Spinning in Quotes

I realize I’ve been absent from the weekly Spin Cycle that Jen over at Sprites Keeper moderates, because, frankly, it’s springtime here in South Dakota, and that means that I am an otherwise BUSY, busy, cowgirl. There are calves everywhere! And baby goats too (I promise there will be photos of the happy goat family this week)! There’s colts and horses to ride, and yearlings to halter break, then they had to be moved to their summer home. Horses and cattle are places they shouldn’t be, because the mama cows are shedding their winter coats, and rub the gates open because they’re scratching. Which creates an additional need to be horseback because there’s constantly bovines and equines in the wrong places. And of course, a cowgirl never complains about getting to ride a good horse, on a pretty day, through God’s country. But it does make for some long days!

Anyway, that’s enough excuses. Let’s get down to the meat and potatoes of this week’s Spin- Quotes.

She would give us an assignment, my first week back, for which I have little, if any fodder.

I can quote “The Man From Snowy River” verbatim. I’ve watched that movie at least a hundred times. It hardly applies to my daily, life, however. And I don’t bust out with the lines, unless I’m watching the movie.

I know one of my favorite quotes is from some unknown source:

“God crafted no better tonic for a man’s heart, than the thunder of hooves under a star-lit night”.

I know that horseman, Buck Brannaman says: “Horses and life; it’s all the same to me”. He’s right, you know.

I am beginning to quote some famous horsemen on a more daily basis, but really, that’s where Zach comes in.

Not only does my cowboy sound like a broken record of Ray Hunt (a famous horseman and Buck Brannaman’s mentor) he intersperses that with Buck Brannaman and Lonesome Dove on a DAILY Basis. Now I’ve only seen Lonesome Dove a couple of times- so the quotes are lost on me- I never know when he’s quoting the movie because I’ve not seen it enough to know when he throws one out there. It’s kinda not fair. Or something. Other than Lonesome Dove, what he quotes to me, wouldn’t really make much sense to the rest of you, because it’s all about horses and horsemanship. The only one that would is “make the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult. Then set it up and wait”.

But enough about all that too.

On Day Four of the Buck Brannaman Clinic he shared a quote from Teddy Roosevelt with the group, and it was one of the best things I’d ever heard. Especially for me, because of where I was at that very moment in my life. I’d been dealing with someone who fit the very individual in the below quote:

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

For more Spins, visit Spriteskeeper.