Where is the Center of the Horse World?

I am finally settled back in Michigan and schooling has been going famously. Jenny has been graciously letting me help with her pretty mare, Tonka, so I have been spending afternoons and evenings riding one mare and then another.

Oxbow is almost exactly the way I left it. Which is eerie for me.
Remember, it was a pole barn; 30 acres and a chain-linked fence when Kim and I first began back in 2005 so over the years when we established it, I shed pieces of my old skins all over the place.
My dad's filing cabinet from Kelly Office Machines,
my childhood plastic ponies with their little wooden barn,
the first polo wraps I ever owned (which was well before I owned a horse,
the huge barn doors with the logo Casey painted that first fall every evening while the sun went down and Tom and I had a beer and discussed figures.
And all of those things are still there. Except for myself and the figures and Casey. Of course, when you have gone from a place and then return, it is not so much the discovery of the things you left behind that is unsettling as it is the life that has gone on around them. The fact that the office is swept and the bridles are hung. Who does that? It is no longer me.

But Oxbow is still there. And red and expansive and awkwardly offering itself.

Jenny and I meet up. We discuss our goals ("...I feel like when I compared this week's videos to last week's videos, I benefited from lifting up more...so today, I am going to try to find consistency through that..."), prepare Skye or Tonka or Angus, and ride in shifts. We use the camera she bought when we first moved to Maryland and tape one another. We capture still frames, ride to music, ride to silence.
We comfortably accuse each other of every visible mistake.
We sweat.
We are always thinking: Forward. Straight. Forward. Refresh. Open Up. Relax. Forward. Straight.
And our bodies are sore from- believe it or not- the rigorous relaxation required to allow the horse- and it is with good intention. Misguided premises still join us for a circle or two until we slow down, feel the horse, ingest and regurgitate the process.
She doesn't ride Skye; I don't ride Angus.
Each horse is the absolute best at something.
Each has her or his physical shortcoming.

At the end of each ride, there is no exchange of money. We walk our pretty ponies over to pick out some apples and then slowly break everything down until it is all put away. Neat and ready to tick-on; its gears as steady as when we left it for Maryland in 2007.

Seeing Oxbow this way reminded me that the Horse World, as it is dubbed, is not a Place. It is what you do with horses in your life.
I used to think that the center of the Horse World was a place. A concrete location. Like Karlruh, Germany or Lexington, Kentucky. But it is not. Horse World in the distilled sense is your network of horses and horse people around you and the the horsemanship tools you use to navigate this network is the key to the impact that you have on and in the coveted childhood utopia of the Horse World. It does not matter where you are, just what you do.