By Tom Fulton

Jenny was four years old. Jenny was autistic. Her parents were sick with anxiety and fear. Jenny would communicate with no one. She only would sit in a corner of her room, clutching a little blue blanket, rocking. She listened to one song on the record player over and over again. The flurry of strange, babbling doctors that hovered over her wanted to find a key to a door. They sought it with crayons and paper. "Open the door to your private hell, Jenny. Good girl.. draw… draw.." They gave her crayons and paper.

Jenny began drawing, but not merely scribbling like a normal 4 year old. She grasped the crayon with a directness and clarity of vision that was startling. Wild, almost furious, movements whirled from her little body. From the cramped curl of her fingers came the image of horses - galloping, snorting, powerful beasts. Hooves rising high, knees high as the flattened, frightened ears and panicked eyes; hind legs powerful, surging, muscular. The line and arc of the drawing was sweeping. It had a focus and center point. Remarkable, furious, drawings - all horses. Nothing else. They poured out of her by the hundreds! In a flurry of brilliant perspective, giant hooves reached out of the parchment and tried to trample the viewer. Clouds of dust rose behind the flicking tails – the long sinews of beautiful equine necks. They piled high.

Then Jenny would finish for a while, clutch her blanket and rock to the familiar tune of a scratched 45.

Art experts proclaimed the drawings were the work a great talent. Wildly passionate, free of constraint, the charcoal reflection of a galloping soul. When the authorship was revealed, they scoffed - they were - they insisted - the works of a mature genius.

Luckily for Jenny, she began to respond to therapy. One day she looked up and hugged her mommy and smiled at her daddy. Over time, she began to respond to the world, her vision was broadened and the fear that crammed her into the corner and held her prisoner was slowly relieved. Today almost a year and a half later, she romps and plays almost like a normal child. She runs now to her mother’s arms. The old 45 record is in a box behind a pile dolls. And for the first time since she was born, the sound of a little girl’s laughter echoes often throughout the house.

When they hand her a crayon, however, what emerges is a few awkward stick figures standing in a row - a mommy, a daddy, a little girl. A sun that looks like a squashed spider.

Not a horse in sight. She has been cured of her thundering herds.

One or two of the pictures are framed. But not many. They are too painful to contemplate. There, in a whirling line. And there, in a great dusty hoof. But mostly there, in wild insane eye – is madness. "Let me be free!" it wails across the canyons of our minds.

Ultimately our humanity is not judged in the gentle light of normalcy, but by the harsh glare of the human soul and its magnificent obsessions. We are all born potential energy - each of us cracked and dwarfed in unique and terrible ways - each of us with our own fearful autism, curling up in safe corners against life's blast of arbitrary oppression.

Nonetheless, Jenny gives me hope. She even gives me chills. She reaffirms the little twig of faith that says: our potential is pure and beautiful. Somewhere there really are thundering herds! Look! For a moment – there they are! Like wild horses - our nostrils flare, our manes dance like fire! We write, we draw, we act, we dance, we love, we sing! We mustn't let the world, try as it will, douse our cherished flames.