Renaissance Horsewoman

(A book about me!?) by Cathy Drumm

When I first met Lise Krieger she was riding one of her Canadian horses Dudley in a lesson during the first of many clinics at a local farm. Dudley had a sullen look on his face and though Lise was attempting to make him cooperate I could tell that she wasn’t into it either. They both were clearly exhibiting what I find to be an all too common hatred of “ringwork”. Lise was there because she knew it would be “good” for them both. Dudley was there because Lise made him be there.

During the course of the next hour I helped them both to gain a new understanding of ring work and why we do it. They both got a glimmer of what its supposed to be like, which to my mind is a combination of yoga and weightlifting, that if done right produces a feeling of joy in both horse and rider as if they were dancing together. Far too often the feeling of lightness and harmony that is the result of a correct flatwork session is instead replaced with a feeling of heaviness and misery caused by sweat producing effort on the part of both horse and rider that gets them exactly nowhere.

Lise was intrigued and over the course of the next few lessons she asked me lots of questions about my life and background. Somewhere along the way she started to think about writing an article for MA Horse Magazine which she then did calling it Renaissance Horsewoman. After it was published and received lots of interest her thoughts turned to a book.

What ensued was a series of interviews taken over the course of approximately two years. Both Lise and I are extremely busy horsewomen with very little available time to sit down together for an interview. Add to this we live an hour’s drive apart so scheduling was very complicated. Weeks would go by when we simply couldn’t fit it in. Somehow we stuck to it. I have to say that my resolve failed a bunch of times mostly because I really couldn’t quite believe that Lise would actually find the time and interest to complete it. But she did! Somehow we stayed on track and she kept all the notes from all the interviews organized and legible enough to be able to produce them into the book.

During the interviews I learned a lot about myself. There is something very liberating while at the same time scary about telling your story to someone. The first thing I had to grapple with was the fact that some of my memories, my internal stories, were not quite right. There were timelines that just didn’t fit with my recall of the order of events, there were people who I had forgotten about, horses I had forgotten about, places which on further examination were not where I thought they were. It is an absolutely fascinating process to weave your way back through the path that has brought you to the present.

In my case it has been a therapeutic process. It’s a good thing that the interviews were often weeks apart because I found digging through my memories, while in many ways uplifting also exhausting. I would drive away from Lise’s house sifting through all the thoughts and feelings left over from digging up a particular period, touching the pain associated with the dark days, the loneliness and doubt that my poor young self struggled through and then, inevitably, the horses that would lift my spirits and allow me to see the path upwards and forward.