Wild Horses…
They are in us. At least I feel it. The recklessly fun and intense energy. Just roiling beneath my exterior. Sometimes it feels as though my need to run free and wild might overwhelm me.
I believe we all have this energy. This hot, untameable energy that pushes us to do more, say the thing, take the risk.
I used to live on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. 45 minutes to a town of any kind. There were these herds of wild horses that would roam the land. And they loved to break into my ranch and eat the grass. They would most often wake me up in the middle of the night, somehow easily springing the iron gate that was designed to keep everyone out. They had no trouble at all, just letting themselves right in. They seemed to know that the land was theirs regardless of what I might think to the contrary.
They would show up every year, new colts in tow. Each year the pack would increase and I was amazed. I watched them feed, and rest and play. God how they played. Rearing up and throwing hoofs at each other, in some sort of mad battle for things that people cannot know are attainable.
They never got the message to be small, to make themselves smaller to fit into some preconceived notion of what they were supposed to be like. Never. They just lived, and roamed and procreated and ran free, and wild and full of heart. The most basic but fulfilling life: eating, resting, fucking, running and loving.
Sometimes I feel like these horses, so beautiful in my wildness, so free but then so shy and aloof when it comes to others. So afraid to allow someone to get close enough to touch. Sometimes the choice feels like freedom or love, and there is no way I can ever have both. And to give up one for the other, means that I will cease being me. I will cease this life I am living and become something I don’t recognize anymore. I think this scares me more than I want to admit.
But I know there exists the wild horse within us all. And we each, to varying degrees, feel terrified to love and lose ourselves in the other. How can we maintain a sufficient amount of freedom so that we live the lives intended for us, while not allowing our love for others to morph us into shells of what we might have been?
I have made myself small in order to fit in. I have made myself small to ensure that my partner didn’t feel small. I have been called “a lot” when really I just refused to make myself smaller. It is confusing to be this woman energy. It is hard to know how much to bring and how much to leave out.
The horses don’t think like this. They are just innately them. They worry not at all about things such as being too much, or too little. They just are wild and free and unrelenting in their pursuit of the lives they must live. I think we humans could learn a thing or two from them.
I am tired today and the words are not flowing. I have all these ideas but they are struggling to find the page. They are stagnating and evaporating just prior to my committing them to the story. I need that wild horse energy right now. I need to feel the charge and rush of the freedom just beyond. And it is comforting to know, that I only need tap into the wild horse within to gain access to those parts of me that are beyond my current grasp.
I long for days of nothing but life stretched out before me. I long for the discoveries that only come when one releases oneself from the commonplace, the routines, the work, the familiar. And one learns, once more what it is to be wild and reckless and free. One learns all of this by refusing to allow the morals and ideas of others to control who we are and what we do. I want to dance in the rain, unfolding myself beneath the open sky. Sinking into the wild equine that resides within…
Again…still.
