Equine Paths: A Learning Center

10/15/2026

Are you in a “got it, lost it, got it again” season?
Most of us are, and there’s more grace in that rhythm than we think.

The Tension That Holds

10/05/2026

Taking a lil break from the "writerly life" this week because Equine Paths has a retired racehorse in Kentucky for the Retired Racehorse Project's Thoroughbred Makeover! If you're unfamiliar, please look it up!

We are SO PROUD of all the work and effort Jennifer Kelly, Aubrie, and Camille have put in since February to prepare for this week-long trip and competition. In my book, you've already won, girls! What a journey!

Please join Equine Paths in cheering on Li'l Miss Camille, Aubrie Stewart (rider), and Jennifer Kelly (trainer). You can follow them here!

10/03/2026

Thank you, Centre!

What a day at the Centre Fall Festival. To everyone who stopped by our booth to talk about Equine Paths, the horses and the books I've written this year, thank you. Your questions, your stories, and your time meant so much.

And to everyone who took a book or something else home: 100% of the profit goes to feeding the rescue and sanctuary horses at Equine Paths. You helped keep hay in front of them, and I'm grateful.

I met some wonderful people today, and it reminded me how much I love our small town. It's a great place to live, and a good place to be a neighbor.

If you didn't get to pick up a book at the festival, you can find them online at www.equinepathslearning.org.

10/03/2026

🍂 Join us at the Centre Fall Festival! 🍂
Stop by our booth on River Street and discover something special for the whole family! We’ll have our children’s books, devotionals, and more available for you to browse and enjoy.
Come celebrate the season, support local vendors, and make wonderful memories with family and friends. We can't wait to see you there!
📍 Find us on River Street at the Centre Fall Festival!

10/03/2026

Meet the Her: one horse a day until October 3.

Apache

Seven years ago I was building a herd for equine-facilitated learning, and someone offered me a completely blind horse.

Every professional voice in my orbit said no. The insurance company canceled our coverage the day I brought him in. Colleagues in this field were blunt with me: he'd be a liability, a risk to the nonprofit, a mistake I couldn't undo. And they weren't being unkind. I had no idea how to care for a blind horse, and the thought of a thousand-pound animal who couldn't see standing in a stall with a child frightened me badly.

I brought him anyway.

He's a roan Appaloosa with a clean white blanket across his hindquarters and dark spots scattered like ink dropped without a pattern. Moon blindness took his eyes, they've shrunk and glazed and anyone who looks closely can see it. But when he lifts his head toward a sound or turns his face toward a voice he knows, the presence is unmistakable. It just isn't carried by sight. It's carried by attention.

He mapped his arena with his whole body. Not anxious circling, intelligent circling, each pass tracing ground he trusted. He knows the fence lines. He knows where the water trough stands and where the feed bucket waits. He knows the gate back to his stall, and he knows Thelma Lou and Rowdy live in the upper paddock that meets his arena. Blindness taught him geography through repetition and orientation through listening.

He's fed last. He has opinions about that, and he announces them.

When I come through the gate at night I call to him. Apache, I am here. He lifts his muzzle into the air and flicks his ears, asking me to say it again so he can correct his path. I am here, Pache. I am here. And he comes.

The moment I keep: my grandson Emmett at the arena gate, small and warm against me, and Apache adjusting his circle at the sound of my voice and coming to us. I sat Emmett on his bare back, and he wound his little hands into that short mane, and I asked Apache to walk on. At the first step Emmett burst out laughing, surprised and entirely whole.

Nothing remarkable by most measures. No lesson. No outcome. Just bodies learning each other, weight and rhythm and breath, safe enough to trust.

Trust does not require vision. It requires orientation. A willingness to listen, to adjust, to keep moving toward what is steady even when you cannot see where it leads.

He's in the children's book, and he's the one Emmett loves best there too. Apache walks by feel. Integrity is like that, choosing the right path even when it's hard to see.

Today the table goes up. Come find me. Every purchase supports Equine Paths: A Learning Center.

📍 October 3 at Centre's Fall Festival.

10/02/2026

Meet the Herd: one horse a day until October 3.

Gibson

He raced thirty-six times as Guitar King. Not a star, just steady. The kind of horse who shows up and tries, and steady horses are usually the ones who give the most without anyone noticing what it costs them.

After the track he was rehomed responsibly to a young woman who meant well and didn't yet know what she was taking on: a sesamoid fracture that needed real rehabilitation, and a bottom-of-the-herd Thoroughbred turned out with dominant horses. Food got scarce. Safety got uncertain. By the time I got the call, he had been lying down in a pasture for a while, too weak to rise, too hungry to fight, too alone to care.

When I picked him up, his 16.3-hand frame had collapsed inward. Ribs like a cathedral of bone. We gave him water out of bottles because he was too weak to drink from a bucket.

The vet advised euthanasia. My horse friends agreed. They weren't being cruel, they were doing the hard arithmetic of rescue work, where a horse who can't be ridden is a horse without a future. I couldn't accept that equation.

I strung a hammock across the barn aisle because I couldn't make myself leave him. Sometime after midnight, I got down in the shavings next to him and sang. It was the lullaby I'd only ever sung to my sons, during fevers and thunderstorms. He didn't lift his head. But his breathing deepened, one ear turned toward me, and then he leaned closer.

He still does that. Years later, healed, he leans his long bay body toward me when I sing and presses his head into my shoulder, like the sound itself is a place he recognizes.

Now the part rescue posts usually leave out. His body healed long before his mind did. He was food-aggressive, horses who have starved often are, and he was vigilant, and he seemed for a long while like he'd forgotten every night I slept beside him. But trauma doesn't say thank you. Trauma says I don't know if I'm safe yet.

He caught me with his head in the stall one evening and gave me a concussion. Months later, in a dark barn aisle, he bit my ear badly enough to need stitches front and back. Second concussion. The ER doctor lectured me about horses the whole time he was sewing.

I doubted my decision exactly once.

It was Ginger who finally said the thing I didn't want to hear: you two have to face your demons together. She saddled him, he hadn't worn one in three years, and he didn't balk. I climbed the mounting block with my heart going, and he stood there like he was waiting to find out whether I believed in him. She led us around and then let go and walked away, and left the two of us alone in the middle of the arena, two creatures who had hurt each other and feared each other and somehow still needed each other.

He took a step. Then another. No buck. No bolt. No bite.

Integrity is not the posture of the unbroken. It's the quiet, persistent gathering of what has been scattered.

📍 October 3 at Centre's Fall Festival

10/01/2026

Meet the Herd: one horse a day until October 3.

Stone Crazy

In racing, a horse who runs fifty or more times earns the title warhorse.

Stone ran eighty-four.

He's a tall steel-gray Thoroughbred sired by Monarchos, who won the 2001 Kentucky Derby with the second-fastest Derby time ever run, behind only Secretariat. There's real running in this horse's blood, and his body spent years proving it.

He came off the trailer the night he arrived leaning forward, braced, carrying the posture of an animal who has only ever been asked to go. I recognized it immediately, because I had worn that same posture into every conference room I'd ever walked into. I knew the gap between braced and calm. So did he.

What he needed was a let-down: months of nothing being asked of him while his body unlearns the tension of constant motion. At first he couldn't do it. He walked and galloped himself around my arena for hours because that was the only thing he knew how to be. Then we moved him into a small paddock with a few other horses, and slowly his stride lengthened, and his body remembered grazing, wandering, belonging to a herd.

He had always been excellent at structured rest, the track taught him that. What he hadn't had was the deeper rest that gives you back your identity.

Before he could become anything new, he had to remember who he was without the pressure to perform.

I was doing the same work at the same time, in a different body, and I'd be lying if I said I noticed. I thought I was rehabbing a racehorse. Stone showed me what happens when a nervous system finally exhales.

And the running never left him. God made this horse to run, and nothing about slowing down erased that. The let-down didn't take the run out of Stone. It returned the run to its rightful place.

Here's what I didn't expect. When veterans come to work with the horses, they gravitate to him. They ask about the eighty-four races, the reconditioning, what it takes to learn to live in a calm body after years of being trained to run. They see themselves in him. And then they walk into the arena with him, and something opens up in the space between them that I have never once been able to manufacture on purpose.

📍 October 3 at Centre's Fall Festival.

09/30/2026

Meet the Herd: one horse a day until October 3.

Luna

The Jockey Club calls her Pennies Princess: a Cairo Prince filly, bred for speed, pedigree, and promise in the name.

The night I watched the Buck Moon come up over my arena, that name felt too small for what was standing in front of me. The Buck Moon is the one that marks new antlers coming in, velvet and tender, fragile and strong at the same time. She was tall and dark gray, and the light turned her almost silver. Not a princess waiting to be polished. A creature learning to grow again.

So she became Luna.

She settled in beautifully. Eight months of letdown, good hay, a body filling back out. She was perceptive, quick, eager to connect when the expectations were clear. Then time thinned and barns filled, and I sent her off the property to a trainer for more consistent work under saddle.

She was tied to a fence panel after a workout. For reasons no one could fully explain, she reared, flipped over backward, and broke the saddle she was wearing.

She came home a different horse. A mare who had loaded onto a trailer without a second thought now needed three people to get her up the ramp. And rearing became her answer to everything I asked.

The first time she reared with me, what got me wasn't her hooves leaving the ground. It was the sound of gravel scattering under her hind feet. That went straight through me, because I was thirteen once, on a friend's Paint horse in a dusty field, and the sky turned upside down, and I jumped, and I have never forgotten the heat of his flank inches from my ribs. That kind of fear doesn't disappear. It settles into the nervous system like sediment.

So when she came down, snorting and shaking, my legs were shaking too. And fear handed me a story: that she was dangerous, unadoptable, a horse who would have to live with me forever because no one else should take the risk.

Then she looked at me. She drew a breath. I drew one too.

She wasn't defiant. She wasn't dominant. She was confused and frightened and still wanting connection without knowing how to feel safe in her own skin, and in that, I finally recognized a pattern I'd been missing in myself for years.

We started over. Safety first, clarity always, and no pressure that never lets up. She learned astonishingly fast once she felt safe. There's a fall afternoon I still can't talk about without my throat catching: I lifted my hand, said "touch," and she stepped out and worked a whole pattern of cones on her own, ears forward, entirely herself.

She didn't need dominance. She needed room to breathe.

She's the tall gray in the children's book, the one Sutton loves best, the one who flinches when the brush bumps her shoulder and then forgives it. And if you see the canvas print called "Hard to Catch" on my table, that's Luna too.

📍 October 3 at Centre's Fall Festival.

09/29/2026

Meet the Herd: one horse a day until October 3.

Thelma Lou

She is not a horse. Nobody cares. She's everyone's favorite anyway.

Thelma Lou is a BLM donkey out of Utah, wild stock, federal paperwork, a long trailer ride east, and she has somehow arrived with the single most affectionate personality on this farm. She is soft all over. She leans. She would like to be scratched now, and also in a minute, and also after that. Children who are nervous around the horses go straight to her and stay.

She appears exactly once in Horses and Holy Ground, and it's a line I love more every time I read it. Apache is our blind horse, and the passage is about how he maps his world by memory and listening, where the fence lines are, where the water trough stands, where the gate to his stall is. And then: he knew that Thelma Lou the donkey and Rowdy the mini horse lived in the upper paddock that met his arena.

She's a landmark. A horse who cannot see still knows exactly where she is.

She's also in the children's book, and she's on the bookmarks, and she's on the note cards, because there is no version of a table with my name on it that doesn't have a donkey somewhere on it. I've stopped fighting it.

Reverence often begins with the smallest things. Sometimes it begins with a donkey who wants her ears rubbed.

📍 October 3 at Centre's Fall Festival.
The bookmark is free with any book. She's on it. And there are stuffed adoptable donkeys...you cannot adopt the real Thelma Lou.