The Solar Light
This is the mystery of life and its masks. What're you going to do when the thing breaks, and it starts winding down? Are you just going to become an old dog getting older and older, sinking back into your body? Or in the moment of the full moon have you made the jump to the solar light? -- Joseph Campbell
When my daughter was much smaller, I made her a Pegasus costume for the mythology fair at school, complete with feathered wings and a white-horse mask I bought on the internet. A white cotton bodysuit I painstakingly painted with silver clouds, stars, lightning bolts, the moon. Yards of snowy yarn for the tail. When we arrived at school, I remember holding the hand of the pint-sized mythological creature as we walked across the playground. I had to re-adjust her wings a few times, because the tips were nearly dragging the ground. One wing caught on the playground equipment, from which a teacher and I managed to extricate her.
When my now 11-year-old daughter J. and I arrived at the Dressage Barn on Saturday for our vaulting exhibition, we made our way across the property with its well-maintained arenas and barns. The equestrian center was filled with middle-aged dressage women bustling about in their jodphurs and tall black boots. As we strolled past the stalls of Hanoverians, I felt suddenly very conspicuous in my boot-legged spandex pants, tank top, and gymnast shoes. Nothing very flashy, mind you. It was a pretty conservative get up. But the uncomfortable feeling was almost overwhelming. Like I was in one of those childhood dreams where you show up for school in your pajamas.
Or worse.
I found myself wishing for my Levis, my cowboy boots, and my flannel shirt, painfully aware of the extra pounds over what is still, admittedly, a pretty well-working musculature. I allowed the wrinkles around my eyes, my mouth, and the flesh that gravity is beginning to get the better of, in spite of Joseph Pilates, to condemn me--to whisper deep inside that I wasn't quite up to any of this, and that I should just quit.
Who the hell do I think I am? the question refused to stop swirling around inside of my head as we found the vaulting horse Shakespeare in his stall and then went to warm up on the vaulting barrel. As I helped J. work through her compulsory vaulting moves on the barrel, I was wishing with every fiber of my being that today I was one of the moms sitting on the sidelines sipping iced tea and watching our angels riding their horses in the egg and spoon race around the cones. But I'd made a commitment to my friend to do this vaulting exhibition, and if you knew my friend you'd know that nothing short of death would serve as an escape clause.
After the demo, a woman about my same age seeks me out in the barn and tells me she wants to vault. How does she sign up? she asks. Her face is flushed, excited. She tells me I was really good. Really wonderful. I begin to explain that I haven't vaulted for a year, that I'm way rusty, kind of the can-do part of the demo. And then she puts her hand on my arm and stops me. "Really, it was beautiful," she says. "Like a meditation."
And then I remember that part. Not the part where I got stuck on the upswing from my seat to my knees, broken in two like an old rag doll who's still able to pull herself back together in a pinch. In kinder circles that would be referred to as resiliency. But the part where Shakespeare cantered rhythmically around the twenty-meter circle with me on his back, arms stretched way above my head, hands touching the clouds. And afterwards, there was applause.
The woman is grinning at me. A meditation.
On the Great Plains in the center of America, one may have this experience once every month. On the fifteenth day of each lunar cycle, the sun sets in the west just as the full moon rises in the east. They're exactly the same size, even the same color, and they're visible at exactly the same moment. That's the moment of the fullness of your powers in midlife, when your zeal for your own life has reached its apogee. From that moment it must remain in your spirit, in your mind. The moon is symbolic of the body's life, which carries its death within it. The sun is symbolic of the pure spirit that has no darkness, no death in it. It is this pure spirit that can watch with compassion as your body goes the way of all bodies. It can share in the amplitude of your spiritual experience of the life of all creatures.--Joseph Campbell
After the vaulting exhibition, where she performed an arabesque and a flag and a stand on the back of a seventeen-hand flesh and blood Pegasus with a sixteen-year old vaulter who could very well be Helen of Troy herself, with all of that bloom of beauty that I suspect could launch a thousand ships just about any day now, and that coil of golden hair at the nape of her long, strong neck--my 11-year-old daughter is so filled with herself, so up and over the top with just a glimpse of her own potential, that she simply has to spend some time by herself when we get home, taking it all in until she's saturated, fat, almost faint with the knowledge of what is just the beginning of her myth, her very own journey.
I am almost faint with watching her.
