Here Be Dragons

If the tilt of reality suddenly shifted and opened the door to the improbable, what would I hope to see come through to inhabit this world with us? Easy. Dragons. Because I have no sense of self-preservation maybe. Or because I'm taken with the notion that I am a dragon (according to Chinese astrology.) More to the point, though, there's value to casting your gaze to the sky when a shadow passes over and shuddering a combination of awe and dread. It keeps the human animal humbler to be reminded that there are forces in the world that cannot be harnessed or tamed or controlled. While I'm not entirely keen on having friends and family predated by a hungry dragon, watching a massive winged force of nature soaring the skies might be worth a few 'accidents'. Certainly, I'd be one of the dumb ones going out to look for the dragons' caves/nests/roosts. Just to catch a glimpse. On par with courting a tiger.

Maybe what I'm really looking for is something to strip away the illusion of control the human race so loves to pretend to have. I have no data to back it up, but I maintain that humans are better for having something bigger and more awesome than themselves to envy. As a species we drive harder when we're challenged. And having a dragon eating your sheep and burning your neighborhood might qualify as challenging.

Dragons have good qualities, too. Some of them bear incredible wisdom and are invested in helping humans. The fun would come in trying to parse out which dragon was which. I don't know. I'm not sure I can fully explain why it would matter to me that dragons made it across the threshold from myth to real. Only that I'd love to see one with my own eyes and experience the shiver that would come from watching a majestic, enormous apex predator claim the skies of this world.

Given the forces arrayed against humans - hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquake, volcanoes and the other assorted ways the planet has to kill us, do you suppose we already have dragons of a sort?

I Believe in Unicorns

This week we're asking the question: What's the Greatest Myth or Legend You Wish Were True & Why?

My reply to this sort of thing, deep in the still idealistic abyss of my heart - which I've carried surprisingly untainted by collisions with reality since my childhood - is "what makes you think they're not true?"

I believe in unicorns.

So, there you have my secret: I believe that the great myths and legends are true. I can't even tell you where the conviction comes from - it just feels like something I know. I see so-called imaginary beast in my head like they're memories of something I've witnessed in person.

Call it having a great imagination. Call it a kind of insanity.

For me, it's understanding that there's more to the physical world than the frenetic boundaries the small-minded and power-hungry draw around it.

I believe in unicorns.

I believe in them all, quite honestly, but unicorns are emblematic of the rest. The above is a book I've had since I was eleven or twelve. It's one of many books about unicorns I collected during that era. I made a somewhat exhaustive study of them, throughout all the cultures.

In seventh grade, we had to do a five-page research paper, with footnotes and everything, which sent my classmates into a tizzy. I went into a similar frenzy, but of excitement. An excuse to look up everything the school library AND public library had on unicorns! Plus my own considerable library. I turned in a nineteen page report. I also learned not to answer my classmates with literal truth when they asked how long my paper was.

This might have been an early clue of my eventual career, though none of us noted it at the time.

When I was thirteen and my family visited New York City (a world away from our home in Denver), my one pick was to see the Unicorn Tapestries. When they turned out not to be at the Met but were instead uptown at The Cloisters - too far to go on our schedule - I had a meltdown of disappointment, totally bewildering my parents. They'd had no idea of the depths of my obsession. Why would they? Not many people wanted to investigate those tapestries as research into proving their own deeply held beliefs in the actual existence of unicorns.

More than thirty years later, when it finally worked out for me to visit The Cloisters and I got to see those tapestries, it satisfied a deep thirst in me.

I still have all those books.

I believe in unicorns.