February 17, 2026 
Note to readers: Week 6 of WEF is hunter week and my editor said I should mention something about WEF in my What the WEF?! column. So consider that box checked. Moving on…
I do not remember exactly what I was upset about. I came home from somewhere in Wellington and could not settle myself. One tries one’s usual medicants and they do not work. Or they don’t work well enough.
So then one turns to words.
I found someone speaking eloquently on YouTube. He was not speaking of horse sport, he was speaking of something else entirely. He spoke of a “strange and beautiful striving.”
As soon as he said it, I grabbed at it. I grabbed at the words and clung to them. I grabbed onto the words and put them in my soul and was comforted.
“We are falling on our face because we’re jumping high,” he continued.
Now this, I thought, I can easily apply to show jumping.
I don’t have the video in front of me, I don’t even remember which it was. But now I walk around thinking inside myself of a strange and beautiful striving. What other thing would you want to be part of? A routine and ugly resignation?
Another disappointment walks in the door and slaps you across the face. Someone is crying, someone else is very angry. I am confused. Someone says a lot of words in a bitter tone. That is usually me, but this time it is not.
“I think I am going to use this,” I say slowly, because that is the level of energy I’m bringing to this thing, “for my own spiritual transcendence.”
Someone laughs.
“What do you want me to do?” I respond with a bit more energy, “Fall into anger and despair? Become enraged, petty, and bitter? No! This—along with everything else—has put me on a spiritual path and I hate to tell you all”—I wave my hands around—“You’re coming with me!”
Because I am, I whisper to myself, engaged in a strange and beautiful striving…
Is all sport like this? This precipice you sit on with joyous ecstasy on one side and utter heartbreak on the other while you attempt to balance on the narrow edge between them?
“But why do you not just leave the edge and jump headfirst into the ecstasy?” says the voice in my head, who wants to make a mockery of my metaphor and screw up the writing of this column, which is being done on deadline.
“Beauty requires contrast!” I scream at myself. “How can we even define it or recognize it without ugly running around all over the place? If everything is beautiful nothing is!”
But the truth is, the edge is the only habitable place. There’s no foothold in the ecstasy or the heartbreak. Or at least none that I have found.
Someone once told me the whole thing when it comes to show jumping is to never give up. That’s the meat of the whole strange and beautiful striving, to never let it go.
Once I was lying in a hammock in a stall at Saugerties and I said to myself, “Look here with eyes from five years ago.” Five years ago I spent most hours of most days of most weeks in a cubicle answering telephone calls.
The eyes from five years ago were very surprised to see the walls of a stall and the barn aisle and the horses and the tack and my own legs stretched out with muddy boots. They were used to the fabric half walls of the cubicle.
The eyes from five years ago were delighted.
