Alexandra Kurland is gone.
I have written that sentence several times now and it still doesn’t look like anything that could be true. I suspect many of you have been doing the same thing this week — starting something, stopping, not knowing quite where to put any of it.
We had a name for the things Alex said: Alexisms. The one I have carried longest is the one at the top of this page. She meant it about horses: that you cannot move a foot without having an effect somewhere else, that nothing in training is ever a separate piece. But it has turned out to be the truest thing anyone ever said about Alex herself, and it is the only way I know how to write about her.
How she found most of us
For me it began with a broken shoulder and a month of not being able to do much except read.
I went out to the barn afterwards not expecting a great deal. Within a few weeks I had a different horse. He nickered when he saw me coming. He met me at the gate instead of drifting to the back of the field. He offered things, and watched me to see what would happen next. My barn owner asked what on earth I had done to him.
What I had done was stop making him. Alex had taught me — through a book, from an ocean away — to ask instead, and then to wait for the answer. I thought I was learning a training method.
I know how ordinary that story is. Almost every one of us has a version of it, and that is rather the point. She reached an extraordinary number of people that way, most of them long before they ever met her.
Meeting Alex
I met Alex when she first came to Italy, at a clinic organised by my friend Miriam, who had found clicker training long before I did and taught me my first steps. I owe her the beginning of all of this. Miriam brought Alex to us, and Alex met my horse Asfaloth.
Miriam translated that entire weekend, English to Italian, hour after hour. Alex kept laughing at how long the Italian took — one short sentence from her, followed by an entire discourse. But there was one thing Miriam simply could not translate: the Grown-Ups Are Talking, Please Don’t Interrupt lesson. The concept doesn’t exist in Italy and hence didn’t translate – which we also discussed extensively.
After that, Miriam and I went whenever Alex came over to this side of the pond. France, Germany, Belgium, the UK, Ireland — if there was a clinic in Europe, the two of us found a way to get to it. Those journeys are among my happiest memories, and I know many of you also travelled far.
Full immersion clinics
If you never got to a clinic with Alex, this is the hardest part to explain.
Alex did not stay in hotels. She stayed in the house. We always managed to get her the bed, though she would happily have taken the couch.
So there was breakfast together, and lunch, and dinner, and then the talking went on far too late. Half of what I learned from Alex I learned after ten at night, at a kitchen table, long after the official day was over. Often the thing you had been stuck on all afternoon came loose over dinner.
People arriving for the first time were always startled. They came expecting nine to five and found themselves inside something with no off-switch.
They were startled by something else too. In a horse world that is so often full of people watching from the rails and judging whoever is having a lesson, Alex’s clinics attracted remarkably kind people. Everyone was supportive. If you are a regular you stop noticing it; if you are new it is astonishing. That was not an accident. Someone who spends her life teaching that the horse gets to say no ends up building rooms where the people are safe too.
We talked about horses, mostly. But also about politics, and life, and how to be a decent person in the world. Everything connected to everything else.
Bringing her to Anja
I wanted Alex to meet Anja Beran.
That turned into a quiet project of mine that took years. When I began organising clinics in Germany, I placed the first one near Anja on purpose, so that before the clinic started we could go and watch her work — not a demonstration, just an ordinary training day. Alex loved what she saw and said she wanted to come back.
So the next event was built around Anja’s workshop, and Anja was generous enough to lend us her library so Alex’s workshop could be held there. Later, when Alex came to Italy to see my horses again, we took the group north to Anja afterwards.
Alex recorded Equiosity podcast episodes from those visits.
Of course, she did.
Science camp
In 2019, Jesús Rosales-Ruiz and Mary Hunter joined Alex and we held a science camp in Italy.
It was an actual camp. Our speakers slept in tents, like everybody else. The discussions ran around the fire until very late — that mixture of behaviour analysis and horses and whatever else came up, with Alex somewhere in the middle of it, still asking questions after everyone else had run out.
The teacher we lost
She had been doing this for thirty years and had seen everything, and still she never took the obvious first answer. Whatever the problem was, she went underneath it, and then underneath that, until she found the place where a solution could be built that would actually hold. Always kind. Always more sophisticated than you expected. Never a patch.
That is why her lessons last. You can go back to something she taught you a decade ago and find it still structurally sound.
And then there are the layers. We used to joke — and some of us were not entirely joking — that Alex was sneaking into our houses at night to edit the DVDs, because every time you watched one you found something that had definitely not been there before. Of course it had been there. You simply hadn’t been ready to see it.
That was her real gift as a teacher. She never buried you. She gave you the one thing you could use that day and quietly left the rest in place for the day you would need it.
It shows in the horses. At one of the Art and Science of Animal Training conferences, Alex used two photographs of Asfaloth to make a point about how slowly good work happens. In the first he was long and strung out — a sausage, as she cheerfully put it. In the second, years later, he was round like an orange, carrying himself, using his back. She wasn’t being kind to me by including him; she used whatever horse made the point clearly, and many of you have been in her slides for exactly the same reason. He is 27 now and he looks stunning. That is the sort of evidence Alex cared about.
What is going to happen now?
During the pandemic, after having to cancel Science camp and Alex’s barn, Alex and I organised Dressage camp online with Anja as a special guest. It was wonderful and Alex and I were planning to bring this event back later this year, or next.
It isn’t going to happen, and I don’t yet know what to do with that. It is such a strange thing, that someone so woven into your life can be there one day and simply not be there the next. Reading what people have been writing this week, I know that feeling is being repeated in hundreds of houses right now. We are all standing in the same place.
Alex’s material is not a collection of tips. It is a deeply developed, carefully built body of work, and it is solid. We do not have to start again from scratch, and we should not try to. The job is first to keep it, and then to build on it — which is what she always wanted. She never treated her own work as finished and she would be the first to say it should keep growing.
I am not worried that it will disappear. It is already inside how we train our horses and how we teach other people to train theirs. It works, and it will endure.
What we have lost is something else. Alex was endlessly generous with her time and gave every one of us whatever we needed to take the next step. That source of advice is simply not there anymore. So for now we will have to be that for one another — answering each other’s questions, sharing what we know, holding the work up between us until it can stand on its own feet again.
I have no plan for how. Right now we are grieving, and grieving is the whole of the task. But at some point we will need to work this out together.
I have no doubt that we will. This is a strong, creative, kind community — she made it that way — and it will hold.
Thank you, Alex. For the layers we are all still finding. For the late nights. For teaching so many of us to ask, and then to listen.
Everything is connected to everything else.
~ Alexandra Kurland