So since I have kept up with this blog for this long and (*fingers crossed*) seem to have at least a little bit of readership, I wanted to do a sort of quick overview about this blog and how I plan to use it in the future.
It is a big common theme with a lot of the horse blogs I personally read and follow to have goals. Monthly goals, yearly goals, show season goals, lesson goals, all manner of goals. I am not a big goals person. It's partially me and partially Jazz, but it's a lot that I just simply don't really know what it is that I want in the long term. I am far from a veteran in the horse world, and there is just so much that I haven't tried yet. I hadn't even so much as sat in an English saddle until last summer, and almost all of my horse experience in the pre-Jazz era was trail rides and more trail rides. There are a thousand and one things I want to try with horses, and I can't know what I want to do with Jazz until I know what I want to do. So far we've had a lot of fun with gymkhanas and rodeo events (mostly at the walk/trot), and my current loose idea is for Jazz to just be a happy, healthy horse who is safe to be around and has a good foundation of training to do whatever it is that she eventually ends up doing. My current goal for myself is to learn to jump, and as I take English lessons in the summer, I will be accomplishing it soon with a little luck *knock on wood*. I also am very interested in learning the basics of working cattle, and endurance, and cowboy challenge. Since the association that puts on my gymkhanas also does cowboy challenge, I will be hopefully going to any of them that I am able and ready for.
Anyways, the point is that I have a fairly scattered existence with a lot of ideas about what my future with Jazz and with horses in general looks like, so monthly goals is just not a good exercise for me. I try to go to the farm with no concrete expectations (except some basic manners and respect, of course), and as a result my progress can be very slow and halted sometimes. I'm okay with that. I have a young horse and a limited database of experience. There is no reward for hurrying to accomplish this or that when I have no real reason to. I don't mean to say that I would be okay with my training coming to a standstill, plateauing at decent and never rising again, but I am perfectly happy to plod along, facing challenges one at a time and really enjoying the ride.
The main reason for this blog is for me to chart my progress, and to help me keep track of my year/month/day/whatever with Jazz. Also it's encouragement to document my experiences more with pictures, which I am horrible at. I also have my things. My things to work on and that are improving. They are sort of my answer to goals. It's hard to pay attention to how far you've come when you're struggling through hard times. They mean to serve as a reminder of all the little victories, and a sort of push in the right direction. I have no "Things that are perfect and need never be worked on again because they simply can't get any better" because I am working with a horse and that's a ridiculous concept where it comes to horses. There are plenty of people who've been working with horses their entire lives that still say they have lots to learn, and I hope to be the same way. You are never done learning, and I simply like to remind myself of that.
Sorry for the long, pictureless post. I'll make my next one a little more visual if I possibly can. And thanks for reading!
Oh, and one more thing about this blog. I think that so far, it's been a fairly accurate representation of my time with Jazz. I write about anything of significance or interest as honestly as possible with as much detail as I can remember, and I am aware of what these winter months are like. They are our work time, our time where there's no room for all the love and cuddles if it means the respect has been pushed out, and that is the case with all our Januaries and Februaries so far, but just you wait. Come summer, there will be a lot more time for fun and all the love for my pony I can possibly express in words.
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