There is a deep and vital responsibility that comes with the emotional nakedness of fully allowing ourselves to experience awe. To lay down our barriers, open our hearts and minds, and release our bodies to fully respond can be everything from exhilarating to bewildering and frightening. It can even be embarrassing to be in the middle of having let ourselves fully step into awe when, once we’ve gathered ourselves a bit, we realize our jaw is hanging open, we’re breathing heavily and we’ve lost all sense of everything else around us.

One night I was almost asleep when I heard an odd clanging sound dance itself out of the pasture, across the driveway and front yard, and up to my second story bedroom. Having horses means there is a lot of clanging. They weigh around 1000lbs each, and I had five of them at the time. There were 16ft gates held shut with heavy chains and large metal clips. There were 12ft x 5ft corral panels latched together by more heavy and large chains and clips. I stopped wiggling my feet (mmmmmmm I love wiggling my feet under the covers just as I’m falling asleep), pricked up my ears, and listened for the sound again. There it was, coming up to my bedroom again. It was not a regular, every day 5000lbs of horses randomly bumping into panels and gates kind of clang.

I sat up, threw the covers back, said ‘stay’ to the dogs, and put on the t-shirt and jeans I’d discarded on the chair next to my dresser. I left the bedroom, turned the corner, and went down the stairs in the dark, counting each stair as I went and waiting to feel the cool tile of the landing on the bottom of my bare feet as I made it to the landing. I put on my muck boots, picked up my flashlight, and opened the door to walk across the porch onto the driveway and to the pasture gate. As I went I heard the clang again. It was coming from the training pen. I walked to the main gate, unhitched the clip and chain, pushed the gate open, walked through and hitched the clip and chain.

“Always, always, always latch the gate,” I tell anyone that will listen.

“Do it even if there are no horses in that paddock or pasture at the time. That way it’s automatic. Muscle memory,” I would say.

Mostly that was spoken to neighbors that didn’t latch their gates and were stopping by to ask if I’d seen their goat, cow, horse, lama, sheep or whatever farm animal they happened to be missing. The only time I didn’t say it was to the people from across the highway whose horse had shown up at my place. She was an old mare that seemed reasonably well cared for, but I knew the reasonableness of it was because she had free access to a 30 acre pasture, spring fed pond and the shelter of an old barn. She was essentially reasonably well cared for because she cared reasonably well for herself. Her owners were tweakers that had been bitten hard by the backwoods meth everyone likes to talk about in a knowledgeable fashion once they’ve seen the movie “Winter’s Bone”. What they say is mostly correct, I suppose, but it’s a whole different story when a backwoods meth tweaker is in your driveway talking 72 miles a minute about nothing but bullshit as his tweaker woman stands in a paddock with their lost horse. Did I think they were going to shoot me, throw me into some backwoods pond, then come back and cut off my hands? No. But I did want them to shut the fuck up and get off my property before they had enough time to have a serious look around or figure out I lived there alone.

“Love, love,” I said, pointing at the tweaker woman as she gently petted the old mares head.

The old mare had lowered her head to be petted, and tweaker woman had a face of sadness I had seen many times. The sadness was a hollowed out place sitting on either side of her nose and between the bottoms of her eyes and the top of her mouth. Her love of that old mare ran into those hollows and did its best to fill them up. She looked full of tears, but too gobbed up with being a tweaker to have a way to let them out. I realized the old mare was probably the only thing that knew anything about love in her world, and I knew she was in awe of that love.

“…my Aunt’s place over across the highway where we stay, where she came from…,” the tweaker man was saying, as he gunned the four wheeler he’d come slowly down the road on, his skinny tweaker woman walking slowly behind.

“Look at her. Look at that,” I said to him, as I continued to point at his tweaker woman and the old mare.

He gunned the four-wheeler. I continued to point and not return his gaze. He gunned the four wheeler again.

“I’m going to stand here just like this until I can count to ten in between the times he guns that goddamn thing,” I thought.

He stopped gunning the four-wheeler long enough for me to take a quick, sideways look at him. He was standing up on the four wheeler watching his tweaker woman put a halter on the old mare.  His shift of attention made me feel slightly better.

Tweaker woman led her horse from the paddock where I had given her hay and water, and led her slowly down the driveway and started into the road. From the corner of my eye I saw tweaker man turn to say something to me, then turn to watch tweaker woman lead the old mare up the road. He gunned the four-wheeler, then went down the driveway and into the road himself to slowly follow tweaker woman. I waited until they rounded the big curve and started up the hill and out of sight before I went about my day.

“Always latch the gate,” I said to the first horse that came up to me in the dark. I scratched her neck as I passed by her to continue going toward the clanging sound coming from the training pen. She quietly followed.

At the training pen I found the culprit – one of the horses had backed her rear end up to one of the training pen panels and was slowly rubbing it back and forth to scratch an itch.

As I turned to walk back through the pasture and to the house I looked up. The sky is closer when there are no lights for miles. The Milky Way hovered overhead it all of its glory. I slowed my pace, but kept walking toward the gate.

“You’re beautiful,” I said to the Milky Way, still slowly walking and staring into the abyss of stars that twinkled against the black sky.

“I’m in awe,” I whispered to no one.

“You amaze me, and…” I whispered, as I suddenly realized I was no longer walking toward the gate and had veered off course so heavily that I was no longer sure where I was in relation to the fence line. Just as I recognized the reality that I needed to stop walking and reorient the toes of my left boot struck the side of something, and I threw my arms out to stop whatever was coming – a fall, an object, a horse. My bare hands landed simultaneously on the electric fence as I went down.

I came to seconds later on the ground beside the fence.

“Am I having a heart attack?” I asked no one.

I lay there in the dirt beside the fence and the large water trough I had struck with the toe of my left muck boot. I stared into the sky. I realized I was not having a heart attack, but had electrocuted myself. I thought of Mona, the first person that had ever talked with me about focusing on my breathing as a way to calm myself. I focused on my breathing.

The dirt smelled delicious. I concentrated on my breathing and imagined my breath flowing all the way up into the Milky Way. I heard myself make a sound; the sound of release and relaxation. I heard horse hooves on the ground, coming slowly toward me. It was Sammi Rose, the oldest mare. Her giant soft lips and nostrils came toward my face and hovered just above it as she breathed me in. She then quietly smelled my forehead and hair. She released a deep sigh; the sigh of a horse that is calm, trusting and relaxed. She kept her giant soft lips and nostrils next to my face, her whiskers gently poking my cheek. Tweaker woman crossed my mind and I cried a little when I said a quick prayer that her old mare was still alive and being all about love. All the while I stared into the Milky Way and felt Sammi Rose’s breath and whiskers and no longer had to focus on my breathing because I was no longer experiencing anything but awe. Beautiful, all-encompassing, naked, magical awe. Every bone in my body, every thought in my mind, every hair on my head disappeared into the glory of awe.

Several years later I was having lunch with two of my closest girlfriends and asked if they ever let themselves fall into a state of awe over anything.

“Ya know, just not worry about anything other than the thing or situation or person you’ve been presented with and let yourself be blown the fuck away by it?”

They said they did. We talked about letting ourselves be amazed by and in awe of things. It felt good. I liked looking at their faces as we discussed it. They are beautiful, glorious and shining women, and I loved their wide eyes and raised voices and eyebrows in that discussion.

And then I told them about the time I was laying in bed and one of the big dogs came over and put her head on my arm to simply stare at me. And about how I turned over in bed so I could be face to face with her and disappeared into how beautiful that dog’s big nose was.

But I didn’t tell them about the night I electrocuted myself. I can’t ever seem to tell anyone about that.