Many heroes and so little time
My avatar has always been Wonder Woman because she was created as a “distinctly feminist role model whose mission was to bring the Amazon ideals of love, peace, and sexual equality to a world torn by the hatred of men.” I mean what’s not to love?
But I’ve been a long admirer of Secretariat, a once in a lifetime horse. There is a passage from William Nack’s book, Secretariat that reads:
Secretariat moved to the field with a rush, accelerating outside as they made the bend, without urging from Turcotte, bounding along as if independent of whatever momentum the race possessed, independent of its pace and tempo, independent of the shifting, slow-motion struggles unfolding within it, the small battles for position and advantage. But Secretariat was not responding to any force the race was generating, but rather moving as though he’d evolved his own kinetic field beyond it, and Turcotte would later recall sitting quietly and feeling awed.
Secretariat was a force of nature who inhabited an inner world and spirit that was unflappable and undeniable. A once in a lifetime horse he was called. And he didn’t always win, but when he failed, he came back even stronger. Reminds me of Jane Hirshfield’s poem, For What Binds Us:
For What Binds Us
BY JANE HIRSHFIELD
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
So today on the day of Atonement, as I fast and contemplate the year that has brought me here, a year of transition, I am warmed by the feeling that the fire inside me is growing stronger. I have spent a year so focused on losing, I have lost sight of winning and that is what has me out of balance.
For this year, for alopecia, for Hashimoto’s Disease, for failure, for going down, for getting back up, I’m most grateful for the hero in me (and all my loved ones who held my cape).