About the Book
"Many scholars have opened Himalayan cultures up to us with authority and learning, but few have traveled with the open heart and transparent sincerity of Sienna Craig. Horses Like Lightning is a singular dance of innocence and experience."
— Pico Iyer, author of The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
At just 19, Sienna Craig made her first venture to Mustang, an ethnically Tibetan area of Nepal, in the rainshadow of the Himalayas. As an equestrian and a student of anthropology, she sought not only to understand what it was like to rely on horses to navigate through the windswept valleys and plains of High Asia, but also to grasp how horses lent meaning – through myth, ritual, and metaphor – to the lives of Mustang's people. Through living and working with local Tibetan medical doctors, veterinarians, and other horse experts, as well as the deep friendships she formed, Sienna began to understand the region’s history, and to witness how life in Mustang was being transformed in the face of social, political, and economic transitions. She also endeavored to learn about herself, and her life’s course, through her year in Mustang – a place that came to feel, for all its foreignness, like home. Sienna Craig was born in Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of the children’s book Clear Sky, Red Earth: A Himalayan Story and A Sacred Geography: Sonnets of the Himalaya and Tibet, as well as the co-founder of Drokpa, a non-profit organization dedicated to catalyzing grassroots development and social entrepreneurship in high Asia. She holds a PhD in cultural / medical anthropology and is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She lives in Vermont with her husband Ken and their daughter Aida.
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