About
Which is lucky for the horses, because otherwise nobody would be.
There are two horses here. Marshall is twenty-one, I bought him with money I saved as a child, and I have owned him longer than I have done anything else in my life. Harvey is five, came off the track this year, and I am still working him out.
Their pages will tell you the rest. This one is about me, which is the part I find harder to write.
I am Morgan. I am an adult amateur, which in this sport is an actual category with rules attached to it, and in my case is also just a description of my life: I do this on my own time, around a job and a child. I am not a trainer and I do not make my living at it. I work a few hours at a western barn, which is the only horse work anyone has ever paid me for, and I took it to learn rather than to earn. None of which is the same as being a beginner. I have been around horses since I was small and I still get things wrong constantly.
I have a corporate job. I used to teach, and I left teaching in large part so I would have more time and more money for horses, which is either the most reasonable or the least reasonable career decision I have ever made depending on the day you ask me. My work is essentially the business of making messy things legible for other people, which I suspect explains more about this website than I would like it to.
I have a daughter. She is eight, she has done lessons and pony camp, and this year Marshall officially became hers. I have not decided yet whether I am ready for that.
And I love horses. They are a genuine passion, but they are not my only one, and I have stopped pretending otherwise. There is a version of the horse internet where the horse is the whole personality. I like that version. I am just not it.
I came up english, and I spent years in the hunter and jumper ring on a very patient paint who had no particular reason to be good at it and was anyway.
These days I also spend a few hours a week at a western trail barn, which began as a way to learn from the trainer there and has turned into most of my real education. He is in his eighties. He has forgotten more than I am ever going to know, and watching him handle a horse has quietly rearranged how I think about all of it.
So I am playing with western now, and Harvey may do some western shows this year, which would have astonished me two years ago. There is still a version of me who wants to jump 1.30 metres; I have not given her up, though I am genuinely no longer certain that is where the two of us end up.
What I have actually fallen for, somewhere in the middle of all that, is the cross-training: the unglamorous business of making a horse as good as he can be in whatever direction turns out to suit him, rather than deciding in advance what he ought to become.
What things cost, told honestly, including the parts that make me look careless. What I get wrong, which is a renewable resource. And the two of them, week to week, as it actually happens rather than in tidy hindsight.
I keep records because I have been on both ends of it, and because I would rather write something down than try to remember it at two in the morning. That is genuinely all there is to it. I am not going to build a philosophy out of a notebook.
Mostly this is a journal about two horses who are, at this point, family, and about a woman who loves them a good deal more than she is organised.
Eventually all my notebooks and spreadsheets started to feel like they wanted to be something better. So I am slowly building a tool called HorseStory, a way to keep a horse's whole story in one place. But that came out of this. It is not the point of it. If it vanished tomorrow I would still be here, writing about these two.