No journey ever delivers only the expected. Our first bison sighting was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. As you can see from my first blog, this wasn’t how I imagined it, but it did allow me to get very close.
Standing beside something that was once living, breathing and bearing horns, and now is still, allowed me to think about what makes me feel alive myself. Surely aliveness is more than experiences that meet my expectations. I suppose it is more than travel or encounters with large mammals too. So what is it? Well sometimes it is the warm smile, the hug, the tiny flower, a good cartoon and often anything else that brings a chuckle. Sometimes the ramshackle house held together with whimsy, rust and prayer.
Today the spark of life was a jackalope,a mythical creature invented right here in Wyoming, though mythic creatures have existed in most cultures throughout history. Sometimes we need new creatures and new ticksters to kick the funnies back into life, or show us how to stay alert to magic. Putting horns on anything is an act of creative defiance. Such an act tells the world to watch its step. People put antlers on cars and horns on drawings of the devil.
Horns are the symbols of our unfillable wishes. They say impenetrable defense. They say immortality. They say unlikely opposites laying down peaceably together, a unicorn under a rainbow. Horns bear our emotions (the smart of confusion sitting on the horns of a dilemma); (the promontory of hope, after fear, protruding from a treacherous coastline). Aries, the fleet ram conveys both creativity and strength and why shouldn’t an agile, soft, fecund rabbit’s qualities be paired with horns of shapely architecture?
I think that at some point this adventure will be over and I will need to return home. When I do, there may be creatures waiting to be created. A porcucow? An armodoggie? A cockeroserus? There may be thousands of creatures still waiting for creation. One of them could be a prongeeta! Who can draw that? Could a ceramic one appear in my garden?
