One cold and sunny morning, the head wrangler invited me to help move seventy horses from the summer pasture to the winter pasture.  “Go, round up those,” he shouted as he nodded his head toward a group of horses gathered in a far corner of the pasture.  “Round up those” sounded about as possible to me as flying to the moon, but my horse knew what to do; she galloped along the fence, then swung back toward the herd.  Suddenly we were surrounded by the thunder of hoofs and the blur of flying manes.  I felt like a character in a movie.  There real me was up in the clouds, looking down on this other me—this me caught up in the wildness of swirling dust and muscled flanks and speeding cowboy hats. 

On other mornings I took long walks alone and inhaled the quietness like oxygen.  During the previous twenty years, I had done what every good Christian is supposed to do: I had filled my life with people.  The motto of our church is People Matter to God, and I had chanted that mantra as enthusiastically as anyone.   But often during the years I had fantasized about standing on the information booth in the main lobby of our church and shouting, Would everybody please just leave me alone!  And I didn’t know what was wrong with me. 

I didn’t understand the difference between introverts and extroverts.  I didn’t realize that some of us who truly do love people, also need sizeable chunks of solitude. On that trip I discovered that for me quiet moments are essential.  They energize me and fill my soul with what I need to go back and engage with people.  That simple understanding changed my life.

After my week at the ranch, I drove west to Montana’s capital, Helena, for no particular reason except that it was there.  After that I drove south into Wyoming and followed the twisting rivers of Yellowstone.  I watched the sun set behind the jagged peaks of the Grand Tetons.  I bought a leather backpack in Jackson Hole and visited a friend in Cody.  In the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, as I headed back toward Chicago, I sat in the middle of a country road for fifteen minutes while seven hundred head of black-and-white cattle meandered lazily past my little red car.  A huge heifer ran her tongue in zigzags on my driver side window, while a cowboy on a tall black horse looked down at me through my open sunroof and laughed. 

“This never happens to me in Chicago,” I said. 

I crossed back through South Dakota with the reflection of a full white moon setting in my rear view mirror and the orange sun rising above the horizon in front of me.  While I drove I listened to The Greatest Hits of Simon and Garfunkel, The Best of Carly Simon, and Carol King’s Tapestry.

Hours later I sat by the bank of the Mississippi River, mesmerized by the swimming reflection of autumn leaves and grateful for the reminder of something I had forgotten—that the world is full of beauties and pleasures and thrills that are here for us to enjoy.  Never again would I tell myself that it was wrong to enjoy them, because they are God’s gifts of love to us.  

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