More than a month ago, sitting on a park bench in New York City, Chief Arvol Looking Horse, the Dalai Lama of the Sioux Nation and the spiritual leader of the Horse Nation, asked to talk with me, he wished to explain to me that I had come to the carriage horse story in response to the horse’s prayers. On the cusp of being banned from our greatest city, and vanishing from the sight, understanding and consciousness of human beings, the horses had called out to spiritual people and people who loved animals to answer their call and save them suffering the fate of all of the horses of the Indian tribes. The chief told me a dream he had in which a gray horse appeared to say goodbye to the Indian tribes, “we are being driven from the world,” the horse said, “slaughtered and sent away. When we are needed, we shall return.”

The chief said I would be having visions and dreams and urged me not to fear them, Native-Americans have visions and dreams all of the times, they worship them. He told me the white animals are sacred, a sign that the world is changing, a call for human beings to come together, to stop destroying the earth and doing violence to one another, to see that Mother Earth is bleeding. If the horses go, he said, the rain and wind and thunder would follow them, and disappear from the world.

Since then, I have been thinking about Chief Arvol’s words and trying to grasp the meaning of the white lambs that followed so closely his prediction. There is something different about these two lambs, their eyes follow me, greet me, they permit me to come within a few feet of them, to kneel and take their photos to sit and talk with them. I hear from the horses every night, they call out to me to remember them, to help them remain in their sacred connection with human beings and the work that they have always done.

The horses are needed, the chief told me. The earth is bleeding to death and they have come to help us save it. It is not cruel for a horse to work with people, Chief Arvol told me, it is their most sacred tradition, it is what they need to do to survive in the world. When the Indians had no work for their horses to do, they vanished. When the horses on the plans had no work to do with the new white settlers, they vanished also. The only horses that have survived, said the chief, are those blessed to work with human beings, and horses who give people work are much loved by them. In the twisted Western culture, this is considered abuse. In the Horse Nation, it is the most sacred and ancient bond.

And the horses are powerful. They have awakened so many people to the great injustice done to them and the people who live and work with them and ride them in the great park. The Draft Horse Journal believes the horses are powerful indeed. They have united the city in support of them, perhaps showing us what it might mean to be human, how we can fight to save the world, as we have fought to save the horses and will continue to fight to save them.

Once I get my head around something and think about it,  I usually get it, I am getting the purpose of the lambs, the messages of the horses.  There is the political thing, the mayor, the money, the animal rights people. There are the arguments – the horses are being abused, the horses are not. Beyond that is the most powerful thing, the spiritual thing. The lambs have come to teach me about it,  to encourage me, when they stare at me in their way, I understand that animals everywhere – including our own – are calling to us to save the animals in the world, to keep them among us, to find good work for them to do, to treat them well and make sure they are not forgotten or banished again.