remembering again and again, it is really barely me

Last night just before bed I was searching through a small bowl of bird's egg blue. This bowl holds what I lightly call my fairy soup. It is full of tiny fairies for unexpected visitors, and treasured beings in their becoming, not yet fully fledged. To call it fairy soup is not, you understand, an indication of the edibility of fairies! It is more born of an initial giggle at the mix of colours in the bowl, and then a gentle delight in the metaphor of nourishing warmth and of the delicate mix of ingredients and materialising subtle flavours in soups as in nature. 

Last night I was looking for a particular baby fairy when my fingers came across something which I had quite forgotten. I lifted it out and I saw what I held. Perhaps this being had become since I had placed the rose in the bowl in the summertime, perhaps my eyes have become more sensitised in the intervening time, perhaps I had already almost seen her when I laid her in the bowl, laying the trace for my soul to now thrill in the awe of recognition. 

See her green bonnet asks only for me to contribute the tiniest soft silk face, and perhaps even that will be too much. She will be a Valentitnes gift for one my daughters. Quite probably she will fly, with so many other fairies who have come, from the mobile in my younger daughter's room, because the eldest now has a minamilist white feel to her growing up space. 

But before being given to my girls, she has been of herself, a gift to me. She has spoken to and thereby nourished the part of me that knows that these beings who meander or rush or slip or fly, who breath into cloth through my grateful enchanted hands are really barely my doing - they are the life of the elements forming my eyes, meeting my fingertips, dancing through the imaginal layers. 

When I listen and await in love, they come. When I trust and simply follow, the become into the form that my hands are able to birth.
When they flow through other hands in different ways, it is still they who come to be seen and held and loved, because...

It Felt Love

How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart
And give to this world
All its
Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being,

Otherwise,
We all remain
Too
Frightened.' ~ Hafiz (trans. by Daniel Ladinsky)

So parents, grandparents, family friends, do please let yourselves find moments to create fairies and gnomes and elves and sprites, in your own way for your children who will recognise them. Let your children know you greeting the living beings of rock and flower and sea washed twig with your hands.

Do this for your children, that they will sense how to do it for their children, so that the elemental beings may continue to have access by which to permiate our material and our senses, to remind us again and again to wonder in awe at what life might be in the unfurling petals of a rose.