Frozen Bo

“Your eyes have died but you see more than I”
Elton John, “Daniel”

As I was carrying the five-gallon water pails toward the barn door, Kris led Bo past me. I turned to look at him, then set the water buckets down. He walked slowly, and his butt shivered and shook like an out-of-balance washing machine. I left the water buckets and followed Kris into the stall.

Kris is my shift lead at the horse rescue on Sunday mornings, and Bo is her horse. He is blind, and very sensitive to touch. He is nervous when I approach: he sways his long neck back and forth as if testing the air, feeling which way I’ll move, testing to see what my intentions are. When I try to touch him, he backs away.

I walked right up to him. “I’ve got towels in the van to dry him off,” Kris said. And she left to get them. It had rained the day before—a cold, hard rain—and overnight the rain had turned to snow. Bo stays outside; in a stall he digs small craters in the dirt and circles ceaselessly to his left. The open air brings him peace.

But he now he was shaking, cold, and wet. Short icicles hung from his mane. As Bo lowered his head to eat the straw on the stall floor, I put my left hand on his right hip. Still quivering and shaking, he didn’t back away. I put my right hand on his chest, up against his heart. I breathed in, and he didn’t move.

For a second I thought, “Joe, what are you doing? This is a thousand-pound blind animal in a 12×15 foot space. Do you know what you’re doing?”

But I ignored that voice, and pressed hard into him with both hands. Very hard. I poured the warmth from my body into his. Bo didn’t move at all, he simply kept eating. But knew it wouldn’t be enough.

I silently called to Sun Into Earth. She is an older Native woman, this guide of mine, with black and gray hair and a quiet voice. She lives in the desert. When I found her recently she said to me, “We’re so glad you’ve come home.”

“What do I do now?” I asked her.

“Breathe the fire into him,” she said. And she sent me the image of rings of fire. And suddenly I knew what to do.

I gathered my breath, and pictured five rings of fire lined up in front me. Then, one by one, I blew each ring of fire straight into Bo’s body. I started at his chest and worked my way down to his shaking rear end. Each ring went inside of him and spun around, like a fiery chakra.

Bo was beginning to relax, I could feel it. But there was one more thing to do. And it came to me, too.

The day before I had attended Deborah King’s seminar at Asilomar via computer video feed. I had felt the power coming from that seminar room: many powerful souls both there in California and around the world, in the same moment, all working together to heal.

To me it felt like the power coming from a hospital generator. I wanted that power with me in that cold stall; I wanted to release that power straight into Bo.

I simply pictured Deborah up on the stage at Asilomar, and I felt the power surging through her hand as she held it in the air. Then I brought that image forward, bending time to meet me and Bo in the stall. That powerhouse of energy from Deborah and her students simply came forward into the present.

There was no past, no future. Only Bo and me and Asilomar.

I took that energy, that hospital generator, and pressed it straight into Bo’s quivering chest. After a minute or two he lifted his head up to look at me, and I placed my right hand flat above his opaque eyes. Bo, always nervous around my hands, stared quietly into the palm I held a few inches above his beautiful face.

He saw something I couldn’t, he focused on a vision completely hidden from me. I kept my palm directly above his deep, soul-filled eyes as the energy poured into his face.

Then he stopped shaking.

∞

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