King Harold
Photo of a small, grassy hill with a horse head sculpture on the crown. There are the leaves of a tree obscuring the grey, cloudy sky, and some other trees in the distance to the right and left of the sculpture.
This elegant sculpture is of King Harold, the legendary Horse King of Selhurst Common. I know it’s a bit far away, but there was a fence in the way, so I couldn’t get any closer. Whilst the landowner is enlightened enough to commemorate empires of horses, they are not enlightened enough to let people get close enough to properly worship the past.
If I could have gotten closer, the base on which the horse head is resting would reveal to me an epitaph relating the mighty deeds of King Harold, from a time not too long ago. A time which could have extended to the present, if we human’s hadn’t turned out to be so narcissistic about who we celebrated and raised up in our myths and legends.
In the olden days, we shared the mythic space with legendary beasts of which King Harold is a type. Beasts which soared in our skies, ran across our plains, and hid in dark places, watching. Nowadays those archetypes are entirely made up of humans and our world is impoverished for it.
When Harold was King, there were also human Queens and Princes. There were dragon barons, warrior trees, and platoons of merpeople who tamed the seas. In those days, everyone had a job they enjoyed doing because there weren’t any jobs per se, only eternal beingness of the fulfilling kind. We shared and we observed and occasionally we battled, but mainly we showed off, seeing which person (of whatever species) had the greatest story to tell or deeds to be doing.
King Harold was a legend because he ran so fast that the steam arising from his flanks became banks of fog which sought forests to roll though and fungi to nourish in its dampness. King Harold was a legend because his strength and power ensured a dignified and peaceful equanimity amongst the species of the shires. King Harold was a legend because he saved so many people from ill-fitting shoes by generating tremendous gusts of winds which caused people to float so that their feet never needed to touch the ground.
If King Harold were still alive, I’d ask him if we could go for a ride. And maybe, if I were lucky, he’d come to my window one night and we would fly free in the nighttime sky. He would tell me to pack my warmest scarf and then we’d get close enough to inspect the stars and I would come home with some diamond earrings to prove it. It would be a different kind of life then, a life where humans and animals shared dreams and resources and all of our lives were richer for it.
The diamonds from the sky would be in King Harold’s eyes, as he looked and I listened. And we both could keep going and keep going until we didn’t want to anymore, and then we’d settle down to allow another empire to rise. After King Harold, it could have been an alliance between the Falcons and the Red Kites, or an emergent race of Fungi. Perhaps, even, the Oaks could have had their time again since they did such a good job of it last time.
Instead it has been us, over and over, wearing holes into the ground, sucking magic from the air and replacing it with poisons. It has been us, and our narcissistic dramas, pumping our effluent into the places we don’t live, deadened to the deadening of even our own species. I think it is time we called time on ourselves, de-centred our dramas, allowed the wild world to creep back into human spaces. Let its roots crack our pavements, prise apart the foundations of our most sacred edifices, and shoot up new life to break down the decay we are tending.
Yes, I say that it is time to let the big wings beat in an orange morning sky and for us to sit in wonder. It is time to admit that we’ve made a terrible mess of things, eat humble pie, and watch how the wild things do it. It’s time for those of us who walk a path separate from materialism to speak on the richness of a still observation. It’s time to let go of our grasping and clawing, so that we can find everything in the nothing which follows. It’s time to remember how to share and to de-centre humans, and in the space which follows, watch and tend the new shoots of an earth which is ever growing.