The moon is still visible, bright and clear just a few degrees above the horizon. Stars glisten in crystalline profusion through the dry atmosphere of a mid-spring sky. Indistinct but discernibly forming in the northwest are black, billowing cumulus, meaning the possibility of wind later, maybe rain. But for now it is comfortable enough.

Predictably, the dogs head for their favorite sniffing- peeing place on the periphery of a small area in the yard that I’ve allowed to fall wild. They will spend several minutes renewing their territorial claims, covering and re-covering each other’s scent until either their bladders are empty or they lose interest in the ritual; I’ve never decided which is true.

I don’t always welcome their company, but tonight I do. When I am with the dogs at night I become, or can become, aware of more than when I am alone, and aware of it in a different way. Subtleties in their postures and manners of focus often inform me of the proximity and movements of creatures I would ordinarily be oblivious of - a raccoon furtively traversing the trunk of a river birch that fell across the creek during the last flood, a cat hunting in the neighbor’s hedge, a possum in the compost. In the company of dogs, these dogs, it is sometimes as if I can concurrently be in two realms, theirs and mine. Despite their domestication and sometimes fawning obeisance, they are immeasurably more attuned to the flow of natural life than I. Tonight they remain close and stay quiet. I haven’t trained them to this deferential behavior; they just seem to know that I am outside at this odd hour because it is easier to stalk and corner a kind of peace here than in the confines of my bedroom, and that they have been conscripted into the hunt.

The irony is that it is their very distractibility, the way they give such sharp if ever shifting attention to everything, that has helped me be aware of my environment in a more primitive way, a wilder way in which it is the spiritual texture of the night itself and not a discipline of my own which pacifies and then supplants the distracting racket in my head. It is partly because of dogs that I learned - and sometimes even remember - that to engage the world fully with my senses and not my thoughts, and to give attention to everything at once and to nothing exclusively, is a process whereby illusion and its attendant distress fall away. What then stands revealed, sometimes, is that drifting beauty which constantly moves through all things, especially one’s own heart.

Where we have come to be still for a while is what, for lack of a better term, I refer to as the wild garden. But it is a garden only in the sense that certain naturally occurring flora have been encouraged to grow by means of arbitrary trimming and cutting away of what holds no particular interest or appeal for me. There was neither plan nor goal except to have something rising out of the earth between the house and the creek besides rye and fescue. The original idea, if it could even be called that, was simply to see what that roughly 300 square foot area of the yard would do if left alone. My disposition is such tonight that I wonder whether in this I have mimicked God: Leave him alone and see what he does.

Earlier in the spring I placed a small kerosene lawn torch at the top of the wild garden beneath a large chestnut. There is a small amount of fuel in its reservoir, so at the touch of a lighter it sparks briefly then flames into a muted, yellow-orange glow. The shadows of pokeweed and bloodroot, groundsel and wild lily dance erratically. The impression is one I recall from similar contexts in childhood, that the shadows were there dancing all along and have been revealed, not caused, by the flickering light. And with this impression also returns an awareness that such correspondences of internal and external events are the synchronistic speech of nature. In this language the communications, as in dreams, almost always speak to what is rather than what ought to be, and it has aptly diagnosed the condition I came here to heal: The shadows were there dancing all along and have been revealed, not caused, by the small flickering light of consciousness.

No, I should not call this a patch of wildness. Rather, the diversity and vitality of what has flourished here simply because I didn’t mow it down seems now, in the stillness of the night and the dancing shadows, to stand more as a kind of communique passing between me and the spirit of the place. That I left it alone to see what it would do was perhaps a spontaneous gesture of good will toward the spirit. That it flourished so richly and so quickly is evidence that the gesture has been well received. Among the eight little trees thriving here, two chestnuts already stand at a height of over two feet.

As I’m seeing it now, it is more like a border zone cooperatively established between myself and the natural forces in which we have placed a few of our respective symbols and energies, neither wild nor domesticated but with elements of both, like an embassy furnished with the accouterments of two worlds so that their ambassadors can meet with at least a semblance of comfort. It is very like the way I would describe my psyche tonight - neither wild nor tame, but with elements of both. The difference is that so far there has been little of that comfort, for the peace I came outside to retrieve is yet sketchy and unfinished, just out of reach.

Both dogs are lying with their chins on their paws, still except for an occasional twitch of an ear or a muffled sniff as even in their half-sleep they monitor movements of the night that are imperceptible to me. The black coffee that I brought with me, and have almost forgotten I hold, has cooled. In it I can see the reflection of heaven, but jiggling with surprising agitation; surprising because to me my hand seems steady. And again there is an impression linked to one from childhood.

One night I came upon a large steel pan full of black oil behind my grandfather’s barn. What at first I saw, however, which occasioned several minutes of both awe and perplexity, wasn’t old black oil at rest in its place, but rather a vast and seemingly bottomless shaft filled with stars. It was not until I very tentatively extended my hand into that improbable universe that I discovered it to be the night sky mirrored in oil still warm from a tractor’s crankcase.

And so, to quiet the stars shivering in my cup, I give attention to the breath and to the body through which it flows, receiving as calmly as I can that pleasant and ultimately inexplicable state in which there are both thoughts and thoughtlessness. Finally the stars in my cup are still, or at least they are still enough. And then one by one they wink out behind the approaching cumulus. Almost simultaneously, the little kerosene flame sputters and goes out.

And I am satisfied, for I came to this place hunting a truth, and now I have it. The shadows are always present, it has said; the light does not create them, but reveals them. And now that I am sufficiently receptive, it also says this:

Protruding nails have been hammered flat, instead of pulled or replaced; doors that no longer abut their frames are held shut with loops of wire or propped open with whatever stick or board came to hand; broken windows have been ignored. And so over the decades since the demise of the farm, the barn has been allowed to pass beyond a state of disrepair into the early stages of irreversible delapidation.

Under the relentless pressure of the elements, paint that once sealed the walls has long since eroded away. Baked by sun and soaked by rain, the unprotected wood is rotting away from the nails so that, thus exposed, they too have corroded and are decomposing. Thus, in a stiff breeze the barn rattles and creaks; in sustained wind, pieces of it are sometimes wrested loose to hang askew, scraping and banging until torn away entirely by the force of a sudden gust.

During dry weather the barn is a faded gray, but in a steady rain it slowly darkens as it absorbs moisture. And in this drab mien, the barn appears saddened by its own slow dying. One can feel sympathy for it, an ancient chameleon-like creature in which there remain only wan shades weakly hinting of a former abundance of life and color.

To see the powerful young Appaloosa emerge from his patched up stall is a startling incongruity. By the standards of his breed he is big, sixteen hands and nearly twelve hundred pounds, and possessed of perfect conformation. As he moves across the paddock after his morning feed he exudes an easy grace and calm nobility that belie the poverty of his surroundings. The fence that delineates his paddock only sharpens the contrast between vitality and decay, for it is as old as the barn and has been so much mended and rigged that it is now little more than one nightmarish tangle of baling wire and rusted fencing nailed and stapled to shored up posts. But here, as in the solid infrastructure of the barn and still visible signs of its builders’ skilled carpentry, the diligence of those who created the farm can be perceived. The posts are oak, tightly spaced and deeply sunk, enduring well beyond what were probably the expectations of the men who put them there.

The horse stops to drink at a dented trough, and then, perhaps having caught the scent of a mare or simply because he is a young horse with energy to squander, he snorts and neighs, throws his head and runs wildly to the far end of the paddock where he bounces stiff legged to a halt.

In the context of these last vestiges of a once thriving farm, he is just coming into the spring of his being. He nickers and prances. And one wonders, upon what grave is he dancing? What spirit arises at night from the hard packed dirt floor of his stall, congeals out of the layers of dust and the cribbed slats of the bins to visit him in his standing sleep and whisper its history?

Then suddenly he bucks and runs. The thudding of his hooves can be felt in the ground a hundred yards away, carrying with it his exhilaration with the untrammeled force of his own life. With this one brief expression of tremendous energy, it is as if he has animated the place itself. And indeed, it is more alive with him in it.

It is not difficult to imagine that the spirit still living in this poor, moribund place has somehow contrived to reach out through time and space and call him here so that as it sheds its present form, as the last of the farm finally dies, it may become a part of this wonderful animal through the grasses he eats, the water he drinks, the air he breathes. Certainly, the spirit of place would recognize in him already something of itself.

In the high plateau country along the Polouse River in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, his ancestors were bred into existence by the Nez Perce Indians. These beautiful spotted horses were revered for their intelligence, courage, agility, speed and endurance. They enabled the Nez Perce to flourish because they were so adept in the hunt for buffalo, and in the movements of war. Our term for the technique employed by the Nez Perce would be selective breeding, and so it was. But their mastery in calling this horse into existence ran much deeper than their understanding of genetic transmission. At the core of all their knowledge, both worldy and religious, was an understanding that there is a spirit that moves through all things, and it was with the movement of this spirit that they worked in order to breed the Appaloosa.

They understood that the spirit that moves through all things creates the forms through which it moves, as well as the forms by means of which it moves, and that a horse possessed in great measure of this spirit would be superior and would forever remain so. For the shaman’s touch is deeply felt, and there is no reason to believe that a purity of attitude could not be encoded in the blood of a horse just as it can be encoded and transmitted in the blood of a man. Nor was this overlooked by the white conquerors.

Pursued by the U.S. Cavalry in 1877, Chief Joseph fled with his people and 3,000 Appaloosas for the Canadian border. After a running mounted battle encompassing 1,600 miles, the Nez Perce and their wondrous herd were decimated and starving, finally to surrender just a few miles from freedom.

The government’s policy at that time of genocide and atrocity against native peoples is well documented, but in this case the cavalry turned its dark attentions against the horses as well. At the end, only 1,100 horses remained. The best were culled from the herd and destroyed. The rest were dispersed among settlers to spend their lives in drudgery, and these latter, considered by their captors to be the least of their kind, are the progenitors of the magnificent animal in the paddock.

And still, twenty-four horse generations after the opprobrium at the Canadian border, there is in him something of that ineffable spiritual power the cavalry sought to extinguish forever. It is in his demeanor, in the cast of his eye, in his scent, something so beautiful and potent that it can only be the spirit that moves through all things. Does he know, in some strange horse way of knowing, that he is the living vessel of essential mystery?

There is a sound that horses make for which we have no truly adequate word. It is a sudden, fierce exhalation. There are subtle modulations and combinations with posture that communicate a variety of messages, but it always indicates high excitement and is audible at a great distance. This is the answer he now blows into the rising wind with a single breath like thunder, the ancient call of spirit to spirit.