Unicorns~

Today, upon waking, I am thinking about Unicorns.  Those mystical horned horses from whimsical places.  As a child I would stand in the hills, on the edge of the wild wood where I lived, and I would wait for a white horse with a single horn to come galloping out of the trees. I would wait there for a long time, until I heard hooves on the soft earth, until I smelled the damp sweat of horsey hair and felt the warm grassy breath on the back of my neck. I believed my Unicorn would come, that she would carry me to the land on the otherside of the wood where she lived.  The land where all creatures lived, who struggled to exist, under the adult reign of disbelief.

This morning, while I sip my tea, I am reading Rilke's poem about a Unicorn.  And I remember my love of these beloved creatures.  And as I let this poet's words into my heart, I begin to wonder if this Unicorn that Rilke speaks of, lives not in the land on the otherside of the wood, but inside each of us. Is Rilke's Unicorn perhaps the mystery of soul that we cannot always see, but only know?  A kind of wonderful mystery to believe in? 

Don't you find the most beautiful and mysterious things are like that; born from the soil of our believing?

This is the creature there has never been. 

They never knew it, and yet, none the less

They loved the way it moved, its suppleness

Its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.

Not there, because they loved it, it behaved

As though it were.  They always left some space.

And in that clear, unpeopled space they saved

It lightly reared its head, with scarce a trace

Of not being there.  They fed it, not with corn,

But only with the  possibility

Of being.  And that was able to confer

Such strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.

Whitely it stole up to the maid-to be

Within the silver mirror and in her.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus