Reading group guide The Horse Boy , a memoir of healing , rupert isaacson TTheHorseBoy_TPtextF1.inddheHorseBoy_TPtextF1.indd RRGG1GG1 22/9/10/9/10 55:02:29:02:29 PPMM TheHorseBoy_TPtext.indd 356 1/8/10 11:57:57 AM A Year and a Half Later . Rupert Isaacson updates the story of The Horse Boy t’s December 2009 and Rowan is just about to turn eight Iyears old. In a rare Texas cold snap the temperature has plum- meted to freezing and the horses outside the window are hud- dled together in their blankets waiting for me to give them hay. In an hour I’ll collect Rowan from the New Trails Center, which has been up and running for about a year and a half now. Rowan does his academics there in the mornings, and in the afternoons the other families and children come in — some on the autism spectrum, some not — and ride, play together, do their therapies out in nature. We have three great therapy horses, Clue, Hope, and El Capitan. Money from this book goes to fund the program. Sadly, this being Texas, neither the gov- ernment nor insurance companies can subsidize us. With luck, that will change in the coming years, but for now we are still lagging behind. Much more happily, however, the dysfunctions that left Rowan during his time in Mongolia are, amazingly, a mem- ory. The incontinence, the tantrums, the isolation from his peers — these have never come back. And as per Ghoste’s instructions, we have continued to make a healing journey each summer. Last year we went to Namibia, in southern Africa, where I know the healers per- sonally. Because I am still banned from Botswana, Besa — Rowan’s namesake — came fi ve hundred miles in the back of TTheHorseBoy_TPtextF1.inddheHorseBoy_TPtextF1.indd RRGG2GG2 22/9/10/9/10 55:02:29:02:29 PPMM Reading Group Guide • 3 a truck by bad dirt roads, despite being more than eighty years old, to conduct the healings in neighboring Namibia. In con- junction with two local healers from the Ju’/hoansi clan, the healings lasted three days. Each night Rowan fell asleep in my arms while the healers danced, sang, prayed, laid hands on him. Hyenas cackled out in the thick bush beyond the fi relight and lions huffed way out in the further darkness. What came after that was — surprisingly — a mathematical aptitude that had not been there before. One month after we got back from Africa, Rowan started adding and subtracting fractions. By four months he was doing them in double columns. I can’t do that. I’m still shaking my head. This past summer we went to Australia for work and man- aged to connect with a shaman of the Yalanji tribe, up in the Daintree Rainforest of North Queensland. The healings — again three in all — were very short, perhaps fi fteen minutes each, with some laying on of hands and a small ceremony in which a certain bark was burned and its smoke passed around Rowan’s body. That was it — very simple, quiet, all conducted in a small shelter on the ancient forest’s margins. Yet while under the healer’s hands, Rowan kept giving these great sighs of bliss. After the third session, when the healer announced he was done, Rowan sat up and said, “I feel better in my head. I feel happy.” Then he ran off to play, returned after a few min- utes, gave the healer a quick hug, then ran off again to chase after the brush turkeys he’d spotted passing by the shelter while the healing was going on. Some days later, while we were on the road south to Bris- bane, Rowan woke up in the middle of the night, strangely alert and wanting to go outside and play even though it was only 3 a.m. In my sleepy state I heard Kristin trying to reason with him as he cried: “When will it be not the nighttime? When will it be the time to play? I want it to be the time to play!” “Well, Rowan” — I heard Kristin sigh and summon all her TTheHorseBoy_TPtextF1.inddheHorseBoy_TPtextF1.indd RRGG3GG3 22/9/10/9/10 55:02:29:02:29 PPMM Reading Group Guide • 4 Buddhist patience in the darkness (I was selfi shly glad that she was the one dealing with it, hoping I could drift back to sleep before it escalated into a full-blown whine) — “you can choose to suffer like this, or you can choose to think about everything that’s good. You’re having a lovely trip with Mommy and Daddy. You cuddled a koala today” — he had: cute over- load — “and today we’re going to go to another wildlife park. So if you think of those things instead of what you don’t like, you might suffer less. It won’t change what’s going on now, but if you think about nice things you might not suffer so much right now.” Why is she even bothering? I thought, still selfi shly pretending to be asleep. He won’t possibly understand that. “Does that make sense, Rowan?” she asked. A for effort, I thought cynically. “Yes,” he said quietly. But it sounded like the kind of yes he might say when he didn’t really understand but feels a “yes” might be expected of him. Then silence. Ah good, I thought. Now if I can just get back to sleep . Perhaps forty seconds later a small voice in the dark said, “That does make sense.” Kristin and I both sat up. “What? You said what?” Not long after that, while we were all in the car, Rowan passed me a box of fries from the backseat. “Oh thanks,” I said, opening it, surprised he was sharing his food with me. Inside was a toy sea anemone. I jumped. Rowan collapsed into peals of laughter. “Oh my God!” said Kristin. “That’s Theory of Mind!” The joys of having a psychology professor for a wife. In a nutshell, Theory of Mind is the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes. It’s tied up with empathy, with know- ing that other people have other states of mind from your own that may be true or false. Typically kids get this between four TTheHorseBoy_TPtextF1.inddheHorseBoy_TPtextF1.indd RRGG4GG4 22/9/10/9/10 55:02:29:02:29 PPMM Reading Group Guide • 5 and fi ve years old. To play a prank like surprising me with a sea anemone in a box of French fries, you have to know that the person is expecting to see French fries in there and will be shocked to fi nd a sea anemone instead. We take it for granted, but it’s a major milestone to reach — a survival skill, the abil- ity to put yourself in another’s mind, to differentiate between true and false. “He’s got it,” said Kristin quietly, as Rowan giggled away in the backseat. “He’s fi nally got it.” This coming year will be the last of the three journeys that Ghoste instructed us to take. We are in the planning stages as I write. Whether the outcome will be as he predicted, that Rowan’s autism will for all intents and purposes leave him after his ninth year, remains a mystery. But what of healthy skepticism, the voice of rationality? Allow me to play devil’s advocate for a moment here. It may come as a surprise to hear that I don’t think that shamanism cures autism. It doesn’t. Horses do not cure autism either. I’m not sure that anything cures autism. So in that case why under- take these healing journeys at all? Because I think there is a crucial difference between heal- ing and cure. For me, healing is the amelioration of negative symptoms to the point that a condition is no longer a disorder or a dysfunction. Cure implies the removal of the condition or way of being altogether. Rowan is still autistic, will always be autistic. But he is now so functional within his autism that increasingly it comes across as more of a quirky way of being than as a problem to be fi xed. Increasingly I now see autism as a skill set to be nurtured rather than a disorder to be fought. There are great gifts there: a quiet ego, almost like being around someone born enlightened. The ability to focus on the task at hand without worry about social TTheHorseBoy_TPtextF1.inddheHorseBoy_TPtextF1.indd RRGG5GG5 22/9/10/9/10 55:02:29:02:29 PPMM Reading Group Guide • 6 distractions (where do I fi t in the pecking order? am I tall enough / beautiful enough / rich enough / clever enough, etc.?). The incredible memory, the ability to be so completely in the moment, the rich intellect — for I have not yet met an autistic person whose intellect was in any way compromised, unless there was mental retardation or another similar attendant dis- order attached. All these are great, great gifts. In the cultures we’ve been lucky enough to visit since this strange journey began, one thing often stands out — that the healers themselves often exhibit neuropsychiatric symptoms; whether adult autism (like Besa, whom I have known for fi f- teen years but have never properly conversed with and who seldom looks you in the eye, and who mainly speaks in strange riddles), schizophrenia, epilepsy (remember Ghoste said he had “the mind of a child” until he was in adolescence and had epilepsy well into his adulthood), or some other related condi- tion.