The Prompt: Hey Tell me a bit- when did you start riding? How long did you play polo- when did grace enter your life- what is special about grace- why do you want to keep her??

My response:

I started riding in 2010/2011 at the Denver Polo Club to join DU’s polo team. I always loved horses but had no previous experience with them. A friend was an avid rider and encouraged me to learn, so I began taking lessons on a 30ish-year-old horse named Clyde who couldn’t go faster than a trot if he wanted to and had been a therapy horse most of his life.

Ok first the good news. Yes, it will happen. Now the less so immediately good (but not bad) news: it takes a while.

It’s a strange thing that our species is called homo sapiens sapiens.

If sapiens means thinking, and sapiens sapiens therefore means “really fricking thinking”, why does this define us as a species?

All animals have brains, so thought is not specific to we super monkeys. There seem to be a lot of other species that think as much if not more effectively than we do – because our thoughts are often our own worst enemies.

So, what is it that really sets we humans apart?

It’s the voice box, the larynx. It’s speech. We are the speaking ape.

When we first stumbled into Rowan’s love of my neighbor's mare Betsy, which led to him becoming verbal in the saddle, and which in turn led to us realizing that it was the rhythmic hip rocking causing him to produce oxytocin that was creating the speech, which led to Horse Boy Method and Movement Method…we were also working with a whole bunch of small animals, not just horses.