I am constantly shocked by the self imposed noose of reality worn by adults, turning them into the walking dead.
C. S. Lewis wrote “someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” Children live in joy, encouraged by those who nurture them to see beauty and believe in magic. The world is endless, full of infinite potential.
In our fairy tales, we learn of dragons, but more importantly that they can be defeated.
In youth, we make the impossible probable, and the improbable possible. Each verse of a poem, every musical note, all shades of purple stir a sense of wonder planted deep within our souls.
Prior to the fatigue of age, before the jaded shades worn by adults and settling into the roles we play, we see a field of dreams within a grain of corn, and a flock of birds in the shadows cast on a wall by hands, we hold infinity at the tip of our tongue, and shrug off eternity vibrating inside a minute.
Why do we allow that sense of wonder evaporate with time?
Without awe, love is impossible, boringly mechanical; awe is the essential gate through which we meet God.
Those arrested by incapacitating love, deprived of breath, eyes wide and mouth motionless, paralyzed, have danced the tango between love and awe.
Yeats wrote “the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” We can’t allow time to dull our senses, committing spiritual dementia.
Rumi believed that our essence is yearning, longing to discard the temporary cage of the body to reunite with the Beloved. Kafka, on the other hand, believed “I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
For most, aging is an imprisonment. Reason becomes a bird-less cage. Science becomes obstruction to adventure. Fear of being illogical turns into a shovel that buries the cocoon despite the butterfly. Rather than creating a profound source of spirituality, they diminish the light.
And what we forget is that each of us has a story to tell- our own fairy tale.
Science and reason, art and music, religion and spirituality, all should enhance our story. In the words of Maya Angelou, written so delicately in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Perhaps all our fears are dragons we must slay, to return to the beauty of our cores, so that the bird of our yesterdays desperately seeking love, can feel free again, and sing a song of praise.
In every atom I crush under my bare feet, I feel Your Love supporting my fall.
