How to fly. You think it’s all about the horse, but that isn’t true because what the horse needs from you is to sink your sit bones into her spine like some cosmic blow torch has melded the two of you together, so she can forget you are up there, not crashing against her back in some ungainly way but finding her rhythm, and pushing her forward, into the next gear, into the next turn, into the sky if you are both lucky and brave enough. And those moments where you stop thinking about all the ways she might stumble or shy, and she stops thinking about how you might jerk the reins and hurt the soft tissue of her mouth, those moments when you are one mighty body soaring, they will imprint on your sinew and bone forever, such that the horses—all the horses—will forever be calling you back.

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How to work. With your whole heart, because otherwise work doesn’t have any meaning. Ask the border collie when he’s halfway through the weave poles on an agility course. Ask the quarter horse as she’s spinning around a barrel. Ask the Percheron when she is dragging the logs that will make the cabin that will house the young family who has thrown away their cell phones and gone back to the land. Ask the leaf cutter ants, or the honeybee drones, or the black lab trained to anticipate her girl’s next seizure. Also, work with joy, whenever possible, because when work is joyful it becomes hard to tell the difference between work and play. 

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How to rest. See how the four-month-old rescue pup flops on the grass after being rolled by her big brother four hundred times in a game of chase that lasts an hour. Be that flop, when you close your computer and turn off the light at ten o’clock at night, even if the emails are not answered, even if the essay is not revised. Admit, after so many years of denial, how much better the day will be after getting eight hours of sleep than the day would be after getting four. Watch how that puppy abandons herself to unconsciousness, even though there is no sure safety in this world of mountain lions and wealthy men. Lay your body down on the sun-warmed Earth and soak up the heat, from the top and the bottom. Turn your belly to summer sky and stretch all four limbs straight into the air. Note the way the horse sleeps so hard in the unseasonably warm winter afternoon that, when he stands, one side of his face has dirt ground into it. Be that horse in your bed. 

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Envision loving yourself on a day when you are not actively useful.

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Ooooh. Even to write those words made me look around the empty room in case somebody might overhear. 

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How to listen. The way a dog listens when the coyotes begin to sing. The way a dog cocks his head at the sound of his person’s car, even when the muffler is new. The way my wolfhound Livie—dear gone girl—could hear the crack of a banana peel from two rooms away. The way a horse keeps listening for the whinny of his pasture mate, hours after the trailer has driven away. The way a horse listens not only with his ears but with his heart. The way a lamb listens for the bleat of her mother. The way the mother listens back. The way a crow listens for the wingbeat of his partner. The way the young humpback listened to my friend Jay play his harmonica, alongside our sailboat in Tolmie channel, on our way from Bella Bella to Hartley Bay, and how that whale eventually began singing too. 

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How to trust. Completely. The way the team dogs trust the lead dogs to get them safely across the frozen river. The way an elk calf will stay right where her mother has set her down all day, even when she hears the coyote’s hungry call. The way the bighorn lamb will trust the bighorn ewe as she teaches her to leap from granite outcropping to granite outcropping. Because if you’re right, your relationship with the one you’ve decided to trust will endure everything (even death), and if you’re wrong, nothing that will happen as a result of that mistake will feel as awful as a life of incessant self-protection. 

How to forgive. Instantly, or if not instantly, as soon as you possibly can. Or never, if the injury is bad enough. Swear to never subject yourself to that kind of torture again. 

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How to live in the snow. Roll in it, obviously. Slide and jump and spring in it. Tear around in it as if it were The Beach of Endless Running. Stay outside until it’s not so much that you have ice balls hanging from every square inch of your coat but more like you have yourself become a giant ice ball. Come inside and drip on the kitchen floor for hours. 

 

How to cultivate generosity without resentment. See Raj. See Roany. See Salka, Stefnir, Gára and Óski. See those and every other horse who has carried me to the place beyond all the confinements I’ve been brainwashed into believing are mine. See the monks who are walking from Texas to Washington. See Aloka the Peace Dog. See all the underpaid teachers. See the honeybees. See a hundred million drought starved trees living anyway, so that we might be able to breathe. 

 

How to love. Unconditionally. You knew I was going to say that. And with endurance. Joyfully. Waggingly. Lately, the billionaire algorithm has been telling me that if my dogs gnaw on my hand, it is not a sign of affection and I should make them stop. Never believe the billionaire algorithm’s dirty lies. One tells me never to pet my dog at all. Another wants to tell me my ideal body mass index. Another one claims ice cream is bad for me. Inventions of sadists, perpetuated by bots. Remember when they told us margarine would make us live forever? Love is sharing a vanilla water buffalo gelato from the Palace Market in Point Reyes Station with my dog Bodhi off the same spoon. Very good for the biome, according to the science of me. Love is hand chewing. Love is an under-the-covers snuggle, snuggling waggingly. With my whole body. With everything I am. 

 

How to pledge my heart wholly and without qualification. Hmmm. Tricky one, and proof of who is the superior species. Dogs do it every day without seeming to try. 

 

How to swim. Leave all the plastic items designed to help propel you through the water more quickly in the car, or better yet, at the store. Don’t count laps or anything else. Laps are not the only way for grownups to be in the pool. Follow the soft parts of your body that remember being in the original waters. Freed now from gravity, let your body do whatever it wants. Be a dolphin, a spider, a skeleton puppet, a wiggly worm. Float like a manatee, bob like a sunfish, splash like a big fish chasing a school of little fish, glide along the bottom like a manta ray, course through the waves like a shark. 

 

How to endure. Witness Isaac. The mini donk, gray with Jesus’s cross on his back, as if he came out of the womb destined to be a martyr. He’ll tell you he’s meant to be living near the sea of Galilee, on a sandy beach with date palms growing, and a temperature that never dips below freezing. Not here, in Colorado, in the used to be snow. Issac gets depressed, especially in winter, when the snow is deep enough to leave him high centered. We rarely get that much snow anymore, but donkeys never forget. Sometimes, in a storm, I’ll open up the big stall for him that we call Isaac’s pleasure palace and turn on a heat lamp. Isaac brays his complaints daily, but he can be bought off with maple treats. Year after year, and against all odds, Isaac endures. 

 

How and when to retire. The sooner the better, and if it is already too late for that, as soon as possible, like, did you consider now? Because you thought you were too smart to be a slave to capitalism. Because your excuse was that somebody had to buy the dog food. Ha ha ha ha ha, say the dogs, tell me another good one. Because you never took enough time for your writing, even though it ought to have counted as one of your jobs. Because a desert adapted lion named Charlie once whispered in your ear that being a good girl was for those who wanted to enslave themselves to the patriarchy. Charlie died for her transgressions, and you might too. But is a life even a life without transgression? Because there are two dogs, three horses, a donkey, a sheep, and four chickens waiting to teach you how to play. 

 

How to play. Grab one end of an unattached leash and run down the hill from the homesteader’s gravesite—down, down, down—to where the pasture flattens out in the bottom, letting the leash fly behind you while the terrier leaps twice his height into the air to grab it, then let him use the leash to walk you back to the corner pole. Instead of dropping donkey treats into Issac’s rubber feeder, put one treat at a time into your hands and shuffle it behind your back before offering him both your closed fists so he can bump one or the other with his nose. If he gets it wrong, wait patiently while he figures out he needs to bump the other hand. If he gets it right, sing praises to him and rub his giant ears while he chews. Take the terrier to The Beach of Endless Running. On The Beach of Endless Running, even sitting still is play. 

 

How to die. Definitely outside. Maybe lying in the grass, curled beneath a favorite tree. Maybe perched on the rim of a red rock canyon. Maybe sitting in a rag top 1969 Chevy, head thrown back and looking at the stars. Maybe lying prone at the edge of the pasture where you chased the frisbee for hours, or where you chased Isaac and he chased you back when you both were young, until that one day he caught up and bit your rump with his big square donkey teeth. Maybe next to the big orange gate, hoping to see the bunnies in the barn. Maybe a thick layer of snow is falling on your face and it feels nice to be cooled that way, your most beloved sitting beside you, not touching, or only sometimes, not needing anything from you except to be in your presence, to remember your presence, for all the days ahead after she lets you go. 

 

How to be present with the dying. With your entire being. And with a willingness to tell them it’s okay to go. Say their name over and over. Say Jackson, Hailey, Dante, Sally, Mary Ellen, Liam, Teagan, Fenton, William, Henry, Livie, Roany, Deseo, over and over again. Tell them thank you for how well they took care of you. Tell them thank you for teaching you how to live. Have patience, for as long as it takes. This is one of those times when knowing how to rest comes in handy. This is one of the few times I have gotten resting right without shame. 

 

How to be present with the living. With all of your attention. With all of your intention. With all of your senses engaged. The way the osprey is attentive to the meadow she is circling. The way a horse is attentive to the movement of a moose on the ridge. With gratitude. With gratitude. With gratitude. Debra Magpie Earling says this about repetition: The first time you say a thing, it delivers its meaning. The second time you say a thing it suggests all the other things it might mean. By the fourth time you say a thing, what you are actually doing is casting a spell. With gratitude. With gratitude. With gratitude. With gratitude. 

 

How to be present with the Earth. Get down there with her on your own terms at least a few times a day. Roll around on her. Put your hands on the trunk of a tree. Follow the tracks of mountain lion, bear, or coyote. When the tracks pause, you pause; try to see the way they see. Talk to wildflowers, to krumnholz, to each individual blade of grass. Sink your hands into mud after a rain shower. Always praise rain. Paint your face with the mud on your hands. Communicate with Earth when she is under your boot soles. Go barefoot whenever you can. Take your earphones out and listen to her music. The clackaclackaclack of kingfisher, the huff of elk or deer. Sit very still at sunset, and don’t say a word to anyone until you can count one hundred stars. 

 

How to hope against all odds. Ask any dog who sits beneath a dinner table on steak night. Ask the soldier’s dog who waits by the door for three years. Ask the dog in the pound what happens in his heart each time the heavy metal door cracks open. Ask the dog who puts one paw on his big sister’s paw even in the moments she is dying of cancer. Where there is life, there is hope, a veterinarian so human-averse he could barely meet my eyes once told me. I am pretty sure he learned that from a dog. 

 

How to make a good day out of a sad day. Go outside. Listen to the wind in the tops of the ponderosa. Watch the bald eagle who returns to the ranch every second year skim the sparking surface of the Rio Grande. Sit by the creek behind the homesteader’s cabin and note how the water in the creek and the ghosts who occupy the ranch are always in conversation. Stare at the snow-covered mountain, and the living forest and the ice crusted pasture, and think, it’s still here, it’s still here, at least for right now it’s still here. Open your arms as the dogs, exhausted from play, come barreling across the meadow toward you. Wag and wag and wag and wag.