The Last Unicorn: About Free Spirits

If you cage a free spirit, you kill it

A free-spirited person is attractive for some.

“Hey, you, what do you see?
Something beautiful or something free?” ~Marilyn Manson, Beautiful People

An odd sort of thing happens when one spends all their time in a collective. Group dynamics, ethics, and behaviors accumulate so that an individual’s fire gets extinguished. Everyone starts to look, think, speak, and act the same.

There’s a comfort in that — to have the expected — but it gets to be routine and that can get stifling and boring.

Sometimes, what’s beautiful is not actually the person who comes into the bubble wrapped experience with their free-spirited differences. It’s that they’re different. The group-oriented person’s spirit is so god-damned hemmed in that, when the free spirit flits into their sphere, the free one’s complete oblivion to the group’s ordinary, wakes up the wilting spirits.

Some understand that their spirit needed ignition. They look around at their experience, step back enough to catch that fire, and begin to fan their own flames of inspiration for change.

Some don’t understand what they’re experiencing. Instead of looking around and seeing how the collective quenches the depths of their own beautiful spirits, they want to obtain the free spirit as their own.

Because they recognize that their own spirit wants to soar, but they aren’t wired for or confident enough to break from the company, comfort, and security of the collective to let it fly so, they try to capture the free spirit to keep that feeling alive.

When thinking on this, I often remember various scenes from the movie, The Last Unicorn.

King Haggard, the name suggesting his experience in life, finds no happiness in anything but the sight of unicorns — the freest and most beautiful of magical creatures — so, he sets himself to capturing and keeping them all in the sea by…