The time I have spent hanging around expert horsemen has never been wasted. If I get stuck with a training problem or need a new way to say the same thing, all I have to do is wait. Soon enough, one of my mentor’s voices will show up with the answer for me.
The other day I was trying to describe to a student how to learn about horses and how to develop a system of training that would suit each one. The next thing I knew, I could hear Bert de Némethy (coach of the USET show-jumping team for 25 years) telling me that learning about horses is “like a mosaic.” You learn one piece of it here, he said, and another piece of it there, and you start to put the pieces together. He added that it is up to us to create something beautiful from all those pieces. Each piece should be related to the next one, and all the pieces that you have should make sense to you and to your horse. I have always sought to copy his work and am always looking for one more piece of the mosaic.
