The horse who taught me that what we find in horses often reaches far beyond the riding.
They say you never really forget your first love, and when I think about Kitty Hawk, I understand exactly what that means.
She was half Quarter Horse, half Hackney pony, a chestnut mare with four white socks, a wide white blaze, and a tiny heart-shaped marking on her muzzle that I was completely convinced existed just for me. I thought she was perfect. Not perfect in the way we sometimes use that word to describe a horse who does everything right, but perfect because she was mine to know, to learn from, and eventually to love in a way I had never experienced before.
I was nine when my mom decided to lease her, and I can still remember how enormous that felt. I wrote “I love Kitty Hawk” across my school notebooks, talked about her constantly, and even brought her to school for show-and-tell because apparently describing her was not enough. I wanted everyone else to understand what I already knew: there was something extraordinary about this horse.
I had been around horses from the time I was very young. My mom rode, and some of my earliest memories are connected to the barn. I remember watching riders with disabilities experience something completely different once they were on a horse, through the therapeutic riding program at the stable where my mom boarded. I did not have language for what I was seeing then, but I understood that something was happening that went far beyond learning to ride. Horses seemed capable of creating a kind of connection, freedom, and presence that was difficult to explain from the outside.
Kitty Hawk was the first horse who allowed me to experience that personally.
We trained and showed on the hunter circuit and competed through 4-H at the state and national level. We traveled throughout the East Coast, spent weekends at horse shows, practiced endlessly, and worked toward all the things a horse-crazy kid thinks matter most. I learned my diagonals and leads, how to see a distance, how to ride a course, how to prepare for competition, and how much work goes into making something look easy once you enter the ring.
Those lessons mattered. They gave me discipline, responsibility, and a respect for the consistency horses require from us. Caring for a horse teaches you quickly that enthusiasm is not enough. You still have to show up when you are tired, when the weather is terrible, when the ride does not go well, and when the work feels frustrating instead of rewarding.
But the things Kitty Hawk taught me that stayed with me most had very little to do with the show ring.
There was a lot happening in my life during those years that I did not always know how to talk about, and the barn became the place where I could simply be. Kitty Hawk did not need an explanation from me. I did not have to find the right words, make sense of what I was feeling, or pretend that everything was fine before I walked into her stall.
I could just show up.
There was something incredibly grounding about that, even though I would not have known to call it grounding at nine or ten or eleven years old. Grooming her, sitting with her, riding her, or simply being in the barn gave me somewhere to put all the things I did not yet know what to do with. She became my best friend in the way horses often become best friends to children: without ever asking us to explain who we are first.
That relationship shaped the way I learned trust.
With horses, trust is never entirely theoretical. You feel it when you climb on their back, when you approach a fence together, when something unexpected happens, or when you ask them to follow you into a situation they are uncertain about. You learn that trust is built slowly through repetition and consistency, and that it can never be demanded simply because you believe you have earned it.
Kitty Hawk gave me confidence, but it was not the kind of confidence that came only from winning or riding well. It came from knowing we could figure things out together. There were good rides and difficult ones, successful shows and moments when things did not happen the way I wanted them to, yet there was always a relationship underneath the performance.
That distinction became especially important when Kitty Hawk was eventually diagnosed with navicular.
We had been doing well and had built a life together around riding, training, and showing. Suddenly the future I had imagined for us changed. She could no longer continue the same work, and at the time that felt enormous. I was heartbroken because so much of what I understood about our relationship had been connected to what we did together.
Eventually, I began to understand that losing the work was not the same thing as losing the horse.
Our relationship changed. We stopped showing and jumping, but Kitty Hawk remained in my life for years. We rode on the flat, went on trail rides, spent time together, and continued to have a relationship that no longer depended on what she could accomplish for me.
I think that may have been one of the first times a horse forced me to separate who they were from what they could do.
It is very easy in the horse world to build relationships around performance without realizing we are doing it. We talk about potential, ability, movement, soundness, competition goals, training progress, and whether the horse is meeting the expectations we have created for them. All of those things are part of working with horses, and there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to develop a horse or pursue goals together.
But Kitty Hawk taught me that the relationship has to be able to exist when those goals change.
She was not less valuable when she could no longer jump. She was not suddenly less interesting because our competition career ended. In some ways, losing that part of our relationship allowed me to see everything else that had been there all along.
I began to understand that horses give us opportunities to practice things we often struggle with everywhere else: patience, trust, responsibility, acceptance, awareness, and the ability to remain present when the outcome is different from the one we wanted.
They also ask us to pay attention.
Kitty Hawk had her own preferences, opinions, responses, and way of moving through the world. Loving her did not mean turning her into the horse I wanted her to be. It meant learning who she actually was and allowing that information to matter.
That idea has followed me through every part of my life with horses.
Whether I am riding, doing bodywork, teaching, watching a horse move, or simply standing in a barn listening to someone tell me what has changed, I am still interested in that same relationship between what we expect and what is actually in front of us. Horses have a way of exposing the distance between those two things, sometimes gently and sometimes with absolutely no subtlety whatsoever.
Kitty Hawk was the beginning of that for me.
She was the first horse who showed me that the relationship itself could change me. She taught me that confidence did not have to come from controlling an outcome, that trust develops through what happens between us over time, and that acceptance does not mean giving up. Sometimes it simply means allowing the picture to change without deciding that everything valuable disappeared with it.
When I think about her now, I do not remember one particular ribbon or horse show first. I remember her face. I remember that ridiculous little heart on her muzzle. I remember writing her name across every notebook I owned and believing with complete certainty that no horse had ever been more beautiful.
I remember how safe the barn felt because she was there.
And I remember the first time I began to understand that horses could be much more than something we ride.
They can become part of the way we learn to see ourselves, other people, and the world around us.
Kitty Hawk was my first horse in that sense.
And she was absolutely my first love.