Last night I found myself walking down a pretty path surrounded by low, bright, neatly trimmed plants that were bursting with color.  I felt relaxed enough to hum as I walked along sniffing the fragrances that drifted on the breeze, and the temperature was perfect.  The sun shone just warmly enough to keep the bees happily buzzing from blossom to blossom, so I picked up the pace a bit until I was whistling and striding jauntily down the path with no particular destination in mind. 

I noticed a fragrance then that put a damper on my cheer with some unpleasant memories, so I slowed down to a stroll and sighed.  The sky didn’t seem quite so blue, and I really didn’t care whether the rest of the flowers smelled good any more, so I put my head down and become lost in thought.  I didn’t really notice that I had company until I heard a soft snuffle, felt a warm grassy breeze on my face, and  looked up into familiar blue eyes.

My beautiful white horse friend began to nuzzle my arm, and I giggled as he tickled my side with his soft muzzle.  He blinked those amazing eyes at me with the silliest expression a horse can manage and motioned for me to look at his back.  I saw a red ribbon tied to the end of his mane and a whole bouquet of bright-colored ballons waving about in the breeze above him.  The balloons were as bright as the flowers around us, and he reached back and grabbed the ribbon in his mouth.  He knelt on his front foreleg and lowered them to eye level, and as I admired all the pretty colors I saw movement inside them!  I leaned in a bit closer and saw scenes from my childhood that were hard for me to look at even after all the time that had passed, and I backed off and stood up with a sharp sigh of annoyance.

I looked back at my friend and let my feelings be known, and just as I started to walk away I felt a sharp pain in my foot.  I jumped, said a colorful word, and bent down to remove a sharp splinter of thorn from my arch.  When I stood I found myself face to face with the balloons and grisly images again, and without a thought jabbed the thorn into each balloon in turn.  Each burst with a resounding “POP!!”,  and I realized I felt powerful and light again as I looked at each nasty event and promptly popped it into oblivion!  I was actually enjoying myself and felt a bit disappointed when I was down to one green balloon, so I peered more closely to savor the experience.  I laughed when I realized the last remaining balloon was filled with me plodding along after I smelled the gardenia flower that had sent me to my past, aimed my thorn and popped it out of existence.

The blue eyes met mine again, and he seemed to be laughing with me for a moment.  Then he became serious and started pawing the ground the way you see horses do to count in the old comedies.  I rolled my eyes at his silliness  and looked down to see what he was writing with his hoof  in the loose dirt.   It simply said,  “The pop wasn’t as loud as you expected, was it?”

I had to laugh since he somehow knew I hate the sound of balloons popping.  I would keep one to lose air and eventually collapse, all the while sitting in a corner annoying me, instead of popping it.  He was really right though, since I didn’t mind the pop at all when I was focused on getting rid of the images once and for all.  I was enjoying the sight of them dissipating and my feeling of power too much to mind the pop, and I actually enjoyed it.  I smiled at him, rubbed his soft gray muzzle, and we took off down the path together to enjoy the beautiful day.

What he was trying to tell me was simple to say but harder to do.  The past isn’t put to rest until our need to live in the  present and make our own future is  stronger than our need to live  in that past.  When the time is right we can send those old memories where they belong…up in a puff of air.  Next time I smell a gardenia perhaps I will just smell a gardenia:)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Journeys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.