Kim Walnes and Gideon Goodheart on the core of self-trust

To any horse-crazy girl from the 80’s, Kim Walnes is already an icon. Many of us know her as ‘Mother Goose’, famous for her unusual partnership with her horse, ‘The Gray Goose’ and their accomplishments in the world of International Three-Day Eventing.

Kim’s unlikely background and her intuitive approach with an ungainly, fearful horse .. .and the odds they overcame together to succeed in the male-dominated world of Olympic level Three-Day Eventing, all with her two young kids in tow … is the stuff of legends!

That someone like Kim EXISTED - with her propensity for talking out loud to the Gray with the absolute certainty he understood - shaped MY trajectory in sport, opening a whole other level of possibility when I aimed for ‘connection’ with my own horses.

Her life story is worth a Disney movie, if not its own Netflix series! Of course, if you have lived a ‘Netflix-series-worthy life’, you will know that as the mixed blessing that it is. As Kim said, “This resilience thing isn’t all sunshine and buttercups!”

Sometimes life is a full blown shitshow. In 1991, Kim’s life went from sunshine to shitshow in a second, when she lost her daughter Andy to abduction and murder. Kim’s world went upside down.

Not all of us have lost a daughter, but many of us know what it feels like to have the fabric of our lives ripped out from under us. So how do we cope? How do we find hope? I like to turn to our elders, like Kim, who show us that we CAN find joy again.

Hearing stories of what they have survived has never failed to alter my perspective. Recently, I got to share stories with Kim Walnes, about her ancestors and what it took for her to find joy after the hardest tests of her life. Together, we looked for the commonalities.

Join me for a conversation about:

~ Trust

~ Endurance

~ The day when, “All of a sudden, the sun broke through”

~ The story of her amazing ride, when she clung to The Gray’s mane with two transverse fractures in her spine, to come home with Team and Individual Bronze medals in the World Championships

~ And her stallion Gideon Goodheart’s message about the importance of connection

You can learn more about Kim and the movement that needs you support, to turn her life story into a film, by following the links below.

Kim’s website: http://thewayofthehorse.com

Kim’s facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063750034342

These are the two trailers for the documentary project:

2021 EQUUS Film & Arts Fest - Mother Goose The Kim Walnes Story - Trailer (by Tory Kelly, and this won an award at the Equus festival)

(teaser) Mother Goose -- The Kim Walnes Story (By Sybil Miller)

You can find me at: https://www.facebook.com/paige.wilde1

https://www.instagram.com/wilde_paige/

https://www.paigelockton-wilde.ca/

Music credit: The Wilds Beyond by L-Ray Music

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