A king unable to rule his country

Here is a new acquaintance I made today. Anybody know what these are? Each cluster is about the size of a ping pong ball or smaller.

Here is the mystery plant as she dances her way up to the sun. You can see some of her buds starting to develop.

Today I spent time sitting on the fence between Sofi who is still on her diet and Patrik and Sundance who have been assigned the task of eating the fresh spring grasses so Sofi won't get laminitis when she goes out again.

The flies are starting to get bad but I remember last year Lynne Gerard writing in her blog about how she found that the times that the flies were the worst, the grasses were at their most lush and the flies had the effect of inspiring the horses to move around more. I've always used fly masks before but I'm going to try having the horses go without this year so they will hopefully exercise themselves more and also get closer to each other by learning to swish the flies off each other's faces with their tails. My horses haven't developed this closeness, I think in part because of the fact that I've always taken care of their flies with masks.

I've noticed the unexpected benefit of having Sofi on the other side of a fence is that JD and Tricia can get closer to her and work on scratching her without feeling as threatened...and also, Patrik and Sundance can get closer and she doesn't feel as threatened by them. I hadn't realized his would be the case.

After I scratched him some, Patrik went over to a tree to show me how he really wanted to be scratched.

Then he and Sundance wandered off...

...and I soon saw why, JD had arrived to feed them dinner. I kept quiet and watched the scene as JD figured out how to get everyone in their proper places. First, he let Patrik in with Sofi...

...then he walked back out to give Sundance her grain.

After Sundance finished her grain, he let Patrik out and gave each of them a little bit of hay. I decided that they probably didn't need any hay at all at this point so he fed them about half of what he had brought out and then was left with a bag of hay while we were hanging out and absorbing the horse vibes. I used it as an opportunity to show JD how to work with the energy to keep the horses away from the bag of hay.

Patrik is using his finest Jedi mind tricks to try and sweet talk JD into allowing him into the bag of hay.

We were both vigilant though and Patrik finally resigned himself to the bit of hay that he had already been given. There seems to be a calming effect when the horses know their place in the herd and can trust that their leader is strong and confident.

Today, Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling sent out a nice email which included the following:

In my new book I begin the first chapter with the headline: We are concerned with the horse – but the horse is concerned with the world. And that is the only reason at all why I personally went to the horses. It was told about one of the ancient Kings, that he was unable to rule his country, because he was not even able to handle his horse. At the end of the day a human always stands completely alone in front of a horse, in front of destiny or in front of the tremors of the world. And somehow that is, so our forefathers said, one and the same thing anyway. And the tremors of the world are meanwhile threatening to take on giant dimensions.

He paired this with a new video clip which you can watch here.

As I walked home, I was treated to the following...