The psychic says it’s so: I’m definitely a horse person.

Holly Clanahan

My background, before I came to AQHA, was in the newspaper business. Being a newspaper reporter was a great gig; I felt like I was doing a public service (“Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”) … but there was plenty of fun in the mix, too.

Case in point: It was 1995, and I was a reporter at the Times Record News in Wichita Falls, Texas, my first job out of college. The annual psychic fair was coming to town, and my editors were looking for a fresh, slightly tongue-in-cheek way of covering it. I’m not sure if this decision was reached in the daily budget meeting, or if it was more of an after-hours thing at the Rusty Nail bar just across the street. But regardless, it was determined that as a fun way to promote the upcoming fair, I’d go in for a palm reading.

The arrangements were made, and I went into it with my sense of humor intact. I just hoped the message wouldn’t be an ominous one … it would, after all, be difficult to write a light-hearted story about my impending death.

As I stretched my arm, palm up, across the Formica table in an austere hotel conference room, my psychic told me how it’d go down. It wasn’t what I’d expected. Instead of interpreting the lines on my palm, she told me that she was actually tuning in to my spirit voices — relatives who had gone before me who were now more or less my guardian angels. They’d tell her all the relevant details.

She concentrated on my hand, her fingers looped over mine, when apparently the voices piped up. “You have a horse,” she told me. “Um, yes,” I said, doing a quick mental review: I had no horsey clothing or jewelry on, so no hints there. My purse was a straight “civilian” style, and I hadn’t been to the boarding barn yet that morning, so I was pretty sure there was no horse hair on anything. My work shoes hadn’t been worn to the barn, either, so I knew I wasn’t tracking in any manure. I racked my brain, but couldn’t figure out what she might be keying off of.

“He’s an unusual color,” she continued. “I’m seeing a salt-and-pepper horse.” I swallowed. ”Junior,” who was still at his dam’s side, was born a deep charcoal gray, with hints that he would continue to gray out as he aged. Salt-and-pepper wasn’t a bad way to describe him. This time, I visually checked my clothes … still not finding any horse hair. She went on to tell me that maroon would be this horse’s lucky color, and we moved on.

Luckily, the next topic was better suited to a newspaper story written from a skeptic’s point of view. My voices, the psychic said, were unusually talkative (something my newspaper friends laughingly said they weren’t surprised by). And they volunteered to talk about my past lives. It seems that I started out as a medicine woman in the caves of Greece, and I knew all about the medicinal herbs of the region. (And, yes, the visual picture is of a old, stringy-haired crazy woman wearing a dirty toga, puttering about from cave to cave and frightening small children.)

What’s crazy is that, over the years, I actually have amassed quite a bit of knowledge about herbs and nutraceuticals (for horses, at least). And a dirty T-shirt and jeans (ie, normal barn-wear) may well be the modern-day equivalent of a ratty toga. But, knock on wood, I haven’t yet had any wee urchins run screaming in terror from me. I suppose when that starts happening, I’ll have to check real estate listings for the nearest cave, eh?

Happy riding!
Holly Clanahan
Editor, America’s Horse magazine

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