Unicorn, Blue whale and the dragon
Horses have been appearing everywhere. In dreams, in quiet moments, in places that feel less like imagination and more like remembrance. I haven’t known what to make of it, only that something in me softens every time they appear, as though they are carrying a message my mind has not yet learned to understand.
Today I was listening to one of my favourite astrologers tell an ancient Hindu story I had never heard before. It was the story of Surya, Sanjna and Chhaya.
Sanjna loved the Sun, yet she could not bear the intensity of his radiance. She left behind her shadow, Chhaya, and disappeared into the wilderness where she took the form of a mare. When Surya eventually discovered what had happened, he did not demand that she return as she had been. He transformed too. He became a horse, and only then could they truly meet again.
Something in me became completely still as I listened. It wasn’t simply a beautiful myth. It felt like one of those stories that arrives precisely when another piece of your own life is ready to reveal itself.
Almost eight years ago I wrote a little story about a unicorn and a blue whale. I hadn’t thought about it in years.
The whale had fallen in love with the unicorn, yet they belonged to different worlds. One lived in the ocean, the other on land. They found each other only briefly before the tide forced them apart again.
The whale refused to believe that love must remain impossible. Guided by a radiant dragon, it descended into the underworld, learned the art of shapeshifting, and eventually transformed into a unicorn. The dragon also taught that this gift could be shared, so neither of them would remain confined to a single element. Together they could walk the earth, swim through the sea, or fly through the sky.
Reading those words today felt almost surreal.
What touched me wasn’t that the whale changed its form. It was why.
The whale never transformed because there was something wrong with being a whale. It wasn’t trying to become more worthy, more lovable or more acceptable. It transformed because life was asking it to discover another way of inhabiting the world without abandoning its essence.
The myth of Sanjna and Surya carries exactly the same fragrance.
Transformation is not the abandonment of our nature. It is the expansion of our capacity to meet.
This morning I found myself descending into childhood and schooling trauma with an unusual tenderness. I could finally feel the terror and shame I had carried for not fitting into well-organised systems. Somewhere along the way I concluded that everyone else seemed built for this world while I somehow wasn’t. If I couldn’t do what came so naturally to others, then something in me must surely be defective.
That belief shaped far more of my life than I realised.
Yet as I stayed with my body instead of the story my mind had built around it, something entirely different appeared. I didn’t find brokenness. I found mastery.
I found a body that had been sensing things many people simply weren’t sensing. A nervous system that refused to become numb. A heart that kept recognising truth even when I desperately wished it wouldn’t, because fitting in would have been so much easier.
The sensitivity I spent years trying to suppress was never the wound.
The violence against it was.
Today I sat with the little girl inside me as though I had travelled back through time and gathered her into my arms. There was nothing to fix. Nothing to apologise for. Nothing to improve. Only the quiet recognition that nothing had ever been wrong with us.
We had simply passed through a mist of forgetting. The illusion, the veil, the dark age of my soul.
As all of this settled inside me, I suddenly understood why the horses have been appearing.
The whale becoming a unicorn.
Surya becoming a horse.
The horses in my dreams.
None of them are asking me to become someone else. It was not about putey materialized animal.
They have been asking me to become someone who can carry what I already am. And the year of the fire horse speaks the same story, what is meant to move forward in the revolutionary times we are moving towards.
A whale cannot live on land, not because it lacks beauty or wisdom, but because its gifts belong to another element. A horse carries those same qualities into movement. It walks. It builds. It travels. It meets others. It brings life into relationship with the visible world.
That lands deeply in this season of my life.
After years of diving into the depths, into trauma, shadow, the body, silence and mystery, I no longer feel called to go deeper for the sake of depth itself. I feel invited to let everything those depths have taught me grow legs.
To let wisdom walk the walk, not only talk the talk.
With the South Node touching this New Moon, I feel invited to release the ancient belief that I must betray my own nature in order to belong.
Belonging was never waiting at the end of self-abandonment. It has always been waiting at the place where essence becomes embodied.
The whale was never meant to stop being a whale. It simply learned how to transform effortlessly.
My Leo Moon is roaring, not with the need to be seen, but with the quiet certainty that the light I once hid for the comfort of the tribe is finally finding its own voice and way.
So many tears. So many unsaid words leaving through coughs and trembling.
Such astonishing wisdom this body carries. And I get to witness it.
Must say, I’m in awe✨