Bailey by KimB

Those of you who know me, know of my great love of horses. From early childhood I adored them. I drew pictures and dreamed of them. Any folk song that had “horse” in it, I made my Mom sing to me at bedtime. We had a record of the song “Strawberry Roan” and I made the family play it over and over that until we wore it out.

My grandfather taught me to ride when I was about 3 years old. We had a great horse named Misty and she was the perfect horse for everyone that came in contact with her. She was kind, gentle, intelligent and knew how to “watch out” for her rider. Misty came into my life several times and she formed a great foundation for my life with horses.

As an adult I had to choose: work or horses. I did try horses for a while. Dealing with the horses was no problem, dealing with the people that owned them was not. I didn't have the knack for dealing with the people. So I shifted to computers and moved on to software engineering in Silicon Valley. Computers have one great advantage: they are not people. Computers don't have “issues” beyond the ones you program into them.

Silicon Valley is an odd place. It's great to work there, it's fun, it's exciting until you burn out, then it's not much fun at all. Corporations have no patience for workers that get burned out. If you burn out, you get tossed out. That's the deal. It's called “at will employment” and that means that corporations can toss you out “at will”. Workers can leave “at will” too but in practice it's rather one sided. People are like barnacles, they like to “stick” but corporations are not in the business of nurturing and keeping workers for the long haul anymore. Their paradigm is:

Use 'em up an' throw 'em away.

When you are new to Silicon Valley, you never worry about this aspect. You think you will be at the Google of the Day forever more. You won't. When the “at will” clause kicks in (and it always does), the excitement and fun disappears along with your paycheck.

When the burn out happened for me, life kicked me in the keister pretty hard. It knocked me down, a long way down. So far down I thought I would never see “happy” again. It was a devastating experience and grinding my way back to “almost happy” has been one of those life-lessons in LIFE. I didn't really want this particular lesson but sometimes you get what you need; not what you want.

As the doors in Silicon Valley slammed shut, I was left adrift in a mental vortex. It wasn't fun and it wasn't exciting. It was more terrifying than anything I'd ever experienced even on the roughest bronc in the stable. I was fortunate, I had money saved up and I had the “privilege of class”: meaning I had access to “help” and “medical care”.

As I began to make some small progress towards “less than awful”, one of the directions I took was an attempt to regain some sense of who I was by revisiting that early foundation and joy in horses. With my good friend Dar, we began a project to find a horse for me. It was the first real attempt to reforge my identity and each step along that path took great effort. Not every step was successful, sometimes the mental vortex reclaimed all my progress but the love of horses helped me regain my footing enough until I could try again.

Bailey came into my life about 10 years ago now. Dar and I looked at a lot of horses; and we settled on Bailey. Bailey is an unregistered quarter horse type mare and was about 5 years old when I bought her. She didn't have any bad habits but she didn't have a lot of training either. We thought I would be able to train her and that was “The Plan”.

You know the saying “Best laid plans of ...”?
So, it didn't quite happen how we thought.

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,

To a Mouse by Robert Burns 1785

Over the years I've worked on and off with Bailey. Sometimes when things went well, I could do more and other times not so much. Bailey is a touchstone of both hope and fear. Fear of regressing into the that black vortex of anguish and the hope that someday things would be different and that fear would be replaced with joy that only a horse can invoke.

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

To a Mouse by Robert Burns 1785

Recently, I've regained some of my former vitality. I'm never going to regain all of it, 'nor do I look for that anymore. I am diminished but I'm still here and with a lot of help and support I make an effort each day to take one more step and Bailey has come again to pull me farther along that path.

I recently moved Bailey to be closer to where I live. I am working with her again and I sense the enjoyment of being with her. Her kind eyes and whinny greet me each time I call out to her. She seems to not mind too much the “on and off and on again” of our relationship. She accepts carrots and apples with the same good will as she does working in the round pen. Munching on an apple is her way of telling me:

It's OK.
I'm here and so are you and that's all that matters.

And of course, she's right.

Bailey 2015



Bailey 2015