck. We each secured a designated section of tree in place-- again, taking painstaking effort to preserve needles-- and then unbuckled our snowshoes and put those in the sleigh, too. My Dad checked Sunny's harness connections and then began to take up his reins and climb aboard the sleigh while the rest of us waited beside him.
It was exactly at this moment that my brother, prone to hyperactivity, surged with a jolt of unbridled Christmas spunk that he apparently could not rein in. For reasons we'll never fathom nor forgive, he bolted across the field springing through the snow like a Broadway dancer, yelping something about cookies and cocoa. His mittens flung, his snowsuit flapped, his voice echoed off the frozen tree trunks.
And Sunny freaked out.
This cookie-seeking, snow-bounding bundle of colors terrified him. Before my Dad could throw himself up into the sleigh, Sunny bolted away with our sleigh and tree attached behind him. He ran like a horse tasting freedom for the first time. He ran with no intention of stopping. Our antique sleigh bounced and jumped and split apart. Its curved runners broke into pieces, causing the sleigh to collapse onto its belly and drag across the snow until it, too, split apart one board at a time. I remember its decorative paint flaking off in peels as each board hurled through the air and settled in the snow. By now, our tree looked like green confetti. Its few remaining branches dragged behind Sunny until, arriving back at the barn, they looked like pulp. What we once envisioned as a festive promenade from woods to barn with a magnificent tree in tow now became a half -mile smear of evergreen detritus and antique sleigh splinters.
Sunny returned to the barn unscathed and we found him standing quietly in his stall munching hay, a few tattered pieces of harness hanging from his sides. Somberly, we removed the tack that his runaway had not and brushed him down. I wiped off the bit while Dad picked snow out his hooves. Nobody mentioned the tree. By now, my brother caught up to us. As disappointed as the rest of us, he asked a very legit question, the type of inquiry that repeats again and again for horsemen.
"Hey Dad," he began, "I thought you said Sunny was our BEST horse. If he's the best one, how come he freaked out?" His eyes twinkled a little as he asked, clearly finding humor in the irony that a non-verbal small-brained animal just decimated the well-laid plan of four human beings in the blink of an eye.
And therein lies the question many of us ponder in regards to our steeds. My brother's eyes grew bigger.
"What would the WORST one have done?"
Friday, December 23, 2011
Monday, October 10, 2011
An Outfit Defines the Person
Recall the last time you saw a smartly dressed man or woman gracing down the sidewalk in fabrics so finely made, they caused you a double-take. Chances are good that within your double-take, in that calculation and appreciation for such exceptional threads, you formed an idea about the person behind those clothes. With the outfit as your leaping off point, you arrived at a description of its wearer.
Just as my fellow Philosophy students and I did in ontology class, you briefly pondered what made that person who he or she was and arrived at a rough sketch. I'll argue here that one's style of dress plays a heavy role in determining that. Start with me as an example. Sometimes my idea of dressing up means pulling on a clean baseball hat. If my socks match and my pants don't show visible stains, I'm ready for a night on the town.
This fashion, or noted lack thereof, goes with my personality. I'm the type who focuses on the practical necessities in life, leaving any luxurious pining to be the fluff that I might occasionally daydream about on airplanes while flipping through magazines. I dwell in the realm of simple and basic. It never occurs to me to tailor a T-shirt for a better fit or that a hair barrette might actually MATCH my outfit. Maybe this will change, but for now it's who I am. Meanwhile, I often give lots of thought to why other people dress the way they do.
An outfit I have often pondered is the Western riding outfit. Assuming I would never in my English riding career wear such a thing unless for a Halloween party, I have frequently stared at cowgirls in their fringe-laden, blingy get-ups and wondered how practical any of that could be.
Then, I decided to enter a Western Dressage show and found myself needing to don just such an outfit. That is where the transformation began, where this new outfit began to define a new me.
First off, getting dresses required two helpers. Probably not since Fourth grade had someone else helped me put on pants, but I found the chaps too tricky to master myself. All that dangling fringe kept catching in the zipper. So, finally I let two bystanders help cram me into my clothes. One zipped the chaps on while the other shoved me underneath a cowboy hat. With a long-sleeved sparkly shirt and a pair of jangly spurs, I was ready for the arena... and very hot.
By Sacramento, CA standards it was an average summer day-- nearing 100 degrees. Inside that Western gear felt like an incubator. I peered from under the hat's enormous brim-- no easy task- and walked slowly over to where my horse stood wilting in the heat. Sleeved in glittery Lycra, my arms began to sweat. Meandering to the warm-up pen, I started to understand why Western riders often seem to be moving so slowly compared to us English folks. Normally, I would have launched into an array of high-energy warm-ups moves with my steed. Instead, we slowly limbered up and found our groove. Melting under my big stiff hat, it occurred to me why Western riders never seemed as frenetically paced as us.
Not only do they need to conserve energy lest they suffer heat exhaustion, but after investing so much time shimmying into an outfit that includes both fringe and sparkle, why not enjoy it? At shows, we English riders change back into street clothes as soon as our class finishes. We hurry out of the jackets and collars and tall boots that make most of us look like newspaper boys from the 1800's. Now that I was wearing this Lady Gaga-style Western outfit, I felt no urge to hurry back and take it off, despite sweating at a rate that guaranteed dehydration.
Long puzzling concepts began to make sense, namely the reason that things happen slowly in the Western world, and I'm not not talking about the riding. For one thing, the dialect has always struck me as exaggeratedly unrushed. Western folks use the same time to deliver their mono-syllabic equivalents of our English multi-word phrases. For instance, Western show announcers take the same time to drawl through "pen" as it takes a dressage steward to blurt out "show arena." The same amount of time for one syllable versus four. We English trainers hurry through telling our students to "apply your inside leg" in the same time a Western coach relaxes through suggesting a student "bump" her horse.
Without realizing it, by wiggling into this borrowed costume, I was sampling a world that long intrigued me. My steed and I moved at a markedly slower pace than normal. And maybe because of that, or because of the blissed out costumed feel-good of his rider, my horse offered up more relaxation and submission than he often does. Our movements were quiet and graceful. We went smoothly through our paces with our fringe and bling catching the attention, I hoped, of anyone watching. I pondered the unhurried conversations I've overheard among cowboys, their "we've-got-all-the-time-in-the-world" interactions with their horses. For this brief moment, I got a taste of that. And I'll admit that, in my snug sparkly shirt and eggplant colored chaps, I felt pretty darn cool. For one wonderful hour, I was my own John Wayne style hero-- full of smooth moves, good swagger, and long pauses.
That is what initiated this reflection about a person's fashion defining her to some extent. It might be hyperbolic to say that an outfit can change a person, but it sure helps create a mindset. In my case, it helped me leap across the Great Divide of equestrian sports: English vs. Western. Had I always viewed that other discipline while clad in my tight breeches and polo shirt, I would have continued to see it as, well, a bit funny. By adopting the look and feel of it for a day, though, I experienced it genuinely. Having done so, I experienced that I long suspected: that we each have tons to learn from each other if we can be open-minded.
It's not that I want to close the chasm between us so that we share one world. Rather, I actually like the separation because it allows riders to fit in wherever they feel most comfortable. I would just like us all to be open and accepting of each other in different disciplines. Plus, I want the opportunity to cross-dress my way through each one. Er, I mean cross-train.
Just as my fellow Philosophy students and I did in ontology class, you briefly pondered what made that person who he or she was and arrived at a rough sketch. I'll argue here that one's style of dress plays a heavy role in determining that. Start with me as an example. Sometimes my idea of dressing up means pulling on a clean baseball hat. If my socks match and my pants don't show visible stains, I'm ready for a night on the town.
This fashion, or noted lack thereof, goes with my personality. I'm the type who focuses on the practical necessities in life, leaving any luxurious pining to be the fluff that I might occasionally daydream about on airplanes while flipping through magazines. I dwell in the realm of simple and basic. It never occurs to me to tailor a T-shirt for a better fit or that a hair barrette might actually MATCH my outfit. Maybe this will change, but for now it's who I am. Meanwhile, I often give lots of thought to why other people dress the way they do.
An outfit I have often pondered is the Western riding outfit. Assuming I would never in my English riding career wear such a thing unless for a Halloween party, I have frequently stared at cowgirls in their fringe-laden, blingy get-ups and wondered how practical any of that could be.
Then, I decided to enter a Western Dressage show and found myself needing to don just such an outfit. That is where the transformation began, where this new outfit began to define a new me.
First off, getting dresses required two helpers. Probably not since Fourth grade had someone else helped me put on pants, but I found the chaps too tricky to master myself. All that dangling fringe kept catching in the zipper. So, finally I let two bystanders help cram me into my clothes. One zipped the chaps on while the other shoved me underneath a cowboy hat. With a long-sleeved sparkly shirt and a pair of jangly spurs, I was ready for the arena... and very hot.
By Sacramento, CA standards it was an average summer day-- nearing 100 degrees. Inside that Western gear felt like an incubator. I peered from under the hat's enormous brim-- no easy task- and walked slowly over to where my horse stood wilting in the heat. Sleeved in glittery Lycra, my arms began to sweat. Meandering to the warm-up pen, I started to understand why Western riders often seem to be moving so slowly compared to us English folks. Normally, I would have launched into an array of high-energy warm-ups moves with my steed. Instead, we slowly limbered up and found our groove. Melting under my big stiff hat, it occurred to me why Western riders never seemed as frenetically paced as us.
Not only do they need to conserve energy lest they suffer heat exhaustion, but after investing so much time shimmying into an outfit that includes both fringe and sparkle, why not enjoy it? At shows, we English riders change back into street clothes as soon as our class finishes. We hurry out of the jackets and collars and tall boots that make most of us look like newspaper boys from the 1800's. Now that I was wearing this Lady Gaga-style Western outfit, I felt no urge to hurry back and take it off, despite sweating at a rate that guaranteed dehydration.
Long puzzling concepts began to make sense, namely the reason that things happen slowly in the Western world, and I'm not not talking about the riding. For one thing, the dialect has always struck me as exaggeratedly unrushed. Western folks use the same time to deliver their mono-syllabic equivalents of our English multi-word phrases. For instance, Western show announcers take the same time to drawl through "pen" as it takes a dressage steward to blurt out "show arena." The same amount of time for one syllable versus four. We English trainers hurry through telling our students to "apply your inside leg" in the same time a Western coach relaxes through suggesting a student "bump" her horse.
Without realizing it, by wiggling into this borrowed costume, I was sampling a world that long intrigued me. My steed and I moved at a markedly slower pace than normal. And maybe because of that, or because of the blissed out costumed feel-good of his rider, my horse offered up more relaxation and submission than he often does. Our movements were quiet and graceful. We went smoothly through our paces with our fringe and bling catching the attention, I hoped, of anyone watching. I pondered the unhurried conversations I've overheard among cowboys, their "we've-got-all-the-time-in-the-world" interactions with their horses. For this brief moment, I got a taste of that. And I'll admit that, in my snug sparkly shirt and eggplant colored chaps, I felt pretty darn cool. For one wonderful hour, I was my own John Wayne style hero-- full of smooth moves, good swagger, and long pauses.
That is what initiated this reflection about a person's fashion defining her to some extent. It might be hyperbolic to say that an outfit can change a person, but it sure helps create a mindset. In my case, it helped me leap across the Great Divide of equestrian sports: English vs. Western. Had I always viewed that other discipline while clad in my tight breeches and polo shirt, I would have continued to see it as, well, a bit funny. By adopting the look and feel of it for a day, though, I experienced it genuinely. Having done so, I experienced that I long suspected: that we each have tons to learn from each other if we can be open-minded.
It's not that I want to close the chasm between us so that we share one world. Rather, I actually like the separation because it allows riders to fit in wherever they feel most comfortable. I would just like us all to be open and accepting of each other in different disciplines. Plus, I want the opportunity to cross-dress my way through each one. Er, I mean cross-train.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Seeing is Believing
Right there in yoga class, my mind and body formed a conspiracy against me. For thirty seconds, I held plank pose in what felt like a perfect imitation of a yoga master. I felt the straight line of my back and long neck, the open spread of my chest and shoulders, palms pressing firmly into the ground yet not straining. It all felt correct and effortless, maybe even graceful.
Then I glanced to the right at a mirror next to me. Whoa, was that hunched up, straining figure ME? My rounded back looked like a turtle shell; my shoulders slumped and chest collapsed. That girl in the mirror couldn't possibly be me. Where was the grace, the long straight spine? That girl looked like Quasimodo crawling up the steps at Notre Dame.
I turned away so I could focus on feeling my body again. Wiggling a little here and there, I fixed the problems and knew that surely now I was close to perfection. For validation, I turned again to the mirror. WHAT?! Nothing changed from before. A lip-biting, sloppy hunchback gazed back at me.
Obviously, my body was betraying me. How could something feel so different from the way it was actually happening? Initially, I thought this trickery might be karmic payback for the lessons I've taught in which I end up being the equivalent of the yoga mirror for students. A common exchange goes like this:
Student: But my leg IS back.
Me: No, it's not. It really is not.
Student: It MUST be. It feels so far back.
Me: No. It's not even close.
These exchanges, while indeed necessary for a student's learning, leave me feeling like a buzz-kill. I end up being a messenger of negativity at the moment someone thinks she is doing really well. Everything feels great, her body is giving feedback that she's succeeding, and then I come along and tell her that her body is lying.
Too often, I deliver these bubble-bursting tidbits into the gaze of a wide-eyed student, whose blank expression says "but...but... how can that possibly be?" Their innocent stare wonders for a moment if perhaps I am lying. Maybe I just want to deflate their egos and make them work harder. Or I'm just a mean person. Let me assure you, devoted students, that I had similar thoughts about the cruel mirror in yoga class. Was this some kind of prank?, I pondered. Did the mirror need cleaning? Or maybe it was foggy.
No. It was the age-old curse of being human. I call this flawed human reality the curse of being deceived by our bodies. Thus, the events we are certain we've created have not actually happened. So, even though my spine feels long and straight, it is not that way at all. It is, more accurately, slumped, hunched, compressed.
Dispelling my belief that this disparity was due to karmic payback, I read the scientific explanation behind it last week. As it turns out, human brains are wired for eternal frustration, at least in the case of learning motor skills. The region of our brains that know how to perform a physical task differs from the region that signals neurons to create movements for tasks. The part of your brain that tells you how to perform sitting trot, for example, is different than the part that triggers impulses to get the job done. You can tell yourself to stretch thighs down and back, keep your eyes up, elbows at your side, and so on. But this does not, unfortunately, translate to the right results.
This mis-wiring of brain and body certainly monkey wrenches our attempts to learn technical sports like horseback riding, where so much depends on the feedback of body sensations. It's just plain unfair, in fact. On my bike ride home from yoga class, I contemplated this. I wondered what good could possibly exist in this way that our brains work (or don't work) with our bodies. It definitely impedes our learning process. And it can wreak havoc on our notion of progress, not to mention the demoralizing of our egos.
Then, I remembered watching a video clip from a recent schooling session with a young horse. The schooling session had felt okay but not great, so I got home expecting I already knew what was on the video my student shot. However, her video clip revealed a much better session. My horse LOOKED a lot better than he FELT. I watched the television pleasantly surprised. As footage reeled, my smile grew. A genuine contentment claimed me. Instantly, I was thoroughly satisfied with the horse's schooling, even though moments before watching this footage I felt nagging discontent.
Moments like these, I realized, make the mis-wiring of our brains and bodies not only tolerable but preferable. Like an unexpected gift, these moments tell us that we're doing a whole lot better than we thought we were. They change our reality from usual self-bashing "This is not going well, I should quit while I'm ahead" to a self-congratulating "Hey, look at me, I'm pretty awesome!"
What's better than that? I argue that few things come close in terms of delivering happiness. The sudden surprising evidence that, no, you are not doing a terrible job but are in fact excelling, deserves our appreciation. So, to the Gods of evolution, I would like to say thank you. Thanks for our flawed human creation, for our strangely functioning brains. Thank you for bodies that defy our commands and for brains that can't tell when they do. But most of all, thanks for when this works in our favor and leaves us feeling awesome.
Then I glanced to the right at a mirror next to me. Whoa, was that hunched up, straining figure ME? My rounded back looked like a turtle shell; my shoulders slumped and chest collapsed. That girl in the mirror couldn't possibly be me. Where was the grace, the long straight spine? That girl looked like Quasimodo crawling up the steps at Notre Dame.
I turned away so I could focus on feeling my body again. Wiggling a little here and there, I fixed the problems and knew that surely now I was close to perfection. For validation, I turned again to the mirror. WHAT?! Nothing changed from before. A lip-biting, sloppy hunchback gazed back at me.
Obviously, my body was betraying me. How could something feel so different from the way it was actually happening? Initially, I thought this trickery might be karmic payback for the lessons I've taught in which I end up being the equivalent of the yoga mirror for students. A common exchange goes like this:
Student: But my leg IS back.
Me: No, it's not. It really is not.
Student: It MUST be. It feels so far back.
Me: No. It's not even close.
These exchanges, while indeed necessary for a student's learning, leave me feeling like a buzz-kill. I end up being a messenger of negativity at the moment someone thinks she is doing really well. Everything feels great, her body is giving feedback that she's succeeding, and then I come along and tell her that her body is lying.
Too often, I deliver these bubble-bursting tidbits into the gaze of a wide-eyed student, whose blank expression says "but...but... how can that possibly be?" Their innocent stare wonders for a moment if perhaps I am lying. Maybe I just want to deflate their egos and make them work harder. Or I'm just a mean person. Let me assure you, devoted students, that I had similar thoughts about the cruel mirror in yoga class. Was this some kind of prank?, I pondered. Did the mirror need cleaning? Or maybe it was foggy.
No. It was the age-old curse of being human. I call this flawed human reality the curse of being deceived by our bodies. Thus, the events we are certain we've created have not actually happened. So, even though my spine feels long and straight, it is not that way at all. It is, more accurately, slumped, hunched, compressed.
Dispelling my belief that this disparity was due to karmic payback, I read the scientific explanation behind it last week. As it turns out, human brains are wired for eternal frustration, at least in the case of learning motor skills. The region of our brains that know how to perform a physical task differs from the region that signals neurons to create movements for tasks. The part of your brain that tells you how to perform sitting trot, for example, is different than the part that triggers impulses to get the job done. You can tell yourself to stretch thighs down and back, keep your eyes up, elbows at your side, and so on. But this does not, unfortunately, translate to the right results.
This mis-wiring of brain and body certainly monkey wrenches our attempts to learn technical sports like horseback riding, where so much depends on the feedback of body sensations. It's just plain unfair, in fact. On my bike ride home from yoga class, I contemplated this. I wondered what good could possibly exist in this way that our brains work (or don't work) with our bodies. It definitely impedes our learning process. And it can wreak havoc on our notion of progress, not to mention the demoralizing of our egos.
Then, I remembered watching a video clip from a recent schooling session with a young horse. The schooling session had felt okay but not great, so I got home expecting I already knew what was on the video my student shot. However, her video clip revealed a much better session. My horse LOOKED a lot better than he FELT. I watched the television pleasantly surprised. As footage reeled, my smile grew. A genuine contentment claimed me. Instantly, I was thoroughly satisfied with the horse's schooling, even though moments before watching this footage I felt nagging discontent.
Moments like these, I realized, make the mis-wiring of our brains and bodies not only tolerable but preferable. Like an unexpected gift, these moments tell us that we're doing a whole lot better than we thought we were. They change our reality from usual self-bashing "This is not going well, I should quit while I'm ahead" to a self-congratulating "Hey, look at me, I'm pretty awesome!"
What's better than that? I argue that few things come close in terms of delivering happiness. The sudden surprising evidence that, no, you are not doing a terrible job but are in fact excelling, deserves our appreciation. So, to the Gods of evolution, I would like to say thank you. Thanks for our flawed human creation, for our strangely functioning brains. Thank you for bodies that defy our commands and for brains that can't tell when they do. But most of all, thanks for when this works in our favor and leaves us feeling awesome.
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