I love horses and the people that work with  them. Thy are so graceful, even the nags are graceful to me. Although from an engineering point of view, it seems to me that their bodies are way too big for their slender legs. I also enjoy watching people ride horses. There is kind of a mutual feedback between the horse and the rider and subtle changes in a rider’s posture and how they hold the reins and how they respond with their bodies to the horse’s movement affects the movement of the horse. We have put Logan’s therapeutic horseback riding lessons on hold for a couple months because he has a lot going on at school including some Saturday rehearsals at the same time that his riding lessons were. I am already missing the long drive to Pioneer Woman country to take his lessons and occasional talks and walks with the director Bob.

Bob had a way of simplifying everything and when I asked him why riding was such a great therapy for people with autism he said basically that when you get on a horse and it starts moving that you need to adjust yourself so that horse doesn’t move out from underneath you. It is this responsiveness to an outside force and feedback that is so important to people who don’t have that response instinctively.

So Logan had those lessons for a few years and I took literally hundreds, if not thousands of photos of him riding the horses and I think the lessons “worked.” Just what they did, I don’t know exactly but I could tell that Logan loved riding the horses. People ask what the horses “do” exactly. I say, they make him better. How, I don’t know.

Well, I’ve kind of digressed a little bit. Now I have to feed my horse jones via the horses in the top photo. They are in a pasture next to Logan’s school and after I drop him off and the horses are close to the fence and there are no cars behind me I’ll stop and take a quick photo of them. It is a good way to start out the day, looking at horses I mean.

How do you feel about horses?

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