Temperatures rarely go below the high 30’s during the night in what passes for winter here in California’s low desert and most times it’s mid 40’s.  It’s a far cry from the near-zero temps and snowy days up in Montana where friends at Horse Prairie Ranch, and everyone else up there for that matter, turn their horses out to fend for themselves once winter sets in.  The animals are hardy, and they’re none the worse for it.

But somehow, when you get out of bed in the morning and go outside with the dog and realize it really is cold, your thoughts turn to the guys out in the pasture so you give up after a few nights like that and begin blanketing them.  It’s more for us than for them but after you do that you don’t feel quite as guilty turning the heat on in the bathroom when you shave.

Horses in pasture are always a little dusty.  Sometimes they are downright dirty.  You brush their coats before saddling them and between brushing and combing manes and tails you don’t often have time to take a close a look at their coats.

It’s a different story when you take the blankets off in the mornings.  Their coats are usually clean.  When I took Macarena’s blanket off the other morning I marveled, as I often do, at the coppery color of her chestnut hair, exactly like a newly-minted penny that gleams in the sun.  Except this time I noticed that her wonderful red-gold color was flecked with some grey hairs.  A lot of them.

I know she’s getting on, coming 19, but to know it on an abstract level and to see it in the concrete are two different things.  I can accept the grey hairs on my head and accept the grey hairs on Sammy’s muzzle but it brought me up short on her.  I’ve had her for about 13 years.  She was, as Rudyard Kipling once wrote about a pony called the Maltese Cat, the pluperfect polo pony.  She elevated my game orders of magnitude better, like a 15 handicap golfer suddenly playing to a five.  She saved my life at least three times, or at least saved me from serious harm.  She and I are telepathic together.

She knows what it means.  She speaks a different language but she knows now that I know, too.  And that’s always been enough between us.

Gotta go…

What does cosmetic medicine have to do with horses?

At first blush the answer is “nothing.”  The real answer for me, however, has turned out to be “everything.”

Even though I wasn’t born in a saddle on a ranch, horses have always been part of my life.  When I was about 12 and I could earn some money delivering groceries I rode my bike into the Orange Mountains near where we lived and rented a horse and rode until my money ran out.  “Cowboy” was always the occupation I wrote down first when my teachers asked us what we wanted to be.

Sometimes it takes years for a dream to come true.  The army, residency, and work put this particular dream on hold for decades until about 30 years ago when I decided it was now or never and since then I’ve never looked back.  Horses will forever be a part of my life.

This is not another “Everything I’ve learned I’ve learned from a horse” article.  But I did immerse myself in their world and the approach to life I’ve developed being around horses became a perfect complement to the philosophy I evolved in my spiritual and metaphysical journey that took me from Zen through Tibetan Buddhism and Taoism; the idea that we are all interconnected, the principle of being in the moment, the value of being congruent.

Most of all, I learned the value of being sensitive to non-verbal communication between horse and human, and between human and human.  Ultimately it made me more sensitive to my patients’ unspoken goals.

Horses are huge, imposing, sentient beings that, in spite of our frequent misunderstandings, help us help ourselves as we learn to develop the skills they need from us.  My journey was so transcending I decided to share my findings and the wisdom of my horses with anyone interested.  To facilitate this I’ve begun a program called THE EPONA EXPERIENCE. It will kick off this fall in the desert.

Way back when, when I was about six or so, full of dreams and full of promise, someone took a picture of me on the back of a pony.  My BW found that about twelve years ago and had it framed.  On the back she wrote: “Once a cowboy, always a cowboy.”

Gotta go.