The most ethereal moments of my childhood were evenings spent astride my young horse’s familiar back. At these times I used no saddle or bridle because I wanted nothing to separate me from my Pegasus. The two of us often didn’t go anywhere or even move at all, instead we stood rooted in the paddock, entranced by the ancient bond that had stupefied girls and their horses for centuries before us. On those quiet summer nights we sat and smelt the earth cooling, heard the breeze’s cryptic secrets, and watched the sun sink lazily into its bed behind the mountains. My senses were sharpened beyond human experience, and I was alerted to everything from my horse outward. I could feel each of the coarse, raw fibers of his mane tangled between my fingers. When he inhaled, the breath that passed through his flared nostrils was the same breath that filled my heart and my lungs with the sheer joy of living. I absorbed every shift of his weight and twitch of his ear and flick of his tail. More than that, I felt the identical pounding of his heart as we shared the dizzying exhilaration of standing completely still while the rest of the world continued to spin on its orbit. In these moments, when I became one with my horse, I also became aware of and synonymous with nature. I felt at once the eternity and transience of time. I appreciated the vastness and the limits of the universe. I realized that I was both infinitely significant and less than a fleeting vapor. But none of this enlightenment frightened me, instead it bewitched me, and I became drunk on the clarity of existence. I gulped this glimpse of nature’s deepest truths until the experience became so dizzying that I feared my lungs or my heart or my soul would burst, and I buried my head in his mane just in time. I breathed in his honest, earthy smell and felt his living heat in my mouth while my consciousness slowly, reluctantly came back to Earth as I was supposed to know it. From this angle, I looked through the glass of my horse’s eye and saw the knowledge that had possessed me for an instant, and I was left gasping for breath and trapped in my mortality.