Riding (farming) & Writing into a New Year
talking about the RIDE in READ | WRITE | RIDE
I promised y’all a Substack called READ | WRITE | RIDE and all I’ve been chatting about these first few missives really is Redwood Court. It’s all connected in my mind these days, as my Instagram feed will show you. RWC has taken up a lot a lot of my life as we’re winding down the minutes and seconds to pub day (OK days!...weeks!) but when I’m not doing whatever is on tap for prepping for my RWC tour, or working on a new writing project I’ve become obsessed with, I am a land steward of 22.5 acres and also a horsey and donkey steward of a herd of 10 farm animals (8 horses, 2 donkeys). Soon there will be 2 pigs!
More than writing, doing this work governs the schedule and flow of my days:
Morning feeding and chores. Late afternoon feeding and chores and prep for the next day. Horse health check: uh, oh—there’s a horse that’s limping in the field, a runny eye, someone who seems very sleepy when it’s not usually his naptime. Is this a vet call? Do I know enough now to troubleshoot? Property maintenance: Regularly I walk the trails and check for downed trees, especially after a storm, while also checking perimeter fencing and gates (I double this as a pup walk!). Stable management: are the paddock’s clean, wires up and hot, are there areas of repair from the horses or deer? Feed prep: do I have enough hay, is there hay stuffed in nets? Did the guys finish the round bale? Is the tractor going to start to move the 1,000 lb bale? Do I need to make a run to Tractor Supply to get more grain?
What I do love about all of that time I spend, often alone, doing the workings of being a farmer is I can work through writerly things I might be thinking about when I sit down to actually write. Doing them while doing these other regular tasks relieves me of the pressure of the blank journal pages before me and what to do with them (I hand write everything before I type it). I can do whatever farm task set before me and turn over and over in my mind and work a scene through. Or a bit of dialogue. Think about character motivations while stuffing hay nets—you get me. Am I afraid I’ll forget whatever it was I might have discovered? Sometimes. Often though, I find whatever it was will make its way to the page when it’s ready to. In this way, I consider my horsey chores to be part of my writing process.
After all of that, I may or may not be able to sneak in time for riding after all of this! But when I do…I tell you it makes everything else worth it. OK OK I have to share with you a Redwood Court story. There’s a scene where Teeta wakes up from a nap and decides that day was the day Mika was going to learn to ride her bike without training wheels. They go outback and he removes the training wheels on the bike, and teaches her how to balance, trust, keep moving forward no matter what.
These days, when I swing a leg over the back of one of my horses, I feel it is an extension of the freedom I felt when I first learned to ride a bike (like Mika, my grandfather taught me how). That I get to feel the wind in my face, and these days the cold air in my lungs…it’s a thrill each and every time. And something like learning a new language. I have an idea of what I need the horse to do, and I have to figure out the right way to ask it of him. If I get the wrong answer, I have to think how to ask it again—softer hands, softer seat, maybe verbal cues, maybe harder thrust with my legs against his side. It gets harder and the language more sophisticated when, say, I am also trying to rope, or shoot a target, or chase a cow. All good brain exercises that I am loving mastering.
This part of the riding partnership feels something like writing when I think about it: I have to think how to say the thing in my head in a way that translates intention, intensity, what I hope the reader does with said information, and feeling. If I’m telling the horse more than instead of a lot of asking, like it’s a conversation—well, that’s recipe for disaster.
I joke and say that learning horses and horsemanship and farming and land stewardship and all of it is like my living PHD program that will never end. Learning is my favorite posture and that literally everyday I wake up and see what this living place has given me to solve for the day I am so excited to figure it out…even if annoyed. For example this week two of my solar fence chargers have decided to quit on me! Which means horses are taking liberty of the 22.5 acres—! But now I am tasked with fixing and figuring. Annoyed? Absolutely. Honored to live this life? Also absolutely.
Folks often ask, very inquisitively, how was it that I, a grown woman, only just started to ride horses. After discovering I didn’t grow up with them, often the next question is: “did you always want to ride them?” And I answer in some version of: I never had the opportunity to be near them to know before I was in front of them and then I knew. It just happens I was 36 when the opportunity presented itself. And I never looked back. I doubled down. Tripled down. Year three is the best yet.
And the returns have never been greater.
Cheers,
DéLana