Discovering Our Source

The horse and rider are elemental. They ride at the heart of the wind of God.

— J. Philip Newell

The core concepts in this book were born many years ago while we were traveling in Scotland. We were on our way to the Isle of Mull in the Scottish Hebrides, where we were going to visit the thirteenth-century McCormick castle, the home of our Scottish ancestors. As we ventured toward the town of Oban, we took a detour and got lost in the countryside, which was lush with wild heather adorning the emerald hills. The horizon was ablaze with purple, shrouded by an ephemeral mist. We were awed by the beauty of this rugged highland terrain, and any impatience we had with the detour quickly vanished.

After traveling for many miles, we came upon a wide meadow, where we were forced to stop. The road continued, but we were surrounded by a sea of Scottish sheep, a strange, curious, and adorable lot. They had long shaggy coats and curled horns and were larger than sheep we were familiar with back in the United States. The sheep began sniffing and licking the car and refused to get out of the way. Seeing that it was impossible to move, we finally turned off the engine. We then opened the car doors and prepared to move the animals out of our path, but to our amazement they started flooding into our car. Within moments we had big woolly sheep in every nook and cranny of the vehicle. We thought we might be spending the night literally counting sheep because there was no one in sight to help us move our woolly friends. We took a deep breath and accepted the fact that there was nothing for us to do but succumb to the animals' advances and make friends with them.

Then from out of the mist came the voice of a man with a heavy Scottish brogue. He let out a roar, laughing heartily as he came to the top of the hill and saw our predicament. Hearing his voice, we jumped, since we'd not seen even a sign of another human being for miles.

As this Scottish shepherd approached us, he waved his crook with his gnarled hands and said to the sheep, "You found them!" After this brief exchange with his sheep, he turned to us and said, "My sheep tell me you are on the path. They want to go home with you, but I told them you live a long way from our hillside village. They know you are unusual people."

Our first thought was, What path could he possibly be talking about? All we knew for certain was that we were delayed, tired, and at a dead end.

In his heavy accent, the shepherd asked what we needed. We explained that besides being waylaid by his sheep, we were lost. We had taken a detour and had somehow gotten off the road. He smiled and said, "You're not lost. You've come to the right place. I have been waiting for you. My sheep informed me you were coming. Please stay and have something to eat. I will send you on your way tomorrow."

Intrigued by his hospitality and playful demeanor, we accepted his offer.

That night we were put up as his guests in his tiny village. We conversed with our host long into the wee hours of the night. He told us stories about the Celts in the Hebrides, opening our eyes to a way of life we had never imagined until that moment. After a long and full evening of robust conversation, laughter, and a meal, we collapsed in our beds while the Scottish shepherd continued tending his sheep. In fact, we never caught this wise man taking a wink. He possessed boundless energy and a gentle radiance, though he seemed to be eternally awake, always with one eye open watching his beloved sheep.

To this day we remember him vividly — a kind, wise old man with a twinkle in his eye, who told us stories of Celtic saints and Celtic healings. He assured us that one day we would find ourselves on a spiritual journey and our lives would be very different than they had been up till then.

We didn't take his predictions seriously at the time, for we were busy with our careers and gave little attention to other matters. Eventually, though, that encounter with the shepherd would come to haunt us, his wisdom seeming to follow us like a benevolent presence.

Upon returning to the States, we discovered that we hadn't even known our friend's name. When we spoke of him, we called him "the shepherd."

Years passed, and the encounter fell from our minds, but true to the old man's prophecies, we found ourselves on a spiritual journey, encountering divinity in many forms and guises. We became completely absorbed in the horse business and spent many years using these beautiful creatures in a therapeutic way to help emotionally troubled humans. Messages of a spiritual nature were often communicated to us through our conversations with these ordinary people, but they were particularly strong in our relationships with our horses.

Then one day, while dealing with a tragic injury to one of our horses, we suddenly recalled our encounter with the old shepherd, years before, on the back road in Scotland. Until that day, we had tucked away, somewhere deep in our consciousness, the stories of seemingly magical healings the shepherd had told us.

At dawn we had gone out to feed the horses, as was our habit, and to our horror we saw that Maximo, our beautiful healing horse, had something seriously wrong with his eye. In fact, we couldn't even see the eye, which seemed to have disappeared into his head. Maximo was in obvious pain. We immediately called our veterinarian, who came out to our place, examined the horse, and reported that the eye had been sucked up into the socket. Her most immediate concern was infection. She medicated Maximo and left, planning to return the following morning to perform a follow-up procedure. We were distressed and in pain ourselves. It was then that our memory of the old shepherd came back to us. We recalled his stories of healing along with the vivid details of how those healings were performed.

We called upon God, within and without. We visualized a loving, healing light within us, in our hands and in Maximo. We then tenderly placed our hands over his injured eye and called upon God in all of us to take over. Just as the shepherd had described, what we experienced was a "Thy will be done" sort of ritual. If healing were to occur, it would come from a much higher source than ourselves.

Following our prayer ritual, we ended our day with Maximo and went home. We continued the healing ritual with a meditative prayer that the wise old Scotsman had taught us.

The next morning the vet arrived promptly at 7 A.M. She examined...