The Brothers Grimm knew their stuff. The best fairy tales come out of life. Last week, I told a friend at lunch that I felt as if I had been asleep my whole life, and then Maria and I found one another, and I was awakened, and yes, with a kiss. Yesterday Maria came back from coffee with a friend and she told me she told her friend that she felt as if she had been asleep her whole life, until we met. How wonderful we told this same wonderful tale about each other.
I would have found this story sappy just a few years ago, but not any longer, it is the sad, strange, exhilarating reality of my life. I remember the first time Maria and I went out together, we went to a somewhat ratty restaurant near Glens Falls, N.Y., we had a drink and sat and talked and I remember this sensation of understanding what it meant to be alive, perhaps for the first time in my life. The only other time I felt anything like it was when my daughter Emma emerged into the world and opened her eyes and I was the first thing she saw.
Like the princes and princes asleep under the spells of powerful witches and wizards, I had been sleepwalking through life, my feelings shut off, closed to new experience, lonely and confused, living in a dark, fearful and angry space. I had been living that way for so long I lost touch with the idea that there was any other way to live. I can’t speak for Maria, only for me, I awakened to life, to color, to light, to love most of all. I began to open to new experience like a Sunflower in August, I just blinked and began to see the world. I saw what love could do, began to understand the power of authenticity, the meaning of friendship, the healing power of animals and the natural world.
Our world is obsessed with talk of health and money, of pills, of tests and surgeries, but I learned, entering my sixth decade that there is nothing in the world healthier than love, more productive, more uplifting, more nourishing to the heart and soul, it restores and prolongs life. Whenever I glance at the news from Washington, I see that a wizard has cursed our capital, it is a loveless place, it’s inhabitants under an awful spell, angry, fearful, cruel and unforgiving. When I encounter people like that elsewhere, I want to drop to the ground and give thanks that I did not spend all of my life like that. Perhaps a Princess is on the way to save them, bring them back to life.
As it happened, the Gods had other plans for me. A sweet and loving Princess made her way to my castle, poked through the walls and moats and animals and vines that surrounded it, found my lair high up in the old farmhouse, carried a beautiful basket of flowers, leaned over my bed and kissed me on the lips. It had been so long since I had been kissed on the lips, I could not understand it at first, but then I opened my eyes for the first time in so many years, I saw the light and color bursting through the curtains, knocking them down, and the thorns and vines and moats melted away, dried up and I began to see the world anew, it was so beautiful I had to capture the images of it and began taking photos.
And in this story, with all of its twists and turns, there was another. I got to kiss the Princess back, and saw her eyes flutter and open and saw her awaken to the world too. And then our great adventure began, we took one another in the hand and heart and see out to see and explore this world together, and for the first time. It is a timeless journey, it will never be finished, never end. Long before therapists, the Grimm Brothers understood the idea of the Awakening, the hero journey into life. They saw that nothing is more powerful than love, truly it can really lift the most powerful spells and being one back from the dead. I know.
The best fairy tales are about life, and they are also about happy endings, I always said this about Maria, she is my happy ending.