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I ride more days than not, and this is an excellent laymans description of the the practice. I call it having a conversation where we spend years trying to unde

I ride more days than not, and this is an excellent laymans description of the the practice. I call it having a conversation where we spend years trying to understand one another, and it ebbs and flows with greater and lesser mutual understanding. A horse remembers everything it experiences, and it is very difficult to get them to unlearn the memory and expectation of something that they have set in their minds. The job of a rider is to bring the consistency and intention to relating with another being. As riders, we use geometric figures as the empirical control we revert to, or the base message. Horses know nothing of straight lines or circles until we establish a basic language of "forward" or "around," and then faster, slower, and they begin to anticipate the figures - to where eventually, you are riding mainly by thought and the microexpressions in your body the thought causes. Beyond stimulus response training, as a rider you begin to interpret desire and intent from another being, and it anticipates and responds to your intents and desires as it experiences them. Where it gets extra fascinating is that your emotional state and beleifs about yourself creates those micro body expressions the animal senses, and so you learn to discipline your mind so that distraction, fear, boldness, forwardness, aggression, urgency, calm are senses that you intentionally summon and express and transmit to another mind that is wielding 1200lbs of muscle across four tall legs. I think learning to cultivate the acceptance and willingness of another being in nature is the origin of human morality. It's a multi-millenia old relationship, and the beauty of it is that when we ride, we inculcate the minds of horses with our intentions and a way of relating by using non-verbal language, and we use geometry to encode the values for our intentions to them. Horses aren't machines or symbols, they are other beings who we relate to. So glad the author wrote this, re-assessing our relationship to horses in a moral and philosophical sense will help us all. Again.

sdwr 4y ago
The way you're talking about riding sounds a lot like sex. I think any kind of live communication involves taking responsibility for (or at least awareness of) the other party's emotional state. There's a cost attached to that, can't gain a sense without losing something else. Have you thought about writing a blog? I know counterpoint is easier than point a lot of the time, but your comment reads substantially better than the article.
- motohagiography 4y ago
  A lot of riders will tell you it's as good or better, which when you think of some furtive or regretable drunk hookup vs. an epic and enlightening experience, they're not far off. Re the blog, thank you, and counterpoint is very accurate. I don't know that winning at blogging would be satisfying, and I'm sort of holding out for a new online form that captures the good parts of the long format that books like Hitchens' "Arguably," Amis' "Einstein's Monsters," and short stories like Ted Chiang or Julian Barnes did. Doom scrolling an essay muddles the ideas, and e-readers don't do it for me. The things I'd like to write are from that time, where you would spend an afternoon with a book and then have a drunken row in a pub over it with an old friend afterwards. In dispensing with the object of a book, we have lost the objective point of discussion, where we used to talk about ideas as just things that were contained in other things full of pages, but now they are expereinces from a screen, and inextricably personal. Ideas aren't things anymore, they're identities, and blogging just hasn't escaped that yet. I like a few bloggers' ideas, but I don't follow them. The only reason I read them is because their substacks show up in my inbox. I've spoken to editors, but everyone in publishing now is on reddit anyway, so there isn't a way for them add value the way they might once have. Publishing is broken, and maybe that's the real opportunity. Thanks, certainly food for thought.
  - sdwr 4y ago
    Ok, sure, blogging is too self-aggrandizing, real writers dive into a topic and aren't swayed by a constant stream of feedback. I also remember the good old days when books were real books and ideas were less (were they?) about politics and identity. For almost a decade, off and on, I've wanted to make a content aggregator where links can be collected and stacked and have some kind of permanence. Seems like everything is a feed now. I want light, long-term, async communication, like community centre corkboards for everything. ampie.app superusapp.com roamresearch.com pinboard.in even steemit.com all have elements, but I haven't found anything thats really nailed it.

sdwr 4y ago

The way you're talking about riding sounds a lot like sex. I think any kind of live communication involves taking responsibility for (or at least awareness of) the other party's emotional state. There's a cost attached to that, can't gain a sense without losing something else. Have you thought about writing a blog? I know counterpoint is easier than point a lot of the time, but your comment reads substantially better than the article.

motohagiography 4y ago
A lot of riders will tell you it's as good or better, which when you think of some furtive or regretable drunk hookup vs. an epic and enlightening experience, they're not far off. Re the blog, thank you, and counterpoint is very accurate. I don't know that winning at blogging would be satisfying, and I'm sort of holding out for a new online form that captures the good parts of the long format that books like Hitchens' "Arguably," Amis' "Einstein's Monsters," and short stories like Ted Chiang or Julian Barnes did. Doom scrolling an essay muddles the ideas, and e-readers don't do it for me. The things I'd like to write are from that time, where you would spend an afternoon with a book and then have a drunken row in a pub over it with an old friend afterwards. In dispensing with the object of a book, we have lost the objective point of discussion, where we used to talk about ideas as just things that were contained in other things full of pages, but now they are expereinces from a screen, and inextricably personal. Ideas aren't things anymore, they're identities, and blogging just hasn't escaped that yet. I like a few bloggers' ideas, but I don't follow them. The only reason I read them is because their substacks show up in my inbox. I've spoken to editors, but everyone in publishing now is on reddit anyway, so there isn't a way for them add value the way they might once have. Publishing is broken, and maybe that's the real opportunity. Thanks, certainly food for thought.
- sdwr 4y ago
  Ok, sure, blogging is too self-aggrandizing, real writers dive into a topic and aren't swayed by a constant stream of feedback. I also remember the good old days when books were real books and ideas were less (were they?) about politics and identity. For almost a decade, off and on, I've wanted to make a content aggregator where links can be collected and stacked and have some kind of permanence. Seems like everything is a feed now. I want light, long-term, async communication, like community centre corkboards for everything. ampie.app superusapp.com roamresearch.com pinboard.in even steemit.com all have elements, but I haven't found anything thats really nailed it.