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My Imaginary Friend - Epiphany


June 9, 1998

When I was a child on the farm, our bus-ride to school took over an hour in each direction.  When my best friend Patsy wasn't there, I would let my imagination take over, watching closely out the window as my imaginary friend, a pure white horse, galloped alongside the bus, majestically leaping fences, ditches, and the occasional house, and otherwise cavorting in the pure joy of motion that is a horse.  This horse stayed with me right through the hundreds of school bus rides till the end of high school, and even occasionally showed up to run delicately through city streets beside the bus I took to work or accompany me on long tedious car trips. 

I never tried to understand the horse, just watched with awe and heart-surging joy as it leapt, trotted and cantered through the fields of my mundane world.  I once tried to draw it, once to paint it, but my clumsy hands could never capture the radiance of that powerful free spirit who somehow chose to follow at my side like a favourite dog, and I have been content to let it run, wild and free, through the mountain pastures of my imagination.

Two years ago, struggling to accept at what level I have an absolute right to exist in this world, I came up with the analogy of a dandelion in a ditch: the right to air, and rain, and food.  Since then, I have been searching for a metaphor for my right to happiness; that has been a far more difficult task.  I knew I could not "invent" a metaphor; that I needed to wait until the right symbol came to me.

Today, driving along the boring highway between Hamilton and Brantford, I found myself again accompanied by my white horse, whose existence I had pretty much forgotten.  Still, I was glad to see it, as I always am, and asked myself, as I watched it leap a fence, muscles rippling in its powerful white chest while white mane and tail danced in the breeze, what it symbolizes for me.  Freedom and power.   A wild horse exults in its power; even a domestic horse, submissive as it may seem to the will of man, lives in the secret knowledge of its superior strength and tolerance; it is its strength that carries us, and its free choice that grants our desire to ride.

And then, suddenly, I knew that I am that horse; that the freedom and power so visible in it exist also in me, and my knees lost their strength and the car began to slow down.  I had always seen my primary self-image as one of powerlessness, of being a tiny speck in an uncaring universe.  Could such power, such freedom, such beauty, exist in me?  NO! I wanted to shout; it CAN'T be—I am more like the pebble beneath the white horse's hooves … but no, it is not so; not only am I the horse, but I have always been the horse; she is that part of me that cannot be tamed or subjugated; that leaps and cavorts on crisp spring mornings; that drinks deeply from clear mountain streams, knows my place in nature, and is never lost.

Tears stung my eyes; as I slowed the car, the white horse, whom I could now see to be an Arabian mare, turned and met my eyes.  Her eyes, wide and brown and luminous, laughed at my distress, and she tossed her delicate head in a horse's nod to confirm this truth for me.  Her long and graceful neck, her dancing feet, and the wisdom and patience and ease in her gaze held me breathless. … could this radiant and powerful creature truly be me?

I held my breath for an eternity while my pain struggled against this knowledge; then unexpectedly, I felt new strength in my legs, felt the muscles cording with power and energy, and I tossed my hair back in joy and exultation, proudly lifting my chin to meet the white horse's eyes as an equal.  I could swear she was laughing then, shaking her head vigorously up and down as she ran, kicking her heels in the air for no reason whatsoever, and daring me to race her the rest of the way to work. 

It was a tie.


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