Croning My Way Through Life
If we opened our minds to enjoyment, we might find tranquil pleasures spread about us on every side. We might live with the angels that visit us on every sunbeam and sit with the fairies who wait on every flower.
~Samuel Smiles
I love fairy tales because of their haunting beauty and magical strangeness. They are set in worlds where anything can happen. Frogs can be kings, a thicket of brambles can hide a castle where a royal court has lain asleep for a hundred years, a boy can outwit a giant, and a girl can break a curse with nothing but her courage and steadfastness.
~ Kate Forsyth
Over hill, over dale,
Through bush, through briar,
Over park, over pale,
Through blood, through fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moone’s sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.
The cowslips tall her pensioners be:
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I’ll be gone:
Our queen and all her elves come here anon.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare
The moonlight fades from flower and rose
And the stars dim one by one;
The tale is told, the song is sung,
And the Fairy feast is done.
The night-wind rocks the sleeping flowers,
And sings to them, soft and low.
The early birds erelong will wake:
‘T is time for the Elves to go.
O’er the sleeping earth we silently pass,
Unseen by mortal eye,
And send sweet dreams, as we lightly float
Through the quiet moonlit sky
For the stars’ soft eyes alone may see,
And the flowers alone may know,
The feasts we hold, the tales we tell;
So’t is time for the Elves to go.
From bird, and blossom, and bee,
We learn the lessons they teach;
And seek, by kindly deeds, to win
A loving friend in each.
And though unseen on earth we dwell,
Sweet voices whisper low,
And gentle hearts most joyously greet
The Elves where’er they go.
When next we meet in the Fairy dell,
May the silver moon’s soft light
Shine then on faces gay as now,
And Elfin hearts as light.
Now spread each wing, for the eastern sky
With sunlight soon shall glow.
The morning star shall light us home:
Farewell! for the Elves must go.
Louisa May Alcott
https://purplerays.wordpress.com/2021/06/18/fridayfantasy-if-i-were-a-fairy/
If I Were A Fairy
I’d love to sit on a clover-top
And sway,
And swing and shake, till the dew would drop
In spray;
To croon a song for the bumble-bee
To leave his golden honey with me,
And sway and swing, till the wind would stop
To play.
I’d weave a hammock of spider-thread
Loose-hung,
Where grasses nodded above my head
And swung.
And all day long, while the hammock swayed
I’d twine and tangle the sun and shade,
Till the crickets’ song, “It is time for bed!”
Was sung.
Then wrapped in a wee gold sunset cloud
I’d lie,
While night winds sang to the stars that crowd
The sky.
And all night long, I would swing and sleep
While fireflies lighted their lamps to peep—
“Oh, hush!” they’d whisper, if frogs sang loud—
“Oh hush-a-by!”
.
by Charles Buxton Going
Art by Asako Eguchi
The forest has always been a place, in fairy tales and in Shakespeare, where you go and discover who you are. You get stripped of everything you thought you were, some type of ordeal takes place, and you come out stronger.
~David Farr
I’m an observer of life. I like to watch people, and I like to watch cactus. I like to talk to mountains and communicate with my friends in the other spheres and dimensions.
~ Frederick Lenz
Science seeks to explain everything–but maybe we don’t want everything explained. We don’t want all the magic to go out of life. We want to remain connected to the secret parts of our inner beings, to the ancient mysteries, and to the most distant outposts of the universe. We want to believe. And as long as we do, the fairies will remain.
~ Skye Alexander
Once upon a time, I thought faeries lived only in books, old folktales, and the past. That was before they burst upon my life as vibrant, luminous beings, permeating my art and my everyday existence, causing glorious havoc.
~ Brian Froud
The cloudy weather melts at length into beauty, and the brightest smiles of the heart are born of it’s tears.
~Hosea Ballou
People are like stained glass windows, they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
Martin Luther
The measuring and mixing always smoothed out her thinking processes — nothing was as calming as creaming butter — and when the kitchen was warm from the oven overheating and the smell of baking chocolate, she took final stock of where she’d been and where she was going. Everything was fine.
― Maybe This Time
Blind folk see the fairies.
Oh, better far than we,
Who miss the shining of their wings
Because our eyes are filled with things
We do not wish to see…
Deaf folk hear the fairies
However soft their song;
‘Tis we who lose the honey sound
Amid the clamour all around
That beats the whole day long…
~Rose Fyleman, “White Magic,” 1918
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything. ~ Plato
The Indian Seer lost God in Nature; the Christian mystic, on the other hand, finds God in Nature. The Hindu mystic believes that God and Nature are one and the same; the Christian mystic knows that there must be a Creator to account for the universe. ~ Sadhu Sundar Singh
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ~ Mark Twain
When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection. – Agnes Martin
If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees. ~Khalil Gibran
Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit. ~Anton Chekhov
I have noticed that the number of followers for my blog has been slowly increasing lately, and for that I am soooo grateful. It means so much to me that you are either enjoying my BoHo Chic Old Lady offerings, my newly discovered Faerie Paths, or my love of discovery of unique art.
And I’ve been thinking. I would bet that more than a few of you are artistically inclined. The spectrum of creativity is far and wide. And I’d love to know about it. About YOU.
I’ve gone on about others’ creativity for years. I have made friends with poets, painters, fabric artists, and potters. I’ve shared their art and websites to encourage my readers to explore further the gifts we all are given.
If you are developing an artistic talent, why not let me know? You don’t have to be first in your field to talk about your creative direction — just someone who loves what they do.
Send me an email at writing.unicorn@gmail.com and tell me about your art. Do you have a website? Do you have pictures of your work? Are you trying to learn a particular skill? Have questions? You can also answer this post and I can go through it and put something together.
True artists get excited about other artists. Help promote each other. Encourage each other.
Let me share a little bit about you!
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. ― Friedrich Nietzsche
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace. ~ Milan Kundera
Laura Jade
Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.
~ Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. ―
Love, be
mystical
as the flickering
blue flame
of night
as the fully-awoken
moon
beneath cobwebs
of passing clouds
amidst chanting
high-tides
fuzzy,
as my blanket
big enough
to illuminate a hundred
thousand billion galaxies
and just small enough to fit
into my embrace.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
―
Make-believe colors the past with innocent distortion, and it swirls ahead of us in a thousand ways – in science, in politics, in every bold intention.
~ Shirley Temple
I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God’s business.
~
It is the possibility that keeps me going, and though you may call me a dreamer or a fool or any other thing, I believe that anything is possible.
―
When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world, I thank God I am alive.
Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. ~H. P. Lovecraft
Every present moment will offer itself as a window onto eternity, a doorway to the infinite.
~Deepak Chopra
Imagine living a life where every day are your Saturdays and Sundays. Make every day your weekend. Make every day a play-day. – James A. Murphy
Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.
― On the Road
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. – Oscar Wilde
Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.
~ Mary Oliver
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
~ William Blake
I love the silent hour of night,
For blissful dreams may then arise,
Revealing to my charmed sight
What may not bless my waking eyes.
― Best Poems of the Brontë Sisters
Frost grows on the window glass,
forming whorl patterns of lovely translucent geometry.
Breathe on the glass, and you give frost more ammunition.
Now it can build castles and cities
and whole ice continents with your breath’s vapor.
In a few blinks you can almost see the winter fairies moving in . . .
But first, you hear the crackle of their wings.
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Science seeks to explain everything — but maybe we don’t want everything explained. We don’t want all the magic to go out of life. We want to remain connected to the secret parts of our inner beings, to the ancient mysteries, and to the most distant outposts of the universe. We want to believe. And as long as we do, the fairies will remain.
~ Skye Alexander
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. ~Henry David Thoreau
The Land of Fairy, also called Elfland, has characteristics of the land of the dead. Time is altered so that a day in human life might stretch into years in fairyland. There is no day or night but a perpetual twilight.
Rosemary Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy
I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew:
Of wind I sang, a wind there came and in the branches blew.
Beyond the Sun, beyond the Moon, the foam was on the Sea,
And by the strand of Ilmarin there grew a Golden Tree …
― The Lord of the Rings
… every child can remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies…
~ Robert Louis Stevenson
Sometimes when you lose your way in the fog, you end up in a beautiful place. Don’t be afraid of getting lost.
When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.
~
We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
… as we travel again between life and death,
Waking and dream, blinking, while layers within layers,
None better, none worse, unravel and knit up before us …
―
Some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense. ~ Louise Erdrich
There are thousands of directions you can go every day —
Why settle for just one? ~Dream Regret
When I sound the fairy call,
Gather here in silent meeting,
Chin to knee on the orchard wall,
Cooled with dew and cherries eating.
Merry, merry, Take a cherry
Mine are sounder, Mine are rounder
Mine are sweeter, For the eater
When the dews fall. And you’ll be fairies all.
~Robert Graves, “Cherry-Time,” Fairies and Fusiliers, 1918
People who have had fairy encounters often speak of the opalescent, light-filled quality of fairies. Their luminescent aspect gives rise to the name “the Shining Ones’. ~Sirona Knight
The fairies went from the world, dear,
Because men’s hearts grew cold:
And only the eyes of children see
What is hidden from the old…
~Kathleen Foyle
Buttercups in the sunshine look like little cups of gold.
Perhaps the Faeries come to drink the raindrops that they hold.
~Elizabeth T. Dillingham, A Faery Song
Believe something and the Universe is on its way to being changed. Because you’ve changed, by believing. Once you’ve changed, other things start to follow. Isn’t that the way it works?
― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard
Animals are such agreeable friends ― they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms. ~ George Eliot
a Spectre in the Eastern Veil
If we opened our minds to enjoyment, we might find tranquil pleasures spread about us on every side. We might live with the angels that visit us on every sunbeam and sit with the fairies who wait on every flower.
~Samuel Smiles
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
~ W.B. Yeats
Humoring the Goddess 