The Easiest Vision

by David Goyette

Horse of loved history, ingredient of the soul arriving from a memory or a flavor stored within your taste buds. Perhaps your grandmother swallowed a morsel of her life with similar longing or remembrance thinking of her grandfather, the shape of his ear, the sound of his voice a mantra at her bedside. All of the family notions as pieces of personal history return in Joy Harjo’s “She Had Some Horses”. Harjo saddles the strength and rhythm of the horse as they beats a pattern of triumphant memory through her poems. Her message is found in "Vision" as she writes:

"How it (the rainbow) curved down between earth/
and the deepest sky to give us horses/
of color horses that were within us all of this time/
but we didn’t see them because/
we wait for the easiest vision/
to save us."

Harjo suggests take the time to tend to the horse. Look for then in your life, for they accompany us as angels might a Christian Mystic. “The easiest vision” is easily drawn out for those watching the shadows in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” The tools of the first culture and language decode this world as education paints by the numbers those omnifarious things before us, scintillating with wonderful mystery. Upon learning a new language or coming in contact with the view of another culture, a new layer of understanding lends one to the hunger for an even deeper telescope of feeling and knowledge. As messengers of time past and present, omens of sorrow and ecstasy and the conveyers of the soulful wisdom of traveling to an old (now commodity covered) park or pasture full of childhood memory, these horses take you back to emotions and notions of remembrance.

“Vision” reminds the reader of the phenomenal nature of how we survive. To remain inspired by words, music or a picture of an old friend is not a function of logical appraisal. The ‘easiest vision’ or presentation of “motivating” or “enriching” stimuli fails to meet the individual longings for personal meaning. Harjo’s Horses shuttle the capricious emotion and illogical resilience, although, “we were never meant to survive.” They help us to teach ourselves, to become our own instructors of our unique lives. This easiest vision as Harjo points out in “Motion” is not enough for “we exist not in words, but in the motion set off by them.”

Synergy Home