03/01/2026
A great description of how knowing can be the obstacle! Eric Dierks Equestrian
Alan Watts noticed something hiding in plain sight: we don't step into love. We don't enter it carefully, or arrive at it. We fall.
That word didn't end up there by accident.
The thing is, you can't fall carefully. You can't negotiate your way down. The whole point (the only point) is that at some moment, the ground is no longer where you left it, and you are no longer in charge of what happens next.
He was talking about love. But he'd never met Argyle.
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It was 2016. Steffen Peters' place in Del Mar. Morten Thomsen was there for a clinic, which meant there was nowhere to hide.
Argyle was a young stallion, the kind of horse who processed my emotions faster than I did. Sensitive in the way that makes sensitive sound like a compliment when it isn't. He knew things about my nervous system that I am still in denial about. And from the first stride, he was absolutely certain I was nervous.
He was right.
Here's what nobody tells you about riding young horses once you actually know what you're doing: the knowledge can be the problem.
A beginner climbs on and just... exists. They don't know enough to be scared. They don't know what wrong feels like, so they don't spend every stride trying to prevent it. The horse wiggles, they wiggle with it, everybody figures out gravity together. It's messy and it's fine.
But you've felt how it's supposed to feel. You know the feeling in your hand. The feeling over the back. The moment the shoulders lift and when the horse carries himself like he finally understands what his body is for. You've felt it, and you cannot unfeel it, and so every stride on a four-year-old becomes this quiet emergency. You know exactly how far away from right you currently are.
So you hold. You prop. You manufacture.
You tell yourself you're being supportive. You're being a good rider. You're keeping him together.
You're not. You're being afraid. And Argyle had that figured out before I'd even picked up the reins.
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Morten didn't need long to see it. He gave me the instruction with the economy of a man who has watched this particular mistake ten thousand times:
Soften. Give him the front end. Let him find it.
My hands didn't want to do this.
Because from the inside, letting a young horse find his own balance feels nothing like a breakthrough. It feels like abandonment. Everything falls apart. You stop being a rider and become a passenger on a thousand pounds of bad ideas trying to negotiate gravity. Your education feels useless. Your hands feel useless. The only thing between you and chaos is hope (which apparently is not a recognized classical aid).
And then quietly, without asking permission, Argyle found the ground.
Not perfectly. Not smoothly. There was wobbles. There was a moment where I genuinely wasn't sure who was in charge. But he found it. And the contact that came back into my hand wasn't something I'd manufactured. It was something he'd offered, because I'd finally gotten out of the way long enough for him to figure out where his feet were.
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The most dangerous thing you can bring to a young horse is knowing what right feels like.
Because that knowledge will betray you every time. It will make you hold when you should wait. Restrict when you should release. It will dress your fear up in the language of correctness and let it run the ride.
If you hold them, they lean. If you restrict them, they tighten. If you catch every wobble before it happens, they never learn to catch themselves, they just learn to find you, and they'll be looking to be held forever.
You don't get to the dance by preventing the stumble.
And here is the thing I wish someone had said to me before that clinic, before Argyle, before I had enough miles:
It's okay that this is hard. It is supposed to be hard. The fact that you know what you're doing is not making it easier. It's making it harder, and that is not a failure of skill. It's the price of having felt something beautiful and wanting it again.
You're not doing it wrong.
You're just falling. And falling, it turns out, is the only way in.
