We are Parelli because ........

I have just entered the competition to win a day with Pat and Linda Parelli! I've joined sixty-three other hopefuls to demonstrate, in three minutes, why "We are Parelli."

I knew exactly what I wanted my video to show from the start - just didn't realise just how short a time three minutes is! Filming the bits I needed took a fraction of the time the actual editing took - it's true what they say about your" best bits ending up on the cutting room floor!"

By the time the video was submitted, lets say I was very familiar with it and, just like audition video submissions, you always think of it as a bit flawed,- "I could have done that bit better" or "I wish I had included something else."

What I wasn't prepared for was other people's reactions to it. I had seen it so many times that it seemed a bit ordinary to me. I knew my Parelli friends would be supportive because Parelli people are the most emotionally fit, encouraging, and warm and cuddly people in the world! And they didn't let me down. Their immediate reaction was to repost on their own page and ask their friends to vote fo me too. The amazing friendship gained from a shared interest in Parelli was one of the things I had wanted to include in the video but I ran out of minutes!. What was really surprising were the comments of non-Parelli people.

For a long time I have been the lone Parelli student at our yard, affably tolerated as the "orange stick waving, rope wiggling mad woman." I usually get an arena to myself as other peoples horses are scared of my stick! and, if I accidentally leave ropes or carrots sticks around the yard they always get returned to me because nobody else either knows what to do with them or would want to be seen dead using them anyway!

If this is a ten level programme, we're only one fifth of the way through so I'm always looking ahead to all those very clever things that other students can do that we can't do yet. I'm also the sort of person who thinks that if I can do something then it can't be that difficult or clever. So when I started getting comments like "...amazing ... speechless" and "brought a tear to my eye ... love the loading" I had to remind myself that most people can't load their horse from the front of the lorry, not everybody can have their horse catch them without a bucket of feed, and some people can't stop their horses dragging them to the grass without roping their horse's nose! As Pat says "It's simple, but it's just not always easy!" I have been taking for granted some of the amazing things Liquorice and I have achieved together.

So, whoever wins, what I'm most proud of about the video is that some non-Parelli people have seen a litttle of what Parellli is really about at the individual level. This wasn't a well rehearsed top level demonstration. An ordinary five foot nothing grandma, who came late in life into horses, showed that it is possible do what many people think of as, some extraodinary things with her horse.