One summer, I’d had a teenage phase when I used to pull all-nighters, alone in the moonlit Ponyville valley. Passing up and down, too early to meet traffic, and then sleeping by day. My bored, goading sense that there must be more to life than this somewhere, I’d tried to satisfy then: altering the too-familiar valley as far as possible, letting its fields become blue and vacant. And often, at the first suggestion of dawn, I had felt satisfied: finding what I’d most desired in the first airy, golden beads of light on the rim of the clouds in the east, so distant, and safely beyond reach - and by this distance given special mystery, as if really somewhere else. Half-revealed and out of reach. More than this.

My name is Lemony Cream, and I’m a student in the little town of Ponyville. Or, I was. As a matter of fact, I just graduated. But I can’t say I’ve made much progress this summer, since then.

Well, that’s not strictly true. I have written some poems. Nothing special. Want to hear one?

Little rocking horse, you have seen better days
Wasting away
in the yard

That’s how it starts.

Little rocking horse, now you rock in the rain
And your beautiful mane
Loses paint

That’s the middle, then it sort of ends with:

But by your eyes, I learned the color green
By your eyes, I learned the color green

What do you think? You like it? Well, would it surprise you to know that I stole it. Or rather, that I adapted it from a song my father used to sing to me, before he passed away. Some poet that makes me, hm?

So, what does a recent graduate who admires no one more than the great poets, and yet who can’t write a poem, do for a living? If you can tell me that, I’ll be in your debt. I’ll owe you one poem. How’s that?

Sorry, let me get back to the point I was struggling towards earlier. Today’s the morning of the Summer Sun Celebration. It’s approaching dawn, and so I’m reminded of that phase I had with the all-nighters. But the difference is, this time, the whole town’s committed to it. And I have to admit I’ve had a good time, even with all the neighbors out, gossiping.

Yes, we’ve passed the night in idle talk, which until now I’d never seen the appeal of. Of course, now I realize: it doesn’t matter what ponies talk about, grouped around each other. The content of their conversation doesn’t matter. We’re each just constructs, prompting each other for novel responses: different animals of personality, playing together on a field out of sight. Unseen besides in our changing faces. Our tones of voice, our laughter, brought out from where? Mere expressions of what? Spirits, interacting through these outward forms. So, what does it matter what is being discussed?

I remembered quietly standing by in school, with almost derisive feelings about what trivial matters the conversation landed on. Superficial-seeming conversation, at a superficial glance. Meanwhile, the ponies around me there were busy joking and disagreeing, testing each other and being surprised, really communicating; however often it passed over my pompous head as I stood by, thinking of poetry.

But think of poetry! How high and strange it sounds. What kind of a mind must it be, that produces such musical, intelligent speech? To have strains of thought this graceful and coherent, first of all, then to write them out with such efficiency. Angelic speech, expressed as if from mind to mind, and even then: between minds so graceful, heartfelt and articulate. Isn’t poetry, then, a kind of simulation of how an intelligence more than mortal would sound? Of how an angel would speak? But how could our species simulate that, if we haven’t made some kind of contact?

So, here’s what I believe: the higher spirits and angelic figures of dreams and poetry, being parts of the mind, must as much be parts of nature also, and as real as dandelions. Because the mind of course is natural, and real. No matter how much more deeply it goes down, out of sight, and no matter what manner of spiritual creatures we each brush against, inside.

So, when I looked at the ponies in town and saw more than flesh, and listened to their laughter, and heard more than sound, should I not think of them, these ponies, as the only earthly housings of the angels? Hints of which I could read and see there, in these more familiar outward forms. There, the highest, known miracles of nature, revealed to me? The root and stem of poetry’s flower. Reassurance of divine love. Wasn’t it there, in what I saw of other ponies, that the most obvious, suggestive mystery lay? Approximations of the divine.

When I saw Nature’s Call practicing tricks over a hillside outside of town, or little Perigee, hovering just off the flowery ground like a butterfly, watching her. When I saw cheerful Daymark poking fun of her old father, in the street. Or Wile at her stall, making pancakes and coffee at a little stove, with Shady Sands there too: giving freely of her time, to help her. Weren’t these higher spirits, here already? Yes, I’d seen it tonight.

Customarily, I’d gone complaining on the hillsides of Ponyville, or on the lonely bridge in town, that I was bored of my surroundings, concluding that there was too little to do here. Becoming plain by repetition, these days without wind or bearing, by long midsummer - where with the high, still weather, time doesn't seem to be passing, even, but drags.

Yet all this time, here with me were other minds: systems I could query or challenge, but which I could never test to their limits. No, no artificiality or flaw would ever be found, no infidelity to reveal them for fake, or less than total. In fact, these were whole other perspectives. Entire other minds. Open to my querying. To my curiosity, and efforts to understand. And what had I done? Assumed they had had little to say, or that I already got the gist of them. Just in the same way, in school, that poetry’s dismissed.

But what was Nature’s Call’s perspective, on the nature of our world? What guiding principle did she live by, that had made her practice and practice until she was so physically fluid? Why was Perigee so thoughtful, and considerate in her speech, so that no careless assumption escaped her lips? Why did Daymark treat her somewhat proud and austere father in all playfulness – how was she so aware that he had once been a laughing colt, and that this same colt survived in him, prepared to laugh again?

And if for Wile the dark and close and cool (as on the shaded riverbank) seem as special and dear as the bright, airy and clear seem to Shady Sands (like the crowning light over the pines, or around Canterlot, more dimly, by evening), how many other variations might there be? Where for some ponies tranquility lies in long, flowery midday, for others it must be in the longer, bowing span of night. But whether it should be in speedy, playful day, or in retiring night: to each their own.

There's the advantage of our weather system, which changes as the weather changes here. And of those diverse callings, which call us each to our careers. This way, the great engine of the world lets us all delineate and follow our own preferences, and yet to learn from each other all the time, and to augment ourselves thereby.

Now, seeing this - the great host of individuals, of friends, ever-available in the world - my life: like a shallow little cove that's filled in a rush with an unusual pitching of the tide, so that all of a sudden there's the movement of water in and out of it, and afterwards the sand of the waterline is left slick and glistening, and the usual, squatting seagulls are sent up in suspension out of their established places -and what is generally stable, dry and unresponsive to the light, starts responding wildly! That's what I feel I've caught happening, here to me. The welling up, and its shining watermark. What was congested, opening out. As I saw the high potential of our kind. The depths of thought and laughter in every other pony, and my faculty for discovering it.

Reading. Close reading. And hadn’t that been my chief interest, after all?

In a dream as I was resting, if I recall, I saw what seemed like a memory of the Ponyville valley from afar, on the very brink of the Summer Sun Celebration: still cast over by a pall of cloud, but where, by a few prodigious shafts of light, kites and banners were appearing, and little foals went kicking up daffodils, running up the hills. A place outside of time where all friends met, and over which Celestia still presided, peacefully.

Still, as soon as my eyes fluttered open, suddenly my dream was gone; confused and disappearing, like one pony becoming indistinct in a surrounding crowd. But even with that said, I felt better somehow.

What ministering angels must visit us in our sleep? Undoing much of the ageing that's been done by day, but not all. We cannot comprehend. Softly, still, help descends as from a blue twilight, to visit us in sleep: to nurse us back again to health, against another long foray. Alone again, across the lonely wastes of day. Is it so bad to live? No, not so bad, but much worse than what awaits us. When for the last time these helping angels visit us, in our final bed, and we no longer have the strength to cling to life, but pass instead into their eternal care, welcoming their help, and recognizing, laughing as we recognize, how well we know our helpers. How often we’ve dreamt of them.

Now, by the sky I could see it was just nearing dawn. I was in a fetal position on my same small cloud, and all I could really see was blank sky. Yet from nearby, Wile was singing:

Little rocking horse, you have seen better days
Wasting away
in the yard

What did that remind me of? I tried and failed to find the answer, and seemed to feel as I searched the lowest branches of whole, staggering trees of unconscious memory, far out of reach. But I knew the song from somewhere, didn’t I?

Little rocking horse, now you rock in the rain
And your beautiful mane
Loses paint

“Ok,” Wile said, I assumed to someone else. “Now the chorus!” Yet she started off on it alone: “But… by… your… eyesss, I learned the color green! By your eyess, I learned…”

“That song…” I said, in a weak voice. “Where’s it from?”

“Ah, look’s like our little gremlin’s awake,” Wile said, her face hanging over me, against the morning sky. “You’ve missed a few hours of hard travel, I’m sorry to inform you.”

“The song?” I said, sleepily.

“Oh,” Wile said. “I heard it somewhere. Probably a standard.”

I sat up on the cloud. A few pines stood on the beginnings of hills around us, with their tips not stirring at all against a fine and peachy, windless sky.

I remembered now, as if reminded somehow: I’d had a teenage phase where I spent the nights awake, alone in the Stable (passing up and down, too early to meet traffic), and slept by day. I’d had a goading sense then that there must be more to life than this, somewhere, and I’d tried to satisfy it: altering the familiar passageways of the Stable as far as possible.

But here, at these first suggestions of morning overhead, I felt that same desire satisfied: finding what I’d then searched for in the first airy, golden linings of light on the Equestrian cloud cover’s northern rim, ahead of us, safely beyond appraisal: and by this distance given special mystery, as if really somewhere else. Half-revealed and out of reach. More than this.

Still, it wasn’t where the body went, but how highly the imagination reached, to find this high, free feeling. How light and free the spirit was, to rise. And I felt free and clear now, accompanied by my friends. It was early, and no direct sunlight fell on the land. Perigee was there to the one side, steering my cloud along.

“Lemony,” she said, nodding, greeting me. And she gave me a shy smile at that, which was freely returned.

I felt grateful, and safe, seeing her again. I realized I’d been sheltered all my life, from lack and illness, and even worry. With Shady Sands for years, like a great, guiding balloon, leading me to gladder days, in our long friendship. So that clumsily my own hooves could land, light and aimless on the ground, one after the other, and yet I never fell. Thanks to her steady help. She had cared for me without condition, and made me happier than I knew. So, I’d been guided and protected, first by her, and lately by these new, good friends, well protected.

“We’ve been alternating with the cloud, Perigee and I,” Wile said. “You were as quite as a patch of cabbages in there.”

I nodded. “Thanks for bringing me along. When did you start out?”

“While it was still dark,” Wile said. “Turns out neither Perigee or I are very peaceful sleepers.” She winked at me, adding: “You must have a clearer conscience somehow, hm? So, any good dreams?”

“I think so,” I said. “I’m trying to remember.”

Wile nodded, and said no more. I sat and stared forward, searching my memory. Something was there: brief as a silvery kite-string, catching the light and then vanishing. Some happy dream, there and gone. I couldn’t trace it. Yet all the same, I felt very happy. To be awake, here, with these two ponies.

Now here came a big sigh of sunlight overland, and in the slight heat our clothes started sticking to our backs. I could see the far, frowning front of Equestria’s cloud cover ahead, covering what remained of our race. That entire country where growing families of ponies, long gone, had grown. Supporting Perigee and Wile as children, even, that land. Where we all of us stemmed from, even in the confines of the Stable. Our home country, under shadow. I looked at it now as similar to a forest: dry and dead by winter, but still ready, waiting, to take in joyful, buoyant life again. As sure as the tubes of trees, unfreezing, take back in pulsing water.

“My father used to sing that song, I think,” I said. “Little rocking horse. It was from a book, in the Stable.”

“Then it’s pre-war,” said Perigee. “Strange that it survived outside, as well as in your Stable.”

I looked at them, and the sunlight in their manes. These good ponies, alive after all this time. My friends.

“No,” I said. “Not so strange at all, that it’s survived.”