Runaway Horses
Why do I hold up a vast array of masks to my sticky face, one after the other? Behind them, my erupting fear is a team of runaway horses. ‘My’ fear belongs to no-one else, though I try to blame others and abstract things like my culture, my heritage, my gender, and so on. It shifts my carriage at terrifying speed across dark moorland to an unknown destination!
This fear gallops off whenever a scent of love or hope reaches my nostrils: One whiff and the stallions tug their reins out of my hands, their ebony manes adamant. I can no longer drive them. It has happened many times but this time the fragrance of someone who has universal courage to be wholesale himself, no single mask, openly refusing to turn the other cheek to mediocrity and dishonesty, incites them to tear away like scalded devils. This is unprecedented. I rear up before they can.
Such wild reaction is in the name of protection, of keeping myself in the good books, of being fully approved of by all beings. I blindly cherish my reputation and status as if they are black and white treasures. My delusional condition convinces me that they are solid, my raison d’etre, my sum total. But their ‘permanence’ diverts me from the rapid stamping of masks in succession into the very flesh of my face. The hoofs of my equestrian team gouge and kick, repetitive, relentless, but the jolting and jostling is the worst thing. My mind is shaken away from my true nature, wracked. It wants to annihilate the now-sour stench of this paragon man.
I spit out my dislike and rejection of you like a mad witch, trashing you outright. But your fragrance remains to irritate and waft at me so you can stay close to my spirit in spite of all the racket and destruction of slow moors as the gallop accelerates.
To balance the fear and guilt of not living up to people’s expectations of us we so quickly judge others instead of honestly reflecting on and evaluating ourselves. We react viciously, needing always to have the last word, the upper hand, some trace of control. Our thoughts are like caustic soda, stinging and purging away any dangerous or natural feelings.
This impulsive destruction and rejection of your flesh and blood is plain fear that I am not attractive enough to you. That you may pass me by, reject my flesh and blood as un-beautiful, on a whim. But I want you to feel it too, so I lash out. The ridiculous thing is that I am putting all my energy into jettisoning and rejecting mere figments of my own imagination.
The visible aspect of the invisible is random, obscure, a rapid sketch which I grab at and add to my collections. I scrupulously classify all items of course, dividing them into fans and enemies, good and bad, useful not useful, fragrant and odious, and so on. But it is virtually impossible to delete them from my excellent misused memory, even though I may hide them. I long for my archives to be erased.
How I misjudged you and folded you away in my ‘redundant’ files like a Spring wind! I struck out at you in a fury and almost lost my chance. Now, thanks to your clarity, you are striding steadily towards me, with neither horses nor carriage, to bring your full fragrance to meet mine. You have always known that we will blend together for eternity, waiting patiently behind my masks with me.
Your uninhibited tall striding turfs me out and away from my carriage so I can stand finally still, damp-footed and trembling in the dawn.
The furious team steeds have vanished forever, and with them ‘I’ and ‘my,’ and my wardrobe of masks. We are one silence, one stillness. It has no need of racing on to the future or pelting back to the past.