Croning My Way Through Life
Faeries are seen through the heart, not through the eyes. Remember that faeries inhabit the interior of the earth and the interior of all things, so look, in the first place, in the interior of yourself.
~ Brian Froud
Robin Wight (-1960) is an English artist and sculptor from Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.
Wight is known for creating stainless steel wire sculptures which depict fairies.
To construct his ethereal sculptures, Wight first builds a sturdy skeleton out of thick steel wire.
He then uses different gauges of wire to create muscles, limbs, and skin, wrapping them around the skeleton until they form a dense, lifelike form.
Inside each figure lies a heart of stone, sometimes engraved with messages to make each piece unique and personalized.
Each wire is carefully shaped and arranged to convey movement, emotion, and intricate details.
The transparency of the medium adds a layer of complexity, allowing viewers to appreciate the interplay of light and shadow within the sculptures.
In doing this, Wight hopes to “deliver a balance of the traditional childlike whimsicality with the aesthetic of a female form wrapped around an action type persona.”
More of Robin Wight’s whimsical sculptures can be found at https://fantasywire.co.uk/
At the edge of our world, at the edge of the otherworld, the beautiful and mysterious faeries stand, watching and waiting to greet us, inviting us to journey with them as our guides while we walk the infinite paths of the Fae.
~Brian Fround
Fairies are invisible and inaudible like angels but their magic sparkles in nature.
~ Lynn Holland
Softly in the gloaming
Flitting through the vale,
Fairy folk are roaming
Over hill and dale.
Pixies in the hollow,
Elves upon the height,
Let us follow, follow
Through the paling light.
Follow, all unbidden,
To the grassy glade
Wrapped around and hidden
In the forest shade.
Hark the elfin tinkle
Of their little lutes!
Mark the golden twinkle
Of their fairy flutes!
~ Evelyn Stein
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
Did you ever see a fairy in a rose-leaf coat and cap
Swinging in a cobweb hammock as he napped his noonday nap?
Did you ever see one waken very thirsty and drink up
All the honey-dew that glimmered in a golden buttercup?
Did you ever see one fly away on rainbow-twinkling wings?
If you did not, why, how comes it that you never see such things?
~ Evaleen Stein
Grandfather says that sometimes,
When stars are twinkling and
A new moon shines, there come times
When folks see fairy-land!
So when there’s next a new moon,
I mean to watch all night!
Grandfather says a blue moon
Is best for fairy light,
And in a peach-bloom, maybe,
If I look I shall see
A little fairy baby
No bigger than a bee!
~ Evelyn Stein
Pretty, pretty fairy ballet,
dancing shoes and fairy hair.
Sparkle, sparkle twirly dresses,
fairy dust everywhere.
Heels together, feet are pointing,
hands look pretty on our hips.
Bending knees we’re fairy dancing,
happy smiles on fairy lips.
~ Fairy Ballet, The Fairies
Athwart the star-lit midnight sky
Luminous fleecy clouds drift by,
As the mysterious, pallid moon
Sinks in the waveless still lagoon.
Now that the queen of night is dead,
The starry commonwealth o’erhead
(Softer and fairer than gaudy day)
Sheds lustrous light from the Milky Way;
While the Dog-star gleams, and the Sisters Seven,
Float tremulously in the misty heaven.
Faintly, afar the horse-bells ring;
Myriads of wakened crickets sing;
And the spirit voices of the night
Sing snatches of fairy music bright,
Old-world melodies – lang syne sung –
Recalling days when the heart was young,
Whose wonderful cadences fall and rise,
As the wind in the casuarina sighs;
And the world seems ‘gulfed, this summer night,
In a flood of delicious, dreamy light.
~Harry Breaker Morant
Children born of fairy stock
Never need for shirt or frock,
Never want for food or fire,
Always get their heart’s desire:
Jingle pockets full of gold,
Marry when they’re seven years old.
Every fairy child may keep
Two strong ponies and ten sheep;
All have houses, each his own,
Built of brick or granite stone;
They live on cherries, they run wild–
I’d love to be a Fairy’s child.
~ Robert Graves
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
Amy Brown is one of my all-time favorite artists. I’ve loved her work since I role-played a faerie woman 20 years ago.
Brown has always been interested in fairies, but never considered painting them as a career option until one day her boss asked her to paint something to fill an empty frame that had been sitting around the art gallery where she worked.
Brown asked what she should paint and her boss said, “I don’t know, paint a fairy or something.” So she did.
It was like the faeries were pushing her to paint their portraits.
After selling prints and originals at street fairs and in local shops for a few years, Brown opened a website and began selling her work online worldwide.
The business has since take on a life of its own.
Using colors, designs, and background, Brown has truly captured the world and the imagination of the faerie world. Each faerie glows with a personality all their own. 
“My passion to paint is like a living creature inside me,” Brown said.
“All the ideas in my head churn and beg to get out. I’m driven to get them onto paper and out of my head as soon as possible.” 
“Once I’ve conjured one creature, another is waiting impatiently for its turn.”
More of Amy Brown‘s magical art can be found at https://amybrownart.com/.
Then clear on a flute of purest gold A sweet little fairy played. And wonderful fairy tales she told and marvelous music made.
~Ida Rentoul Outhwaite
I found some “ambient” music on YouTube a few weeks ago — background music, really. (You should really check it out … instrumental music for all tastes). Great for crafting or reading. I came across this one long track, Relaxing Fairy Music – Dark Fae/Soothing, Sleep, Peaceful. It’s kind of slow and mysterious, nebulous and a touch enchanting.
It makes me want to role play a dark faerie again.
As I talked about in a blog from 2012, What Is Role Playing and Can I Do It By Myself,
Through the initial excitement of wandering through Internet worlds, I stumbled upon chat rooms where people typed to each other as if they were face-to-face. Interesting. I didn’t have to fess up that I was a 40-ish year old housewife/innkeeper … all I needed to do was make up a name and race and I belonged. Can you imagine the doors that opened for a writing goddess like me? Role-playing was like a video game with instant feedback. I could write my own dialogue, fight with swordsmen, disappear or have flames shoot from my fingertips, all with a sentence or two.
For those of us on every level of creativity (and I know that’s almost all of you!) there is something exciting of creating something with its own charms and purpose.
That’s the biggest reward of writing. But I digress.
I was a dark faerie named Dream Regret — half human, half fae. I was beautiful and clever and sexy. I could flirt as well as discuss strategy, chat with unicorns and trolls, or learn to hold a sword or javelin. I could get into philosophical discussions about the cosmos or the maturation of the Fae race or how to metamorphose into a dragon for a few hours.
It was all nonsense and it was all escapism.
The really good players fed you dialogue as well as you could dish it out. Enemies fought with swords and laser beams. They lied, cheated, and proclaimed their love.
I miss being that clever. That alluring. That magical.
There’s something about reality that sometimes takes the shine off of your crystal dome. Nothing could be as intricate as what is in your head. Nothing as full of unlimited possibilities.
Nothing can be as complicated — or as simple.
The older I get, the more I crave simplicity. Simplicity in real life, complexity in creativity. I love the challenge of a hard-to-design pattern, a harmonious color scheme, or a biting slice of dialogue while in the Creative mode. But I also like to be able to drop the pattern and the color scheme and dialogue when I’m done for the day.
I don’t like to deal with the complexities reality often brings along with it. Those challenges don’t fade with the sunset.
The days of creative chat rooms are over. I’ve put away my wings and my long dark blue hair and headed down a different street, searching for creative people and minds and hobbies.
But I’ll always have a bit of Dream Regret in me.
I’ll never let her fire go out.
Last night I stood on my back deck in the dark of night and watched the fireflies dance in the woods.
Of course, you and I know they weren’t fireflies.
They were, of course, faeries.
This is the time of year they cross the bridge of time and float into our world to gather pollen from the night flowers and water from dawn’s dew drops. They fly around between the summer and autumnal equinox with their little buckets, gathering samples of the soil from deep in the woods and remnants of crops from the fields to take back home.
They stay just out of sight so humans can’t see them. Yes, they could take a chance on those who believe, but faeries don’t really take chances. Why bother with beings who just might swat them before thinking?
I love watching their random movements, their signals to each other as they play through twilight into the darkest of night. I can’t quite decipher their language, but sometimes it’s as if I hear their whispers and laughter in the distance; as if I can sense their pure joy of life.
Oh, I’ve heard all sorts of things about faeries/fairies/fae. They love sparkly things, wildflowers and plants, and music. They love honey cake, milk, nectar, and sweet butter. Fairies have an aversion to iron, and are quick to do you a favor, yet even quicker to demand payment for it.
I’ve never heard of anyone EVER seeing a faerie. Ever. They are myth, they are made up, they are born from our imagination and desire to create something fresh, free, and eternal.
But those naysayers have never looked off my deck into the warmth of a summer evening that slowly, ever so slowly, turns into a velvet black backdrop. They have never felt the electricity in the air of a knowledge and way of life that has been since the beginning of time and will continue long after we are dust.
They will never see, for they will never believe.
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
Few humans see fairies or hear their music, but many find fairy rings of dark grass, scattered with toadstools, left by their dancing feet.
― Fantasy Encyclopedia
Brian Froud (born 1947) is an English fantasy illustrator.
Froud graduated with Honors from Maidstone College of Art in 1971 with a degree in Graphic Design.
Soon afterwards, he began working in London on various projects ranging from book jackets, magazine covers to advertising as well as illustrating several children books.
Froud soon realized that fairy tales and legends were something which would never get old.
In collaboration with his friend and fellow artist Alan Lee, Froud created the 1978 book Faeries, an illustrated compendium of faerie folklore.
Upon discovering Froud’s lavish and mysterious drawings in his books, and recognizing his complex and singular artistic vision of the faerie world, Jim Henson chose him to help him create a unique otherworld feature-film which became known as The Dark Crystal. 
Soon Froud developed his own magical distinctive style and experimented with three dimensional designs complete with gnomes, goblins, warlocks and dragons.
Through Froud’s unique style utilizing acrylics, colored pencil, pastels and ink, he has created some of the most well known fantasy images of the Twenty-first Century.
More of Brian Froud‘s amazing workmanship can be found at https://www.ferniebrae.com/brian-froud.
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
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
I’ve always believed in experiencing everything in life. When you walk out with blinders on, you cut yourself off from the angels and the fairies.
~ Alyssa Milano
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
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
… 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
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.
~
Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace. ~Eugene O’Neill
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
Last night I looked off my back deck into the darkness, across the empty yard and to the woods beyond, and saw faeries busy doing whatever faeries do, their little lanterns flashing on and off as they fluttered through the darkness.
I’m so glad I still believe in magic.
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
Animals are such agreeable friends ― they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms. ~ George Eliot
a Spectre in the Eastern Veil
Are they real? Does it matter?
The world of the Fae is all around us. Just take a look…
Humoring the Goddess 