Instead, I spent the day on a hospital bed, on the phone (mom, boyfriend, someone to haul my horses home), and in the CT machine.

Spinal fracture. L3 and L4, lumbar above the tailbone. Non-displaced.

Lucky.

Lucky, I understood, but still I cried there in the emergency room. I’d had big plans for the season, a bid at endurance riding with a new horse after my old campaigner retired. Endurance was what I did. Who I was.

In the ensuing weeks, from my place on the sofa where I was forced to accept the kindness of friends, I came slowly to terms with my aborted season. The hottest weather came and went. Across the state, wildfires burned. Smoke throttled the mountains before finally smothering under feet of snow.

Slowly, I resumed walking. Running. Skiing. 

Come spring, I was fit and cleared to ride. Only when I mounted up did I discover that I’d undergone a deeper shift. Beneath the healing lay a jagged scar. Somewhere in the forge of time, mortality had become reality.

I was afraid.

As a kid, I nearly always rode bareback and felt pretty secure. Later on, I started young horses and took some falls, but I mounted up with the belief that I could generally either stick on or jump off as needed. Though aware of risk, I didn’t worry about getting hurt.

But now, the Pangea of my confidence had split. In the valley between its severed parts welled an ocean of unease. Whenever my horse’s emotions escalated, waves crashed in my chest. I fought to keep them there, to stop them reaching my hands, my knees, my seat, my horse. But they burned my lungs with icy brine. 

I sold the mare. Despite more professional training, and trying to push through, we never meshed. A few years later, I sold another green mare that I’d raised from a weanling. She was a well-bred, lovely thing, but when started under saddle the trainer discovered her go-to form of resistance was rearing. We tried many things, but in the end I wasn’t up for the risk.

I was glad to see her go. And I was terribly, bitterly disappointed in myself for being glad.

That was the darkest mile. Deep in the valley of shadow, walls rose high on either side, stretched unreachable behind and unknowable before. I rode familiar horses. Easier horses. Sometimes, I dismounted and walked. 

Very gradually, I began to wonder if fear of falling was not so much failure as wisdom. Perhaps my experience reflected a more genuine way of being, a reality stripped of presumption.

Have you ever been on the verge of sleep and felt yourself fall? The great swoop in your heart, the jolt of every muscle grasping for branches that aren’t there. Some research speculates that hypnic jerks are an evolutionary holdover from the time our ancestors slept in trees. Perhaps fear of falling is, quite literally, in our DNA.

So I stepped down when I felt unsafe, walked beside my horses until both our minds grew quiet. Slowly, I began to own this practice. I declared myself a member of the I Choose Life Club.

Because I did. I chose to live, more softly, still among the horses.

I took time for extra groundwork. Sliced training concepts into even smaller pieces. “If it isn’t easy,” I used to say about the horses’ learning, “It isn’t time.” Now, I claimed that for myself as well.

Author Steven Pressfield wrote, “The opposite of fear is love ~ love of the challenge, love of the work, the pure joyous passion to take a shot at our dream and see if we can pull it off.”

I never gave up riding, and I never gave up the fear. Instead, I took its reins and showed it another way. Curiosity. Creativity. Feeling our way until the valley widened and sunlight filtered in, glistening on the water. 

Along the route, I fell in love with another mare. Six years old, mostly unhandled. Flighty and defensive. And though I’d said for several years that I was done starting horses, this one caught my heart. I didn’t want to hand her off to a trainer. I wanted to her to join me by the shore, to find our way together toward dawn.

I also picked up a gelding with a big personality. Big movement. Big emotions. The kind of horse that, despite solid training, sometimes boils over. Occasionally I still step off when his lid begins to rattle, but more often I don’t.

I’ve ridden both horses through the stormy gap. The ocean is still there, wide and black. But the valley is broad as well. A moonpath stretches to the horizon, rocked by breaking waves. It is vast and lovely and changing, appropriate to the journey, part of my world.

This gentle road, ridden slowly, is only hoof-deep after all. Beneath the sea lies solid ground.