My Gentle Barn (26 page)

Her eyes shifted like she was thinking it over.

“What are you going to do? Just lie there and die? Look around you; your belief was wrong! You’re in paradise with me, and I will never let you down. Now, get up and eat something, dammit!”

She lifted her head as though to get a better look at my face. Then she stood up and ate her dinner.

Now that Susie Q was OK and everyone had settled into the barnyard, we slowly began rescuing some new animals. Mostly it was horses; I was just so excited to have all this space, and now a brand-new corral. As usual, I didn’t have a laid-out plan, I simply followed the whispers, which led me to one horse that needed to be rescued and then another. Toward the end of our first year on the property, we had the beginnings of a wonderfully mismatched herd.

As with Sasha, some of these horses needed to be healed by revisiting the saddle to rid their bodies of trauma. When the horses graduated from being ridden in the corral, Jay and I added a trail ride to our daily rhythm of building, feeding, and rehabilitating. We took the horses out into the hills behind our house, where the grasses were waist-high after a winter of rains, and purple, pink, and yellow flowers filled the meadows. These rides were a wonderful break from all the manual labor we’d been doing, and we returned home rejuvenated.

With all this focus on building the new Gentle Barn, getting ourselves and our animals adapted to the new terrain, and healing the new horses, we did not have time to do any fund-raising during that first year, and neither was our place in any condition yet to reopen to the public. Thus when our one-year marker arrived, the bottom of the
barrel was well in sight, and there were no new funds coming in to replenish it. We decided that we needed to refinance our place in order to loan the Gentle Barn more money. We had put a lot of our own funds into the property with a large down payment; it was time to take some of it back out so we could get up and running again.

We paid the bills with money from the refi, and Jay went back to applying for grants, mainly from private family foundations offering five thousand dollars here, ten thousand dollars there. With the horse barn now in place next to the corral, a shelter next to the cow pasture, four Tuff Sheds serving as a barn and tack room in the upper barnyard, and makeshift running water in each area, we were now ready to invite the at-risk kids back out. We’d been off the radar for more than a year, then reopened a half hour farther from town; I had no idea whether the agencies would still be interested or would want to travel the distance. But the moment we announced our reopening, we had agencies lined up to bring their kids out. That September we had three groups of at-risk kids coming out each week, as well as school field trips. By late fall we were starting to hit our stride again, even if the money was slow in coming. The new herd of horses breathed new life into my sessions with the kids. When we had small groups, each kid could pair up with a horse to groom her, allowing for a deeper bonding between animal and child. And with the more expansive space, there was more to do and explore with the kids, including visiting the three separate barnyards, going on nature hikes, and starting a garden.

I still started off each group by having the kids hug Buddha, but I now had a new way to end each session. Up in front of the house, a decorative, old-fashioned well stood atop the actual underground well that fed our water supply. The moment I’d first caught sight of it, I knew that everyone who came to the Gentle Barn now would have to make a wish before they left. So, with my first group of kids on this new land, I took them up to the well at the end of their session.

As we circled around it, I said, “Remember earlier I told you that this was my dream since I was seven years old?”

The kids nodded, their faces rosy from the heat and wide open from having spent the last two hours with the animals.

“Well, I didn’t have a good childhood,” I said. “I didn’t have anybody’s support. And I definitely didn’t grow up on a farm. So there was no logical reason for me to have all this … other than I’m very stubborn and I refuse to take no for an answer.”

A couple of the kids laughed.

“That’s why I’m living in paradise now. That’s why I wake up each morning and look out that front window there and say to myself, ‘Yes! It’s another day in my dream.’ ”

“You have a really nice home,” one of the boys said.

“Thank you,” I said. “I wish that for you, too.” I looked around the circle to be sure all the kids were paying attention. “My dream came true, even though it didn’t seem like it possibly could. Now I believe that dreams can come true for
everyone
 … just as long as we don’t give up on them.”

Before we ended, I asked the kids to think of something they wanted for their own lives. “It can be as simple as ‘I wish to be happy’ or ‘I wish to have a wish.’ Or maybe you already know something big you want for your life. Any wish is OK.” I asked them to put their hands on this magic well. “Now, make your wish with every fiber of your being, every inch of your heart and soul. Don’t judge it. Don’t criticize it. Don’t doubt it.” Then I asked them to stay there with their hands on the well until their wish filled their entire being. “When that happens, you can clap two times and walk away.”

And thus I introduced these kids to the ordinary magic of believing good things are possible.

Working with the kids fulfilled me more deeply than it ever had, and I was thrilled to have them back. I saw myself coming into my own—venturing more often away from my “script,” beginning to trust my instincts, taking risks in the moment, and reflecting back to the kids
what I saw in them. And I could see my growing confidence reflected back to me—in the animals, in the kids themselves, and by the very fact that the groups who had come to us at our old location were still eager to schedule visits despite the fact that they had to travel twice as far to get to us.

Over time my work with the at-risk kids evolved to include a horse walk, where each child or teen was paired with a horse of their own to lead on the trails that headed off the property and into the surrounding grasslands. We never had the kids ride, but instead kept their feet on the ground, where they could be shoulder to shoulder with the horses. These children and teens had spent their life being shut down and tough and arrogant, trying to dominate others as a response to having been dominated. It made no sense at all to teach them to dominate still another being by putting them on a horse’s back. Instead, we wanted to give them the opportunity to be humbled, to allow them to surrender and bond. We wanted to open them up in a way that traditional therapy had failed at; it was in this vulnerability that they would find their healing. And there was no better path to this than to integrate them with the herd.

In a herd, no two horses are equal. There’s always a leader and there’s always a follower, and every horse knows her rank in relation to every other horse. It’s the same if a human pairs up with a horse; that horse will know immediately whether she’s the leader or the follower. Horses are a wonderful mirror, reflecting back each kid’s issues, which allows me to see what’s going on with them. If a teen is acting fake or cool, a horse will not tolerate it; horses want your heart available and open or they have no interest in being around you. Especially sensitive to inauthentic or shady behavior was Addison, our donkey. When Addison refused to follow a kid’s lead, I would say to the kid, “Addison has been severely abused. He’s sizing you up, trying to see if you can be trusted or not. Can you?”

Usually the kid would answer yes.

“OK, good,” I’d say, “but you’re going to have to show him that. This cool, tough, kind of fake way you’re being is making him believe he
can’t
trust you. He needs you to be real and safe for him. Can you do that?”

Time and again, I have seen a “tough” kid get quiet and still and gentle when approached with this request. And sure enough, Addison’s behavior would change accordingly and he would follow that kid’s lead all the way through the horse walk. It was a vivid way to prove to these young people that love and fidelity come to those who are real.

Similarly, if a kid lacks leadership skills and appears weak to the horse, that horse will take advantage of it, stopping to eat grass or pulling away to go where she wants to go, and the kid will have no control. So whenever I saw a horse rank herself above a kid, pulling the kid all over the place, I would walk beside that kid and coach him on how to be a leader. “Look up, ahead, not at the ground. Look where you’re going. Pull your shoulders back, head high. Walk with intention. Walk with purpose. That’s it.” And by the end of the walk, the horse would be at the kid’s hip, walking in line, following his requests. And that child would be beaming with triumph—instantly rewarded for strength and confidence and a clear sense of direction.

Before I took a group of kids on a horse walk, I told them the horses’ stories. Sasha and her fear of the saddle, Mama Dear and Cinnamon who’d been ridden into the ground, Bonsai and Addison who had suffered extreme abuse. And Caesar, the movie star, with a long list of film credits, who had been fired from the studios when he’d finally shut down—afraid to make the dreaded mistake and suffer the consequences—and stopped performing on command. I told the kids about these horses’ hurts, and—more important—about the horses’ healing and recovery. I also told them about Sasha’s instant crush on Caesar and how the two had become a duo, mated for life.

One day, when I was relaying all these stories, a boy named Ethan, who was angry and defiant, stood at the back of the group, kicking at
the dirt. He had refused Jay’s and my invitations to come closer. Then I got to Bonsai’s story.

“He’s our miniature horse who was abused by an alcoholic owner until he was seven years old,” I said. “By the time I met him, he was so angry and hurt he’d decided never to trust anyone ever again.”

Ethan perked up, his eyes on me, and he began hanging on my every word.

“We worked for a year to be able to touch him. I could see him just fighting with himself whenever I was nearby—one step forward, one step back. He really wanted to trust, but another part of him had learned so well not to.” I finished the story with Bonsai’s triumph. “He decided to trust one more time and he ended up with the best possible life. He taught us that it’s not about
whether
to trust, but about
who
to trust.”

Ethan pushed his way to the front of the group and pulled on my arm. “Please tell me that story again.”

I told it again, and when I’d finished, he asked me to repeat it once more. After I’d told the story a few times through, Ethan went to Jay and asked
him
to tell the story. When he’d heard the story many times over, Ethan asked us to please take him to meet the little horse. Ethan approached Bonsai slowly, then wrapped his arms around the horse’s neck, and with tears streaming down his face, whispered into Bonsai’s ear, “It’s gonna be all right; you’re gonna be OK.”

Bonsai’s story was not the only one we’d told over and over that day; we had also told Ethan’s.