On Mondays, we smell like horse shit.

As a child I loved to watch episodes of The Adventures of Black Beauty with The Sis, after which we would spend hours speaking in Southern-stained British accents. I liked horses then because I had never met one in person–they were just an idea to me. Then I went to day camp and stood about twenty feet from where a horse, ass facing me, emptied his colon. A few years later, at a youth retreat with my church, I rode up a hill on a horse who had a death wish–he spent the entire hike clinging to the side of the incline while I sweated, cried, and prayed for it all to end.

I don’t like horses.

But the mother of the girl in TK’s class, the girl who began speaking shortly after starting horse therapy, who became happier and more social and more of everything you want for your child, she recommended the therapy as miraculous. And we’re always looking for a miracle around here, so I signed us up. And Monday, I walked through the gate with TK and into the barn full of horse poop and cats (I don’t like cats). They put a helmet on TK (he doesn’t like helmets) and sat him on a horse. He screamed his lungs out and tried to rip off the helmet, making the sign for “all done.”

It’s almost like someone is trying to change our minds about things.

TK rode around the ring with three therapists keeping him aloft, and after a while the screams died down and gave way to reluctant assent. They took him off down a trail and The Husband showed up and we waited. By the time they came sauntering back, TK was signing for more and TH and I were grinning like idiots.

“Faith sees best in the dark,” said Kierkegaard and Joe Biden, and this stretch of road without maps and milestones can feel just that: dark. And dark can feel mean. But I remember that good can also feel bad, and right can feel wrong. That once, I felt like a horse was leading me to my death, but now? One may be helping lead TK, lead us, to miracles. In the meantime, we step forward in relative darkness and realize with each movement that we are not alone, that this is not a mistake, that the stepping off ledges I thought I was done with years ago is just beginning.

I have given the divine such a narrow range within which to work in my life: signing off only on what felt easy, calling him good when what I meant was that things were good for me. “Why does it have to be easy?” asks Elizabeth Gilbert. “It’s MAGIC!” Light falls through the trees unevenly, and I’ve groaned so loudly I failed to notice that everything is growing exactly as it should. Fall sneaks in, temperatures cool off ten degrees, my mood is fifty pounds lighter, and the world reveals itself in colors that are lost in the haze of summer and the gray of winter. I have eyes that have not seen, and ears that have not heard, even with the sights and sounds all around me, but now the light filters through and the sounds echo. I hear the travel guide call Ireland a “terrible beauty” on the TV in the background and I think about how this road we’re on is the only way I could have learned that terrible and beauty do not contradict each other. I see the words on the page about how manna literally translates to “what is it?”, and that we can eat, live off of, mystery as our sustenance. And this takes my breath away, because each point and sound from TK lately is exactly that question: What is it? This question our manna, our bread in the dark.

The prophet on the plane had sat beside me at the gate while I debated whether to run away, screaming, but I had stayed and he had told me what he saw coming for me: swings and cameras. And maybe it’s a generic prediction, and maybe I rolled my eyes the whole way home, but now I’m standing at a swing set in our backyard, pushing Little Brother with one hand and snapping shots of TK with the other, and there may just be a chance that it has all led here, to this moment. To the next one. That life takes different shapes as it changes from our plans to the plan, as it moves from one season to the next, and it can take awhile to grow into those new shapes, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad; it doesn’t mean we’re in the wrong spot. Because later, I sit with the boys in a chair and read a story and while I’m reading, I see both of their heads next to each other, hear TH moving in the next room, and if all that’s fallen apart and come before has led us here–to this place I can finally see as everything I ever hoped for, this moment of completeness in the midst of the darkness and patches of light–then I can stop looking for answers and start gazing upon this mystery that is like the weekly table with the wine and the bread–enough. Which is, of course, everything.