“Dallas found a horse named Lady Briminc she wants me to look at,” Dan said a few days later. “The horse is in Idaho, I think we’re going next Saturday.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You’ll come, right?” Despite the thrill of riding Beau, four hours in a car each way to look at a horse did not sound like fun. I’d have to leave the babies for an entire day. Just that thought made my stomach drop. Plus, I get sick in cars. And I wouldn’t know what to look for in a horse anyway. But I couldn’t say no to the little cowboy in my husband. Then Dan told me we’d be sharing the ride not only with Dallas, but also with the owners of the barn, Jim and Donnette, meaning eight hours in a car with people I barely knew.

There are so many things I’d rather be doing on a Saturday morning, I thought as we started out, way too early in the morning, with Dallas, Jim, and Donnette. But as we passed out of Salt Lake and into open territory, the landscape seemed to create space in my chest I didn’t know had been missing. I watched the populated towns give way to fields and mountains and distant rugged horizons. I wondered about the occasional solitary home. I wondered about the people who lived there, set against the vast winter landscape. I imagined their resilience and slowly, my stomach released the chronic tension I had accepted as the new status quo.

“So, we should talk about how to buy a horse,” Donnette said, interrupting my reverie.

I nodded. I had no idea how to buy a horse. “I assume it’s mostly temperament we’re look for?”

Jim had been quiet up till then. “It has to be the right horse for you and what you want to do with it,” he said. Jim’s intonation implied it was a question as well as statement, so I replied as honestly as I could.

“I just want to learn to be safe on a horse. That’s a bit rudimentary for Dan, but that’s all I want, is to be safe.” Silence ensued. Perhaps my answer was too bare bones to warrant a response.

“Well,” Jim finally said. “The horse has to fit you, and you have to fit the horse, both in temperament and what you want to do with him. We have to make sure there are no injuries, and that the horse isn’t blown.”

“Blown?”

“Blown out.”

“What does that mean?”

Jim paused again. I sensed I was asking questions that were too basic, and yet, I just didn’t know. “You were an Olympic athlete. So you know peak performance exists when the mind and body are tuned and attuned. It’s the same with a horse. If a rider is asking too much, either physically or mentally, the horse can stop responding. When its mentality and its physicality don’t match up, it just gets blown.”

Humans function that same way I thought. We thrive on a challenge but pursuing an unrealistic goal can damage on multiple levels.

“Can you get them back? Or once they’re gone, they’re gone?”

“Sometimes you can get them back, and sometimes you can’t.” He paused. “Horses know things in their body, not in their mind. It’s not about changing their mind, they don’t relate to us on that plane. It’s in their body, so it can be hard to change once they’ve been blown. Most people don’t understand that. The way to be in relationship with a horse is beyond the mind.”

I perked up immensely. The mind was an adversary I’d been battling for years. I had learned to quiet my mind by giving it a goal or a purpose to achieve. But the incident with the twins had rocked my world and my goals had crumbled. My mind had jumped on the opportunity. When it wasn’t torturing me incessantly about the past and what I should have known, it perseverated about the future, the coming trial, and what we would or wouldn’t learn about the case in Belgium.

“The way to be with a horse is beyond the mind,”I repeated. “But as a beginner, I have to be in my mind.” I was hoping Jim would disagree.

“That’s true. While you’re learning. But you can’t stay there.”

“Okay, but how long does that take?” Jim paused again, so I continued, energized by the direction of the conversation. “You brought up hockey. The whole point of my hockey career, I believe now, was to teach me how to turn off my mind, to learn how to get and stay ‘in the zone.’ It may sound strange, but my hockey career was an introduction to meditation, a vehicle to touch the glimmer of the divine that is constantly blocked or obscured by my overly frickin’ chatty mind.” Silence. “Said another way, being a goalie was entirely about resting in the stillness of the movement. But it took twenty years in hockey to learn to turn off my mind and let something else work through me.”

“It won’t take you twenty years,” Jim said.

“Okay, but how long?” I sounded like a six-year-old on a too-long road trip, but my time was already feeling tight.

“That depends on you.”

“Yeah, but theoretically, are we talking months or years?” Was it the depth or the width of my ignorance that stumped Jim?

Finally, he looked at me and with total patience said, “Six months.”

True or not, six months was something on which I could hang my hat. At the time, the only places I was able to find a moment of peace were those where my mind was quiet: skiing, snowshoeing, playing music, being with Kalvin and Grace. Little moments with them were a godsend as being in their presence was the one place the darkness simply couldn’t touch me.

Like this past Christmas Eve, when Dan and I had laid our two tiny bundles on blankets on the floor in front of the fireplace. Dan had stretched out next to Kalvin, and I’d snuggled against Grace, sandwiching the new lives between us. Then Timber had laid her head on Dan, and Acorn, the cat, had made himself at home atop of me. The colored lights from the Christmas tree danced with the light from the fire, and we’d rested in a perfect glittering moment of presence.

Or the nights we lay listening to Kalvin and Grace giggle and play, passing lovies back and forth between their side-by-side cribs instead of sleeping.

Or the way they gazed at us, seeming to convey we were all in on one big beautiful secret.

I was quite sure that the reason my fretful mind quieted when I was with Kalvin and Grace was it abhorred all that pure unadulterated experience. It liked to ruminate and rationalize and explain. It liked to twist itself, and me, into circles of redundant thought that drained my energy. And it especially loved to chew on the Aubrey incident, feeding on my doubt and guilt and ignored intuition.

“I suppose horses live only through their intuition and instinct?” I pondered. If I had lived there, I was convinced, if I’d paid attention, none of what happened would have happened.

“That’s all they know,” Jim said. “We all have it, horses just seem to listen to theirs better.”

“God don’t I know it,” I sighed and felt the grey mist of guilt gather at the edges. “I knew there was something off about Aubrey, I just didn’t know what.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Dan flinch.

“Aubrey, the nanny? Wait, those were your babies?” Donnette cried. “We saw it on the news.” Her arms wrapped around me from behind in a huge hug. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Compassion suddenly permeated the entire vehicle.

“It’s okay now, the babies are okay,” I said. I sounded completely normal but underneath I was afraid. Talking about the case was still a bit like dipping a toe in my emotional ocean. Just a little bit, how does that feel? I was testing the waters, wary of being swallowed whole. I knew Dan didn’t want to talk about it, I could feel him closing in on himself. So I switched the topic to intuition in general.

“That off feeling, that’s all we ever get. That is intuition,” I said as much to myself as to the others in the car. “No neon signs, no conscious thought, no perfect knowledge.”

Dan reached out and took my hand. I wondered if my mind and intuition would ever peacefully co-exist. I wondered if they are meant to.