Sometimes I wish my emotions wouldn’t get the most of me.

People think I’m calm. When I had an office at work (ahem), people would tell me that they found it calming to come into my space. The gentle music playing. The dim lighting. They could unburden themselves. Little do people suspect the roiling waves below the surface, like a feeding frenzy of sharks.

Danny Fisher has a lot roiling under his surface. A city boy. Not growing up in the Rider culture; not used to the beasts talking to him. Still going home to face his family from time to time, facing their disapproval that he has formed an attachment with a horse – well, not quite a horse as they’re not on Earth, and the things they call horses here (“nighthorses” really) aren’t really horses. They’re native to this new planet. And carnivorous. And definitely not something a good boy should be hanging out with.

On this planet, all the species are carnivorous, hunting each other and hunting the humans. All humans are at risk: thinking so loud as they do, they’re easy to stalk. So the towns have high walls to keep the beasts out, and the riders with their ferocious nighthorses ring the inner, vulnerable part of the town, where people cling to each other and their religious belief that hearing the creatures of this planet is a sin. Even hearing the nighthorses that protect them is evil. And the men and women who ride them, fallen.

So Danny is, like most of us, a bundle of emotion. Thoughts too close to the surface. Too impetuous. And when he hears that his hero, Gil Stuart, is at risk of letting the wild into the camp surrounding the town where Danny’s family lives, Danny loses his cool championing his idol, and finds himself in over his head. Caught up with a brutish gang, he is unsure whether they are going to help Gil or to exact a revenge for some reason beyond his rookie ken. His horse is skittish; Danny is skittish.

And that puts him at risk. From the men. And from the wild.

And something is stalking them on the mountain, knocking at the gates of the snow-covered village where Gil and Danny are headed, something that isn’t right in the head. And something else that isn’t right in the head is inside the village, ready to let it in.

This book speaks to the part of me that feels at loose ends, the part that loses its cool when things get rough. And like Danny, I have to remind myself to stay cool, to stay calm, especially when people push my buttons. When scary things are haunting the woods around me.

I read this book first when I was just learning to meditate. And it reminded me, as Danny reminds himself, that when things get rough, I need to focus on the tangible. I need to calm my emotions, the way Danny calms his nighthorse, Cloud. Imagining gentle clouds on water. Clouds in the blue sky. Clouds calm. Calm, Cloud, calm.

My husband has taught me a few words of Tagolog. Tahimik means peaceful, calm, quiet – like, as Alma says in Summer & Smoke, a waterlily on a Chinese lagoon. That is what Danny and Cloud and I strive for. The other word, Gahol, means frantic, lacking in time, pressured. That is how Danny feels through much of this book – and Gil, too, though he is more experienced and hides it better – and how I feel sometimes.

Like when I’m trying to get my blog post done at the last minute.

To learn to switch from Gahol to Tahimik, to have the self awareness and the self discipline, is something we all strive for, right?

Which is why they call meditation a practice, because you are rehearsing it over and over, every day, without hope of every getting it perfect. But the practice helps you get faster at switching, to remember to reflect on clouds on water.

Because you never know when the beasts will be stalking you, human or otherwise…