Sometimes A White Stage Is Just A White Stag

When Sometimes A White Stag Is Just A White Stag…
I am a big fan of the white stag. It has a sort of magic about it. I have long since and ever thought with every fiber of my being that the white stag was strictly a mythical creature verging on the plausible blending from fantasy to reality like most myths tend to do. Just like King Arthur and the reality of his whereabouts- we love to muse on the various possibility of his story and various versions thereof. Along with all the other mythical beasts and different accoutrements of the dreams of our collective consciousness, we have the stories that hold them in their own backdrops. These stories have these creatures within their tales that hold sway with us by themselves alone, adding further speculation and assumptions of their false existence (however erroneous that may be).
This elusive animal however real has lived within our legends, hunted in vain by King Arthur and the Kings and Queens of Narnia alike. Granted King Arthur was born in legend by our own Anglo culture and the Narnia royalty was born of the mind of a rather brilliant author but this lends no help to the credit of the white stag’s authenticity.
I’m the greatest skeptic on this beautiful beast- at least I was until today, ridiculously and undeservedly so as I found out today. Yes just today, I learned much to my joy, that they are actually real beasts that reside on our very own planet and roam and frolic in the fields of Essex and Gloucestershire England. I was shocked, yet again still confused as I was on the sometimes seemingly invisible thin borderline between the two worlds of fantasy and reality as it was from an article on the making of the new Narnia chronicles movie, ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’. I suppose this confusion is rooted in the sadly “sheltered” life of some of us Americans. We only have deer where I live- no white stags to hunt here. Coupled with this I can’t forget that it was young Harry Potter himself who had the ability to muster up from deep within his soul a mightily bright petronus to shoo away the very negative and ugly, bad bad baddie Dementors on the banks of Hogwarts Castle’s lake. The very visage of the animal is what made his patronus one of the strongest charms of his wizarding community.
Now I guess I’ll just take heart that some things on our very real and often times ugly world are just as wonderfully fantastical and surreal as the worlds our most gifted authors can bring us out of their minds and into our own. Maybe this could mean we could summon a patronus of our own and manifest something greater than the sum of ourselves from a place that can hold such a power.
I believe that to be true, along with all the other mythical beasts and different accoutrements of the dreams of our collective consciousness we may find ourselves one day to stumble out of a wardrobe of our own and see a fantastical land we have created for ourselves by that very power from within.