Home Again

...Although being up there is being home as well, so I suppose I had better elaborate and say that I'm home in PA now, drinking green tea and catching up on a backlog of mail. It was a long summer, and a hard one, but it was also a lot of fun, and rewarding and entertaining and enlightening to boot.
It is a little odd to be back here, as always. I throw myself fully into the job, because I'm working for family and that means I am always pushing to give 110% every second, so to go from that to sitting quietly and doing very little in the course of one day is always a bit surreal. I was trying to explain it to one of the other counselors as asking your tired horse to hold on and stay round and forward just a little bit longer, but when you ask for walk all he can manage to do is collapse into it on the forehand and stumble just a little. It'll take a few minutes on a loose rein before you can pick him back up again.

Things I have learned this summer:

1. If patience means that when frustrated you keep explaining things calmly over and over in a reasonable tone of voice and show no outward sign that you'd like to be shouting and screaming and generally throwing things about, then I have far more patience than I ever thought possible.

2. Teaching of any sort is both the hardest and the most rewarding job anyone can ever do. It is absolutely amazing seeing your students improve because of what you and their four-legged instructors are telling/showing them. However, all this comes into being through massive doses of the previous entry, so you spend your time between being proud, humbled, and insanely frustrated and strapped for ideas on how to get your point across.

3. Hard candy peppermints and ibuprofen are possibly some of the best products developed ever, although I've been reliably informed that they're both not all that great for you in large doses. Uh, oops. #grins#

4. Even so soon after losing Cam, working with horses on the ground in whatever capacity wasn't all that difficult emotionally for me, I think because it's in my blood now and so it's just what I do, like breathing or sleeping. Riding, however, was intensely difficult from the emotional perspective, and I spent a couple of flat rides in tears for no other reason than this wasn't my pony. Just being on a horse made me miss him all the more. But in one of those incredible little coincidences that keep me believing in things, Windsor came to stay with us for a month, and I was tasked with riding him on the mountain trails up behind the house. That was better therapy than anything I could have asked for, because Windsor is the first horse I ever really loved, and I was hugely grateful just to be around him again. It was also the first time I enjoyed being on a horse since I lost Cam. Also on the therapy front, I got to talk to a friend who had lost her own horse a couple of years before, in the same type of tragic quickness, and she assured me that it was all right to still be grieving, and that I shouldn't be hard on myself for still being upset, becuase it really is the loss of a family member. All of which I guess I knew intellectually, but it was nice to hear it from someone else who had been there.

5. Considering some events of the summer, if I haven't developed an ego by now, I'm guessing that it's just never going to happen. Which is probably for the best; I mean, I'm hard enough to deal with now, and I'd be insufferable with an ego. But man, if anything was going to cause me to develop one, it'd have totally happened. #grins#

More later, as things occur to me.