Spring/Summer Events at Bramblewood

The refurbished website is up and running at www.bramblewoodstables.com , but check back here for in depth content and all the upcoming special events in one spot.

Upcoming Bramblewood Events and Camps:

Spring Schooling Show: Early June (TBA)

Summer Camp Dates 2013
June 11-14
June 25-28
July 9-12
July 23-26
August 6-9
August 13-16

Contact Kim for more details either by responding to this post or sending her a message at bramblewoodstables@gmail.com or 864-363-3727

Unmounted lessons are an integral part of the learning process.

With all the rain we’ve had in 2013, some parents have asked why we stress taking a barn lesson rather than taking the week off or rescheduling. As someone who has dedicated their life to the care of horses, your instructor has a unique perspective on the invaluable benefit of taking time to learn the care and management of a horse. Rainy days give us an hour of uninterrupted time to learn the countless tasks that allow a horse to actually be ridable. Modern life has made the horse solely dependent on our care, a clockwork routine that does not allow breaks or holidays.

In advanced work under saddle, the rider cannot progress up the ranks without first learning where the hock is located in the legs or where the horse’s neck is flexed: is it at the poll? If so, how much? Barn lessons lead to the advanced work under saddle that so many riders strive for over the years. Within the regular weekly lesson slots, rainy days give us a perfect opportunity to prepare for more advanced work in the saddle. That preparation occurs, of all places, on the ground.

Do we ever doubt a veterinarian’s knowledge or skill because they don’t ride a horse during diagnosis? Nope, it all takes place on the ground. Barn lessons are like feeding your inner vet for a fraction of the cost of vet school.

Those who don’t personally own a horse seldom realize that 95 percent of the rider’s time is spent … not riding, but taking care of their horse. Care can mean many things: grooming, medical problem shooting, feeding, leading out to the paddock and back in, grazing, quiet time spent simply building a relationship with a horse, countless hours spent taking care of the tack and equipment. When Rachel Neese rode for Virginia Intermont College, she was expected to spend at least three hours in preparation for, participating, and finishing up for every one-hour ride.

Thinking of a lesson horse as a simply a riding horse is like, to use a human example, an employee who is never allowed to take a break or vacation unless they are sleeping. Think of how much your working life is improved by the relationships you’ve built with the people in your workplace and by the hours you have with your family when you’re not on the job. Think of all the hours you spent studying in college or learning your trade. Horses are a lot like us. No one likes working for the manager, the thankless task master, who fails to take our needs into consideration. Barn lessons allow the rider, by a minimal investment of time and resources, to understand what it is they’re managing when they’re back in the saddle. Hours on the ground are the surest path to more value for the lesson hours we spend riding.

When Sarah Boudreaux first started teaching at Bramblewood, she asked if she could sign up for a day of feeding and cleaning stalls. To understand the school horses and to better serve her students in the ring, she wanted to know the farm from the inside out. Her days routinely started at 6am with morning feeding and went straight through to 8 or 9pm when she was teaching a full schedule in the evenings. Whether it was raining or snowing, she had 24 stalls to clean and a wealth of new information to pass along to her students.

Here is Sarah’s perspective on unmounted lessons, straight from the experience of a rider who was once a weekly lesson student before buying her own horse, selling that horse, taking on a training project and organically becoming the valued equine professional that she now is:

I imagine that even most instructors don’t want to teach barn lessons. We know most students would ‘rather be riding’ and it’s hard to build enthusiasm to teach people who are half listening as they gaze at the sky, searching for any sign that the weather might break. Then the duct tape, tack soap and sponges come out, maybe someone brings a snack to share. There’s laughter as kids meet and talk to students who ride with other instructors. They ask good questions and help each other figure things out. Barn lessons are actually fun. Heightening the social experience of barn life.

Students who only come to the barn to ride can become fabulous riders but will never achieve true horsemanship. True horsemanship demands awareness. Awareness of the horse as a living breathing animal that needs time and attention, gets sick, hungry, worries, has friends, dies. Awareness of how your tack functions, how it is put together, how it’s use can help or hurt your riding experience. Awareness of the barn itself. The barn requires constant care. Boards must be replaced to prevent injury, water buckets and feed pans must be scrubbed; the list is endless.

The rider who comes ‘just to ride’ will be a functional rider but remain ignorant of all that is required to make that ride possible. They may never fully understand why the horses behave as they do or why certain choices are made for them. They are at greater risk of seeing the horse as machine and riding without understanding or empathy towards their partner.

Students who fully engage in barn lessons begin to become true partners with the barn and the horses. The heightened awareness creates a more observant rider. No longer do they grab a horse and march it to the cross ties for a quick brush but they walk with the horse and groom quickly but carefully, looking for signs of lameness, scratches or anything out of the ordinary. They know and understand the signs of illness as they walk through the barn. They might even take the initiative to empty and scrub a water bucket that doesn’t look quite right. The things that we discuss and do during a barn lesson helps the rider to become more confident and independent in their choices. They simply know better how and why things work.

To sum it all up, before you make the decision to stay home and cozy on a rainy afternoon, understand that your rider might be missing out on some important life lessons and team building opportunities that can only really be gained through broadening their knowledge and skill on the ground with their horse. Your tires might get a little muddy down the driveway, but the horses are waiting in the barn to reveal their secrets.

Please know, we are always ready to reschedule in dangerous conditions or when a rider’s health would be negatively impacted by being out in the elements. For all the other days, have some grocery bags on hands to slip over muddy shoes as your rider gets into the car and chances are that rider will be beaming and filled with information to share that will go a long way toward helping them realize their goals in the saddle.

State of the Farm Address 2012

Sunrise at the farm

The sun rises in the front of the house and sets in the back. I notice these things now that I’m living at the farm full-time.

We’ve had such a long/short year of sick and broken things.  My annual State of the Farm address in years past noted how long we’d gone without a colic (knock wood) or a lameness or a wound, but things were only fine on the surface.  The façade was intact, but there was so little that was real or true.  Life isn’t about things not being wrong – it’s about how we deal with the lot we’ve been given. (I think I just copied an eCard).  Having walked through some pretty intense illnesses this year, both with the horses and the humans, I am more connected to the heart of things than I ever was in the past.  I’ve witnessed the incredible spirit of our barn family first hand and I know I am surrounded by some rare and genuine people.  The answer always comes. It might have four feet or two; it might blow in on a gust of wind, but it comes, quietly, without any herald or fanfare.

I’d emailed a friend in one of those moments of desperation, up at dawn with a sick horse.  I asked her what our string of bad luck meant.  She offered some words of wisdom that kept the question with me. I needed to turn my attention to the things that truly mattered.

I have time now to relish tiny, vastly important things that used to be a headache when I lived across town and was always trying to hurry up and close up the barn and head home.

Matilda has a habit of getting her feet stuck in buckets. This draft cross mare is HUGE and her ability to stand in a full water bucket hanging from the wall as she craned her neck to watch for the feed cart passing is the stuff of legends, and a vice that forced me to keep her in a paddock for several years. She’s older now and has been back in a stall at night for a while, but twice we’ve altered the hanging of her buckets after finding her standing, quietly, with a foot raised out in front of her in salute, stuck in a bucket. She doesn’t panic. I have a lot to learn from Matilda about how to manage stress. But if she panicked she would be able to release herself by breaking the hay string our last fete of bucket engineering brought us. We’ve tried hanging them low; we’ve tried hanging them high. Matilda just stands there – on three legs — waiting for someone to feed her and possibly free her as an afterthought. She’s in it for the food.

So we installed a Rubbermaid container as a makeshift trough in her stall. I figure the worse she could do is flood her floor or stand in the container. You can read more about Matilda’s bucket antics at Sarah Boudreaux’s Matilda Project blog.

Last night as I was giving hay and closing up, I realized her bucket was filthy, so she might have been standing in it, or some bedding was thrown around when her stall was being cleaned. Having nowhere else to be, I didn’t have to wait until the morning for weekly water scrubbing, so I bailed the trough out bucket by bucket as Matilda munched hay and watched me like a movie or a sports show — Human Moves Buckets. I rinsed the trough out and waited for it to fill. She curved her head around and stared at me.

So I pressed my ear against her side and listened to her stomach. She breathed and I breathed and pressed closer into the thick, giant, warmth of her. Having the time, finally, to think and to press close, I became acutely aware of the creature’s whole sixteen hundred pounds, amazed that she’s fine with me being there with her, sharing hay and water.

I’m more conscious of water use in the house now that I’m off city water in my normal, doing dishes/laundry, human-time. We’re vastly conservative in our water use at the farm, being on a well. It makes me think of all the sacred wells I’ve visited in Turkey, Russia, Portugal. Blessed water that was hauled bucket by bucket for normal, human-things: washing dishes, doing laundry, drinking. Living at the farm, drinking from this well, reminds me to turn the water off when I’m brushing my teeth, to soap dishes up and rinse them, separately, together. The horses and I share the same water for living now and that communion makes every drop of it a prayer.

When I was at one my lowest points a few years ago, another friend offered the best advice, “Take some time to pet dogs every day.”  As we head into a new year and new adventures, I wish all of you the time to do tiny, vastly important things. Look for something thirsty and give it water.

Or as Neil Gaiman says much better in his children’s book, Instructions:

However,
if any creature tells you that it hungers,
feed it.
If it tells you that it is dirty,
clean it.
If it cries to you that it hurts,
if you can,
ease its pain.
From the back garden you will be able to see the wild wood.

Unseen Paths

A couple months back I asked our Bramblewood regulars to send me their thoughts on what the barn means to them.  We’re in the process of completely revamping our website and logo (many thanks to Cyberfluent, a local business that took on that challenge) – essentially, putting the Bramblewood vibe into words.  This should be an easy undertaking for a bunch of writers, but there’s so much of what we do that doesn’t have words.  There’s so much of what we do that’s different from what we did three years ago.  We’ve arrived at the place we’ve always needed to be and I can say, with certainty, what we are and what we do, finally, comes with no apologies.  I’ve lived the other side of the horse world the better part of my life, and how peaceful the horses are now without a training agenda that’s dictated by show results.  We might travel out occasionally, but we can now make the choice to do it because we truly enjoy being with each other, with our horses, and we go armed with the knowledge that we’re fully prepared for the job.

Laura Paradis bought her horse Demetrias thinking she was getting a field hunter who would jump the rest of his gorgeous, old-style, Roman-nosed, thoroughbred life.  She did her homework.  She splurged on an extensive pre-purchase exam after an extended trial period.  She’d done everything by the book before she signed the purchase agreement.  Demetrias had been Laura’s companion for less than a year when she noticed his eyes — they’d changed, appearing cloudy.  She treated him for allergies and flushed his nasal passages.  She kept jumping him even when one of those fences ended sideways with her underneath him in the sand.  It took a random cut that needed stitching and a visit from a vet who was on call for the weekend to discover that the changes in Demetrias’ eyes were the first-stages of degenerative blindness.  You can read all about Laura’s journey with Demetrias at her blog Unseen Paths: Riding Blind.

A very long story short: Laura chose to treat Demetrias’ moonblindness and by doing so, she had to change her agenda for her riding and for her life.  We know so very little about this disease, though it’s the oldest recorded in human or animal history, because most people choose to walk away from their horses when they’ve reached the end of their planned use.  Laura chose, instead, to change her plans.  Demetrias trots poles by voice command these days.  He’s fully blind, but he can walk/trot/canter and ride a Training Level test with the best of them.  He’s still a thoroughbred.  He still has days when his energy level does not mesh with his lack of sight, but when that occurs, Laura takes a step back and gives him a little canter on the lunge or simply allows him to walk with her in the saddle.

Demetrias was diagnosed at a time when I had to take a long, hard look at what we were doing with the horses and what Bramblewood Stables was truly meant to be.  In our old path, I would have advised Laura to farm Demetrias out as a pasture ornament, or encouraged her to put him down.  But the new paradigm allowed me to think in an entirely different way — learning to work through our shortcomings, and the horses limitations, to design individual paths that might not follow the old models of living with, working with and showing horses.

Demetrias’ journey allowed me to create the Bramblewood we have today.

That was a very long story to lead into this excerpt Laura sent me about what Bramblewood means to her.  Thank you so much for sharing your words with us, Laura. (And just so the rest of you know, the reason we crawled around in the loft with a meat thermometer — for weeks –was beacause the hay supplier at the time sent a batch of wet hay that was growing hotter by the minute as it cured):

I discovered Bramblewood Stables one chilly Wednesday night in late February of 2008. I had been away from a stable and regular riding for over a year after moving from Ohio and missing it sorely. My search in Greenville was a trying one because I wasn’t very familiar with the geography so I would find a stable online and get all excited and then realize it was over an hour away and re-start my search.

I visited stables in Greenville that were too fancy and some that were in the middle of a muddy field with no other place to ride. There were places that expected me to ride the one horse they had available that no one else would ride and to pay a pretty high price for it and not one of them had the “feel” that I was looking for.

My Internet search did not originally produce Bramblewood Stables but the trusty yellow pages did. By the time I made that phone call ultimately to Kim, I was kind of done. I was sick of searching and being disappointed and I didn’t have a huge budget or amount of time to work with. I was beginning to think my saddle would be a permanent living room ornament.

The night after I left what I am sure was a weird and convoluted message trying to describe what I was looking for I got this amazing phone message in response. Kim was running into a meeting but outlined what the stable was like briefly and sounded so inviting I played it for my roommate and couldn’t stop grinning. Already this place sounded promising and was not a million miles away.

So, back to that chilly night in February. I stopped out after school just to check the place out. It was around 6 but already fairly dark out but they were getting ready for the Wednesday night lesson. I know there were other riders but the only one I remember is Maggy. She was on a horse who I later learned to be Norman. I didn’t really ever get to know Maggy when she had Norman. Our friendship started when she had Bentley. There were several other riders and Kim was bundled up and ready to teach and so Mihran is the one who showed me the horses and talked about the lesson program. He is who I rode with in the beginning. Gail was a boarder and just looked at me with a smile and said, “You will love it here.”

Re: Thinking Education

Originally published on the Wofford College Re: Thinking Education alumni blog, I’m re-posting this here so I can keep track of it.  The Re: Thinking Education initiative is a: ”…year-long conversation about the liberal arts, higher education, and Wofford College. During the 2012-13 academic year, Wofford will join the current national conversation about the crucial role of the liberal arts in American higher education.”

When Wofford queried alumni to send in their own stories about how a liberal arts education had shaped their lives, I knew this was the perfect chance for me to put the Bramblewood Stables story into words.

Here it is:

I often joke after staying up all night with a sick horse, after repairing freeze-damaged plumbing, after cleaning a stall:  this is my Wofford diploma at work.  But I’m really not kidding. A liberal arts education is, to me, a method of inquiry, of living, that allows me to assimilate knowledge, often from the most unlikely and disparate sources.  Wofford taught me how to learn.

When I thought about opening a riding stable, I asked myself how I could re-create the intellectual atmosphere I discovered at Wofford.  How could I make that atmosphere available to children who might not be able to attend college?

I founded Bramblewood Stables, Inc. under the premise that a liberal arts education does not begin in college.  The close-knit community of the horse world is a type of secondary education that arrives, for many children, while they’re still in elementary school. The seed of my own philosophical inquiries began around a barn when I was a young girl striving to find communication with another species in riding lessons, cleaning stalls, or distributing grain and hay in early morning feedings to mitigate the cost of those lessons.

When I am an Old Horsewoman

Just the Beginning

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of  love. – George Eliot

We had a very bittersweet beginning to the school year this fall as we said goodbye, for a short time, to Christine Effert.  Heading off to boarding school in Sedona, Arizona, Christine could not be in a more beautiful place for continuing her traditional education and being able to immerse herself fully in the spirit of horses.  (Want to be jealous? Check out the Verde Valley School’s site — it makes me want to go back to high school.)

Sarah Boudreaux put together a photo book to send along with Christine on her journey and flipping through its pages I discovered a visual history of what Bramblewood is all about.   Sarah, can I request multiple editions? We need to consider doing year books, but since most of us love to write we’ll need at least ten blank pages in the back so we can all sign them.

I love handing out writing exercises and most of the riders handle it with good grace and minimal grumbling.  So, it’s not enough that you want me to use every part of my body in a different way every moment on the horse, but you want me to write about things too? Yep.

I’d asked our core group of riders to help out with newsletter and what they gave me was too good to receive a passing glance in the calendar.  I’ve held on to Catherine Pierre’s entry for a few months because, like Sarah’s book, it explains what we’re all about here at the farm: how much we admire each other, the horses, and most of all Christine.

We’ve talked a lot about timing the past few weeks.  Hard, hard weeks for most of us to get through with the passing of Plum – a nine year old Quarter Pony that Christine had loved and developed over the past few years.  It’s been so long since we lost a horse to colic that I’d forgotten how hard it is to process through the grief.  With a community like Bramblewood, it’s not just a personal loss for me, but a hole in our family that we all must work through in our own space.  Christine was here with us by text and calls throughout Plum’s struggle and having gone through that experience with her, even at a great distance, I have a new understanding of human and equine spirits, their links and connections.  Even the hardest experiences bring us gifts.

So here is Catherine Pierre’s gift to Christine (my hat’s off to you both :) though I’m not just publishing this for the hat love).

It seems as if my first day at Bramblewood was only yesterday. The weather was perfect-a gorgeous sunny day with just the perfect breeze. As my mom and I were walking down the driveway, we were warmly greeted by a lady with a fabulous hat (hmm..Ms.Kim?) . Before my first lesson on Iggy was finished, I knew that this place would quickly become my second home. Everything was so welcoming-the horses happily eating hay, smiling faces, colorful jumps, beach chairs, and the dinosaur like dog to say the least.

Starting out, my lessons were on Friday evenings. It was before one of my first lessons here where I first saw my soon to be best friend. Walking by the jumping ring, a girl smiled and waved to me. She was riding this magnificent beast. It was Choo, with no one other then Christine on him. During my lesson, our moms seemed to click. Ms. Effert even offered me a popsicle!

Three years later, Christine and I are practically sisters. We’ve done so much together; she truly is someone that I can trust. But as the summer slowly comes to an end, we’ll have to face a tearful goodbye. Christine was accepted into Verde Valley School- a boarding school all the way in Arizona, we’re she’ll be able to ride every day in their equestrian program. It’s going to be hard barely seeing each other, but I am so proud of her! I know she’ll accomplish great things there.

And, as a Bramblewood girl, I’ll have to advise her not to eat any green gummy bears.

__

No parting is ever final. We can’t wait to absorb the wealth of information that Christine brings back with her on holidays. Until we meet again, we love you Christine and could not be more proud of you!

None of us were meant to stand in stalls

Only when I’m traveling do I feel that I can take time for pointless wandering.  Hiking doesn’t always have to have a destination, right? In a similar vein, I love watching the horses in their paddocks, drifting from place to place, raising their heads occasionally to see what’s going on over the next hill. I think they live in that traveling-spot of expectation and wonder.

Kim harrasses London horse guard. I SEE A SOFT NOSE PLEASE LET ME TOUCH IT.

Maybe it’s because I’m an only child, but my most vivid memories of travel come from times where I simply took a walk by myself.  Which is weird, because I don’t like to travel by myself. There was that time I booked a last minute flight to Lisbon, but the plan was to meet someone over there and I attached myself like a tick to the first priest I found in baggage claim who looked like he might be making his way to Fatima.  Good thing too because it took his six fluent languages (none of them Portuguese) to help us find a bus.

I grew up traveling all the time with my grandparents.  Early-onset Alzheimer’s made new environments difficult for my grandmother, so I kept her from getting lost in hotel halls while my grandfather played poker with his buddies.  I was happy to be the nursemaid.  Wherever we were, we’d dress for dinner and my grandfather would urge me to try something I’d never tasted before: caviar, an unfamiliar olive, a tiny sip of his martini.  Now that it’s some years since his passing, I see how very much I’m like him – simultaneously independent and co-dependent.  Just the way I travel.

I’d wander off in the afternoons on these childhood trips – twice when I really shouldn’t have, like that cab I hopped into to visit a distant village near Cancun.  Luckily I had enough change to get back to the ship.  And somewhere in Pakistan there is a photo of me posing with a group of guys who pestered me on the Canadian side of Niagra Falls until I agreed to stand with each of them in my approximation of late-80’s skater gear.  “You look like you’re from New York,” they said.  Yeah, right.

I was in college when I made my first trip to Europe, once again with my grandfather.  After a couple hours in Helsinki, we landed in Russia and I was a little too much out of my element to go exploring very far by myself in St. Petersburg and Moscow.  In a relatively closed environment, I did go for a late night walk on the train between the two cities.  Speeding past a lake that glowed silver in the light of a full moon, the bark on the birch trees mirrored the water surface – everything phosphorescent  and surreal.  I was mesmerized by the scene, and knew there was no way I could ever describe the unreal beauty of it to my traveling companions when we woke.  I also had no idea that all the sleeper cars were being robbed until I opened my eyes the next morning to the shouts of my grandfather’s poker buddy who was out $2,000 US.

A few months later I traveled on the infamous Wofford College Interim to Ireland.  A touch braver in an English speaking country I set off by myself to explore the first week when we were in London.  The cemetery where Mary Shelley’s mother is buried was/is in a desolate, industrial district and I almost stepped on Johann Christian Bach’s headstone in my rush to catch the first taxi I’d noticed in three hours.

When we touched down in Ireland, I felt like I’d come home. Equal parts British and Irish, I’m at odds with myself.  Slipping away from the group, I explored the streets of Dublin until I’d purchased more books than I could safely carry back to my hotel, or stash in my suitcase without extra airline fees.  Following the foot traffic on Grafton Street, fire trucks, with their distinctive European wail, rushed past me and I felt, for a moment, that I was simultaneously the singular subject and audience of a movie streaming only in my head.  Maybe that’s why I write, with the ghost of Joyce and Yeats always stashed in my carry on.

I thought myself well-traveled by the time I reached Portugal the following year.  The priest that I wouldn’t let out of my sight on the way to Fatima would say otherwise.  We crossed Lisbon on foot, me pulling far too much luggage behind while he traveled light.  I’d never been so grateful to reach the Dominican boarding house my friend was staying (and the priest was very happy to be rid of me).  Unfortunately, the friend became quite ill and I passed the time watching car racing, playing poker or walking around the small village anchored by a massive basilica in the center of the square.  I’d gone out for shrimp subs one night and my path took me past the basilica.  The doors were open and a choir practiced inside; the acoustics carried the sound until it seemed as if the voices were beside me, otherworldly and perfect.   I leaned against the church in the cool shade of its white walls and I closed my eyes to listen.

Turkey’s still a pain in my side as I sort my memories of the city from what I experienced in my marriage to Istanbul – the place I visited on my own.  I blamed Istanbul in a lot of ways, but others have better claim on her – say, the Greeks or the Crusaders.  Their cause was far loftier than mine, but as I’m given the luxury of time to file away my past I, once again, remember solitary walks: a violin echoing through the subway, the blue-light of sunset reaching out from the Bosporus and filling the streets.  Mostly I remember staying up by myself, all night writing, as the sea gulls screamed like human babies from the rooftops of nearby apartments and the suspended street lights swayed, eerily,  in the ocean breezes.

Why do we wait for travel to simply set out and see what we’ll find?  By necessity, travel places us in the moment, but it’s hard to recreate that mode of simply doing and seeing and being in our regular lives.  All those perfectly encapsulated moments that I stumbled upon while traveling could just as easily be happening all around me on a daily basis, I just fail to see them because I’m so stuck on what has be completed next – one more tick off my mental check list.

With the kids all back in school and quiet descending across the barn in the early hours of the day, I miss the rush of activity but I’m cherishing this time of reflection.  Looking back through my photos for an old travel shot that highlights one of the moments I listed below, I realized I was so in the moment there wasn’t time to take a photograph.  I can recall the scent of the night breeze or the coolness of a stone wall because I wasn’t distracted with other things.  My rusty senses had time to work.

It’s the same when we ride horses.  Our thoughts are often so busy with other things that we have no time to hear the horse.  I love every quote from Rumi, but this one truly captures the indefinable quality of those moments of just being:

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.

Let your horse be your feet for a moment.  Or simply allow your feet to carry you.