There is no denying the wild horse in us, said Virgina Woolf. There’s more to the quote but that’s the part I like best. Essentially, the quote is about passion which means it’s about feeling things deeply which means it’s about having a heart. Most of the time, I don’t think people feel things to their full extent and I blame that on a lot of things, mainly fear. We are afraid of being vulnerable, and of being too much. Also, we forget how to feel things. Like many things growing up, the permission to experience true emotion is trampled out of us from a young age. It’s hardly appropriate to be fully governed by emotions after the age of two.
On Easter Sunday, I went to Dalkeith Country Park and saw horses grazing in a field. They didn’t seem very passionate but that’s probably because I was watching them. If they were away from prying eyes, they’d be galloping, and jumping, and roaming somewhere. I am jealous of wild horses because they are free and I have spent my whole life trying to be free from something, even if I don’t know what it is. Wild horses have something I don’t have: a certain spirit that can’t be contained or told what to do or be made to feel ashamed.
It’s spring here but the trees were still bare and the sky was grey. Watching the horses, I was suddenly reminded of morning mist, and love stories, and good things happening simply because life wants to be kind. Whenever I look at wild horses, I get the feeling that my life isn’t mine. It can’t be mine because the life I know doesn’t involve quiet fields and watching horses eat grass. It seems utterly impossible that this is my life but it is because I took a picture to prove it.
I hope Virginia Woolf is right and that there is a wild horse in us. I hope beneath the smiles we fake and the words we don’t say, and the polite rules of society we abide by, there’s a wild horse in us that still stirs and swells and never quite gets stamped out completely.
Things I Learned Growing Up 