Dandelion: The Extraordinary Life of a Misfit

by Sheelagh Mawe

  She saw later she had fallen into his trap, though at the time she was too angry to notice. And if she had, she wouldn't have cared. Timothy could go his own way. She wouldn't be needing him anymore now that she knew there to be a wise, all-knowing part to herself to learn from.

  Planting herself firmly with her back towards him, she closed her eyes and settled herself to listen for her instructions.

  A long time she waited, all her concentration turned inwards, listening. Many things she heard and felt on the outside of her, but never so much as a whisper from within. She tried changing positions, turning herself first this way, then the other, foolish as it seemed. She stood up and she lay down. On her head she would have stood if she'd known how to do it, so anxious was she to learn the direction of her life.

  And, “Timothy,” she wailed at the end of it, her new found pride in tatters and not caring if he found her foolish or not. “It's devil a word I've heard this whole long day and me listening me heart out.”

  “Time,” he answered. “Give it time. Remember how it was before when you were very small and obeyed it with never a thought. Easily, naturally. You'll hear it again. Patience.”

  Patience! How many times Dandelion heard that word from Timothy! So often that the very sound of it had her stamping her hooves in vexation! Many wise and wonderful things she was to learn in her life, but patience came hard to her. Hard, indeed.

  “It’s trying too hard you are,” Timothy told her at the end of her second day's efforts. “And when you try too hard you get in your own way and then worry sets in. And because worry is a thought just like all others, you'll get what you're worrying about and not what you want. You've got to expect it! And by and by, when it's furthest from your mind, you'll hear and you'll know. Go easy...”

  “A fine thing it is for you to say `Go easy',” she told him. “You at the end of a long and satisfying life. But what about me? With me own not yet begun and time a-wasting.”

  Nevertheless, she tried feigning indifference and went about her business as though she had not a care in the world, but ready, always, to pounce on the first faint murmurings from within.

  But as day followed day, with never a sign, she began to lose her belief in her ability to learn from herself and her head filled up, as before, with the injustices of her past life and feelings of helplessness towards her future.

  “Timothy,” she said approaching him one dawn after another worrisome night, “it's thinking I am that you've been having me on. Days I've been waiting to hear from me innards the object of me life and devil a word have I heard. A hard cold world it is we live in, and I think I must be simple to have listened to a word of your blarney.”

  “If it's the world you're not liking now, then you'd best change that, too,” he said, coming slowly out of his sleep. “And before you start pestering me as to the hows of it, I'll tell you. You'll change the world only by changing yourself.”

  “Is it the whole world you'll be burdening me with now?” she blurted, her eyes stinging with temper.

  “Aye, it is. Why would I be putting it on another when it's yourself not satisfied?”

  “And where is it you'd have me begin?” she asked, expecting him to say, “Yourself”.

  Instead he said, “Why any one of a dozen different places I'm thinking. You could stop feeling sorry for yourself as a start.”

  “Yes, but I have so many reasons...”

  “You could start, in a playful way to be sure, to act as if you already led the kind of life you would like to lead.”

  “But I still don't know what kind of life I'd like to lead.”

  “You could exercise yourself every day, prepare yourself...”

  “Yes, but I've been so downhearted...”

  “You could be thinking about what you can do and forget what you can't”

  “But I don't know what I can do.”

  Timothy sighed. Dandelion knew she was trying his patience, but she had her own limits too. The very suggestion that she had to hold herself responsible for her own circumstances and the world besides was really expecting too much.

  “You could be making up your mind, now, this minute, just to be a better `you', than forever asking me questions you can answer yourself.”

  “Yes, but...”

  “Is it thinking you are that if you say, `Yes, but...' enough times, your life will change all by itself?” Timothy exploded.

  Dandelion hung her head at that. “Ah, don't be angry with me, Timothy,” she begged. “I want to find the answers meself. It's just that you are so wise and know so much. I think me mother was right. I am just a silly, vain creature. Everything I have ever done turning out badly.”

  “Everything, me darling Dandelion, is what you think it is, no more and no less. If you will persist in thinking yourself silly, then silly you'll be forevermore.”

  “And you?” Dandelion asked. “Do you think I'm silly?”

  He sighed. “It's not what I think of you nor what others think of you that matter, me darling. It's what you think of you that makes the difference.”

  Dandelion almost said, “Yes, but...” again, but caught herself in time. Instead, she said, “Timothy, it's knowing I am that you are trying to help me, but you have to understand that all of the things you tell me, about knowing everything meself and using me imagination and having a purpose and... all those things. Well, I never heard tell of the like before and ... ah... well, maybe they are not true at all. Maybe you just think they are.”

  She thought she might anger him with her words, but Timothy smiled a pleased smile.

  “And will you look at who's starting to use her head at last,” he said. “Sure and they're true because I think they're true. That is what I've been after telling you all this long time. What I've been telling you from the first. Your thoughts create the ‘you' that you think you are, and your whole world besides. That is the purpose of thought, to create, through the imagination. And through emotion! You imagined yourself in great detail, and as you imagined, so you became. You thought yourself fast as any race horse, and so you became. You thought yourself a poor lost soul, dying of starvation and neglect, and so you became. When will you be seeing that everything you ever imagined, you lived? Now, if you don't like the results, change them. Imagine a different you. A you that you will love. Choose!”

  “I don't think I could be doing that.” Dandelion said uncertainly.

  “Sure and I'm telling you, you can! Put a picture in your head of whatever it is you're wanting to become, with all your heart believe yourself capable and worthy, and become it! Isn’t that what you did, all unthinking, when you learned to walk? To trot? To gallop? Isn't that what you do when you want to go from here to there? If you had never had a thought in your head, never used your imagination, why, you'd still be lying on the ground where you were born.

  “You believe your life now to be the result of your past,” he went on, not letting Dandelion get a question in edgewise. “But turn it around, me darling, for the opposite is true. Your life is formed by the thoughts you project into the future. What you think, you become. It's your thoughts going on ahead of you that become your present. You create from the present, not from the past. If you believe yourself a misfit, a poor silly nothing unable to fill any role, then that is what you will become and everyone meeting you will agree with your opinion of yourself. If you expect unfeeling masters and cruelty - ridicule - a harsh, uncaring world, then bless you, you will find just such circumstances, for your thoughts will attract them to you. Thoughts are like magnets, me darling, and always bring you precisely what you expect. Are you understanding now that nothing outside of yourself can harm you? Neither man nor beast. That you are at the mercy of nothing in this world but your own thoughts for they create your life?”

  He eyed Dandelion sideways and smiled, no doubt at the variety of emotions chasing one after the other across her face.

  She watched him carefully, wondering if what he said could possibly be
true, for if it was, why... anything was possible. And that seemed impossible.

  “Is it magic you're after telling me?” she asked doubtfully.

  “Nothing magic about it at all,” he said sharply, “though there's many that would call it so. Your imagination came with you the same as your nose and your ears. It's your choice which way you use it - to your advantage or disadvantage - the choice is always yours.”

  “I always thought,” Dandelion began and stopped, smiling at her own words. “That is, I always understood there to be a powerful being, not of this earth at all, who created life and put us all here to live our lives as best we can.”

  “And so there is, me darling, so there is. A powerful being indeed it is. But you're mistaken thinking it not of this earth. Why, bless you, it is the earth. And it is every creature that flies or walks or crawls besides. It is what makes eyes see. Hearts beat. Bones grow. Things no mortal can do for themselves. It lives both within and without, this powerful being, a part of everything that is, and not a-way off somewhere distant.”

  “Does it...” Is it...?” Dandelion shuddered, scarce daring to hope, “Could it be... the part of meself you spoke of earlier? The part that knows all?”

  “The very same! What else? And it's wanting for you whatever it is you're wanting for yourself?”

  “And why then,” Dandelion asked, still not ready to believe him, “since it is all-knowing and wise beyond belief, why doesn't this part of meself help me choose the direction of me life?”

  “Because that choice belongs to you. It wants your experience, not its own. Your happiness, not its own. It awaits only your instructions, as it were. Show it, through the pictures in your mind, what it is you want, and it will prompt you, urge you, towards their realization. At birth you are, thereafter you become...”

  “Then... if this all-knowing part of me is always with me... is me... then... then I am never alone as I always thought,” Dandelion said, her words coming slow. “Nor yet am I a poor lost soul with no part to play in life. Why, this great all-knowing being is... is Dandelion!”

  “Indeed and to be sure! Why the very chain of events that led to you being born into the times you were born, to the parents you were born to, events so complex, going so far back in time, requiring such split-second timing must convince you of that. For no mortal could devise so intricate a pattern. There are no accidents of birth, no coincidences. And how dare you think yourself a victim of circumstance? Why, only a fool would think such a thing. You are here because you chose to be here. Now, what do you choose to become?”

  A long time Dandelion stared into those bright young eyes of his. Looking for a joke. Looking for deceit. Looking for truth. They remained as they always were. Dark, kind, humorous, studying her as carefully as she studied him.

  A dozen times she opened her mouth for another why, another how, and not one did she utter. For now she understood what he had been telling her from the first and she was stunned. At once jubilant and yet terrified of the responsibility implied.

  If he was right and she had within herself the power he said she had, and if indeed her thoughts created her life, why then she had only to think, imagine, a better life... No! Why not an amazing, extraordinary life? And live it. But what if she could not control her thoughts? What if, in spite of her best intentions, her old thoughts, the doubts and fears of a lifetime, persisted and kept her prisoner?

  So much he gave her to think of, to come to terms with. And so much he took away, too. All her upbringing. Everything she had ever learned and thought she understood. All her ideas of the place of man and beast in a harsh, unjust world. Likewise, the comfort of self-pity, the luxury of blaming circumstance and coincidence and luck, the `fate' of her forbears. Stripped to her bare bones he left her, cringing, terrified to take on the responsibility of herself.

  She felt desolate then, and lonely, cut off from the old Dandelion. She had been comfortable with her, poor thing that she was. And even though she had given endless lip service to her own betterment, never once, in all her chatter, had she thought to take the responsibility of her to herself. Why should she when it belonged elsewhere? To those who bred her... Those who owned her... In the hands of the all-powerful being she had thought apart from herself. “Not to me!” she cried inwardly. “Why, what if I am not gifted with sufficient imagination to create a new life? A new me?

  “Not me,” she cried again. “Not me! I am the misfit. The joke. I am too young still. Too uncertain. Too small. And me head is not right with the rest of me...”

  She caught sight of Timothy watching her carefully and she quickly turned away, too overwhelmed even to nod in his direction as she stumbled away to confront herself.

  FOURTEEN

  To be sure it was herself Dandelion ran from that day, though at the time she thought it was Timothy.

  Scarcely able to walk she was, such was her confusion, and she stumbled towards a thicket and hid herself deep in its darkest recesses. A long, long time she stayed there, her mind a battlefield where all her old beliefs fought tooth and nail with Timothy's ideas. Could it be…? Was it possible that one's life was indeed fashioned by thought?

  Like a vacant building, she was, its old tenant gone - dead - and its new one loitering at the door, peering through its windows, unwilling to step inside and take up residence, in case the foundation proved false and unable to support it.

  She had thought herself alone and abandoned when her mother left her at her birth. And again when she was left to fend for herself in the midst of Lord Harrington's thoroughbreds. Certainly when Daisy died. And still again when she wandered lost. But never was she more alone than when she plunged herself into that thicket of her own free will. For always before, she had had others to blame for her plight. Now she did not have that comfort, nor ever would again, if what Timothy said was true.

  Yet, as time passed, she found her thoughts dwelling more and more frequently on her earliest days, and it seemed to her that, with the innocence - perhaps the ignorance - of extreme youth, she had indeed lived by her imagination as Timothy said she had. What she had imagined, she had become.

  Faint stirrings of pride in her accomplishments of that period began to pierce through the gloom and despair of her thoughts. Why, she had learned more in that year, alone and unhampered by others, than at any other time since. She had gone from a helpless creature not able to stand to a ... Well, it made her smile to think of how she had been.

  So then, if what Timothy said was true and she could create, with her thoughts and imagination, whatever she pleased, what pleased her?

  Playfully, shrugging to herself, she tried to imagine what she might become. Nothing came to mind, her entire experience being limited to her previous two alternatives. She dismissed them both. Better to die quickly than put herself between the shafts again. Racing likewise. For she knew at last that she was no more born to race - fast though she might be - than she was born to grow roses. Where then? What then?

  The black clouds rolled in again. Imagine it and it is yours, he had said. But imagine what?

  A hundred times, a thousand, she thought to exit her shelter and ask Timothy for advice, for direction. And a thousand times she would not.

  “Ask yourself,” he would wheeze. And ask herself she would though she perish in the exercise.

  Endlessly she probed the question, coaxed and cajoled, raked the attics of her mind for a clue, a hint, a suggestion. If you can be anything in the world, what do you choose to be?

  I could just be satisfied being meself, as Timothy suggested, she caught herself thinking.

  “I am already,” she replied. “I want to be more. To grow, to know, to take me place.”

  “Then be more yourself, start by being proud of yourself.”

  Now there's an idea, Dandelion thought. I used to be when I was very young.

  “Then be proud again!”

  “Yes, but... I have nothing to be proud of at the moment.”

  “Let's
not be going back over that again. Let's try going forward for a change.”

  “I would, if only I knew where to begin”

  “Begin where you are. Alive and breathing on the planet. Young and healthy again. Now... what will you become?”

  “If I knew that, do you think I'd be hiding away here?”

  “All right, you don't know yet what you are to become, but you could pretend, act as if, you knew.”

  “And what good would that be doing?”

  “All the good in the world. Tell me, if you had already found your place, if you were successful, respected, loved. How might you be feeling?”

  “Why, I would feel elated. Proud. Happy!”

  “Sure and you would. You'd hold your pretty head high and your steps would not falter.”

  “Indeed and I would. I would!”

  “Well then, there's a picture to hold fast in your mind. Already you look better, as though you are indeed that horse. Now, create another picture. Imagine a human, someone who is kind and who needs you.”

  “No. I'll not be having any humans in me life, thank you. I'll not be wanting to be a possession again.”

  “Don't interrupt! You won't be a possession. We're not thinking of a master. We're thinking more along the lines of a partner.”

  “And where in the world am I to be finding such a person? If I were to show me face out there again, I'd be trapped, caught, at their mercy again. Thank you again, but no. I'll not be needing any humans in me life.”

  “You're forgetting a very important thing, Dandelion.”

  “Am I now? And what might that be?”

  “You're forgetting that thoughts are like magnets. That like attracts like.”

  “So Timothy said. But I'm not clear in me mind what that has to do with me finding me way.”

  “It has everything to do with it. You have already imagined yourself a fine horse. Now imagine there is someone out there who needs just such a horse as yourself and let your thoughts bring him to you.”