What is wrong with me, she wondered to herself. I felt so good last week and now. I just feel deflated, sad, depressed, her mind whirled with thoughts. Nothing had changed in her life in the last week or so to cause this kind of response. She walked around in the house putting things back where they belonged. Sighing heavily to herself, she looked out the window trying to understand. "I've got to get out of this mood", she said to no one in particular. A tear spilled from her eye and moved slowly down her cheek.
The house felt strange to her, it felt like she was only a visitor there. It's wasn't warm or welcoming to her. Sitting down at her computer she downloaded her emails and noticed the date, May 17th. A sad smile moved across her face and she nodded quietly to herself, in two days it will be her one year divorce anniversary. At least now she knew why she felt the way she did. Looking at the date she mumbled to herself, "I thought I was over all this". Why do these feelings still linger? What does it matter anymore? Why do I have to feel this? Why can't I just be done with this? Will the answers ever come to those questions? "I don't want to feel this anymore. I just want it to go away", she said moving away from the computer.
She wandered outside, looking at the fish, hoping to find inspiration in their flashing Koi swimming dance. But there was nothing. So she lay down in the shade and maybe she slept, though she didn't remember closing her eyes. It was one of those times when afterwards she never could tell if it was dream or waking weirdness coming into her life.
As she lay there, she heard a sound across the lawn, but ignored it, figuring it for traffic on the road or something. But it was insistent, like hooves on grass, and it was followed by an urgent whinney. She sat up suddenly, staring at the horse coming towards her. She looked around, wondering after its rider, but there was none. Just her and Epona's daughter. She blinked... Epona's daughter... where had that come from? It seemed apt. This mare was too otherworldly to be anything else.
She didn't know how it happened. One moment she was gazing up from the grass and the next she was on the mare's back, riding off over the lawn. She had the briefest moment of thinking about how much damage she was doing to her garden, then the next she was in another place entirely. Riding free, clinging on while the wind whipped her hair about her face, but she knew that she would never fall off now. She was MEANT to ride this horse to wherever their destination turned out to be.
Scenery flashed and changed around her, mountainsides and beaches; flat, golden prairie, where the sky went on forever, so big and majestic; then into the desert, riding by the Sekhmet Temple, which shined alive for her, its energies spiralling out and around her; then up into the starry sky itself, the mare galloping along through Arianrhod's silver wheel. She laughed, wonderstruck, alive; a wild thing for sure, but a witch and a child of the universe, as she always was and always would be. The Wild Hunt itself could never have been so ecstatically pursued as that frenzy ride through the corners of the earth, the heavens, through the dawn into a new and beautiful day.
She rode until she tired, then closed her eyes, smiling as she leaned against the mare's rough mane. She felt the beautiful creature slow down to a trot, but held on until it slowed and stopped. She felt the sun on her face and arms and opened her eyes to find herself in her garden again. No less wondrous than all the wonders she had seen this day and night. She slid off the horse, her feet unsteady on the ground and her legs turned to jelly; but her spirit still soared in all that she'd felt.
She turned to thank the horse, but it had gone. Though it's smell lingered and the briefest whisper of a whinney travelled on the air.