Who knew horseback riding could be so dangerous? That Thursday afternoon in February seemed like any other day to get in the saddle. But when I landed on the ground and looked down at my grossly disfigured wrist, I realized something was very different.
The day had started the way all of my days at the Five Brooks Ranch did. I raked and forked loads of manure and wet hay for several hours. It was what I chose to do on my 60th birthday the previous November. Since then, I went up to the ranch in Point Reyes one or two days a week and enjoyed being around the horses.
In the seconds before I fell to the ground, my mind flashed back 45 years to the first time a horse that ran away with me when I was 15. That ride seemed normal until the horses knew they were heading back home to the barn and decided to run, canter and then a gallop. I dropped the reins and held onto his mane and the horn of the saddle. I remember looking down at the reins skipping near where his hooves were landing and feeling a great sense of dread at the thought that he might step on them and send us head over heels at high speed. That day, however, I stayed on and eventually we stopped at the gate.
This time, I was not so lucky. I was set to go out for a two-hour ride with a group of seven guests. There had been some confusion about whether we were going to go as one large group or two smaller groups and there was quite a lot of hurrying to get everyone on their horses and get the horses in their proper order to go out on the trail. My horse, an Arabian, was waiting impatiently to be the tail horse with me as the tail guide.
As the other horses were leaving the corral area, I looked over at him and realized that I had neglected to put his bridal on. So I wrestled with him to get the bit in his mouth and get the bridle adjusted. Now he was even more agitated. And I could feel the pressure of the group leaving without me in position.
As I hurried to untie him and get him ready to go, I overlooked the fact that the saddle he was wearing did not have a horn over which I could loop the reins. So when I climbed into the stirrups and onto the saddle, the reins dropped down on his neck. Having ridden him several times before, I didn’t feel like I was in any danger. He was my favorite horse to ride.
Then he went from a standing position to a running one.
But instead of running to catch up with the group, he was running in the opposite direction toward the gate of the main corral. It felt like a crisis and I jumped off, giving myself a compound fracture of the radius bone in my left arm, just up from my wrist joint.
One of the hardest things to endure is the burden of knowing that you made a terrible mistake that led to a terrible outcome. I have played the moment of crisis over and over in my mind hoping that the outcome would somehow be different. But it never is.
Along the way, however, I reflect on all the confounding and distracting factors that came in to play that day. The saddle that had no place to secure the reins. The last minute request I got from one of the other guides to work on extracting a hose from the engine block of a dump truck. The guest rider who complained about her saddle and the stirrups being unlike anything she had ever experienced. The pressure of time, knowing that I needed to drive back to San Francisco to play tennis with my team that evening. It was a perfect storm that dramatically lowered my awareness - my situational awareness.
Forgiveness is an important part of healing. It’s especially critical to forgive yourself for an accident. A mistake. And it’s important to recognize how your awareness gets clouded by outside factors. It’s easy to blame others and I could blame that horse, but that doesn’t help with the healing process.
The healing process is an adventure. It is an opportunity to learn how to experience wellness in the face of pain, sorrow, shame and the shadow of trauma. Recently I have been using the term “adventure wellness” in its most robust and courageous sense. After this accident and during the experience of the many weeks of recovery, I am looking at the term in a whole new way. The more I am able to experience the healing process as a new adventure, the more wellness I feel.
It’s still an agonizing process. After almost 6 weeks, my hand is still swollen and my arm aches with pain throughout the day and night.
Breathing into the pain and discomfort raises my awareness of how I can heal myself and avoid making it worse. Sometimes I have to force myself to sit down and elevate my arm. My restlessness and anxiety, much like my overactive mind, lead me in new and perilous directions. Just sit and breathe. The wellness is in the adventure of the moment.