Winters are for Faerie Tales
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, a powerful Faerie Queen looked out over her magical domain and sighed the deepest, most mournful sigh.
Her speckled owl daemon sat perched next to her. He could feel what was weighing on her heart. Magic is fading from the world, she said.
It’s true, observed the bird.
And it was true. People were turning away from their deep inner wells of power and wisdom, the place from where magic was born. They were turning away from their inner spirals of light transmitters, their DNA, that exhaled out into galaxies and seashells and seasons and tides and the very breathing of the Earth, and inhaled back again into the spirals of light hidden deep within the dark, rich soil of their bodies. They were turning away from this rhythmic continuum that they were a part of, from which all things arose and returned to.
Instead, they turned towards external, artificial authorities that propagated themselves rapidly the more energy and attention and obedience they received, spreading like an invasive species, choking out the Earth’s breath. These authorities had hypnotized the people into believing that matter was not alive and imbued with the spark of soul, as the very expression of the play of Consciousness itself. They had hypnotized the people into having profound distrust for their own deep and mysterious inner wells of power and wisdom, deferring instead to the shackles of homogenizing dogma and ideology. Through fear, they had trained the people to attack, ridicule and silence anyone who asserted that humans and all organic, sentient beings were light transmitters made manifest in form, the living union of matter + spirit, with the innate ability to heal and transform themselves.
And this too is part of the spiral, the owl gently reminded the Queen. She nodded, sadly.
Suddenly, the Queen did remember: The spiral of course! Shadows contain the essence of their own re-membering.
Even while these forces of ignorance and distortion and their institutions of false power were spreading, they were, through the natural law of thesis + antithesis, creating spaces and pockets of magical Self-reclamation. Many of these spaces were where the timeless stories, the treasure maps that told of the light hidden deep within us were being re-membered and re-integrated.
These stories were codices, replete with Nature’s symbols and spells. They would illuminate the way, as long as they were not forgotten. As long as they were not distorted or completely pushed away as childish nonsense in a world obsessed with the self-righteous suffering of seriousness and struggle that was degrading and dulling the vibrancy of the Earth’s soul.
It was in these secret spaces of myth, story and the folk tales of the fae where the ones brave and alive enough to come together and re-member were gathering for the sacred alchemy of conspiring ~ of breathing together, ~ to create new and outlandishly marvelous worlds.
Worlds that would no longer be visible for those without the eyes to see.
The owl and the Faerie Queen smiled as one. And as the people slept, they set about planting sparks of remembering those timeless treasure-map-tales that would lead them Home to themselves.
This season in Root + Rise, our winter excursion is the alchemical tale of Sleeping Beauty.
Registration closes at midnight PST on December 31st.