The Fairy Tale Revealed

"Once Upon A Time ..."  That phrase at the beginning of any story conjures up automatic images of times long gone, of castles and royalty and mythical creatures and hopes of happy endings that almost always come true.  Almost always.  Sometimes, the ogres and evil witches are stronger and more cunning than the heroine, the landscape to be traveled is denser and more treacherous than expected, impossibly high walls have to be scaled, or, and this is the scariest one of all, the heroine falls into hopeless unending self-doubt.

In Disney stories and Grimm's fairy tales, there is always something or someone that pulls the heroine back to her senses.  At the very least, some small sign or miracle that allows her to refocus her energies and pull through to believe in herself and save the day,  no matter how long the battle.  We read these stories as children, watch versions of them on movie screens ... I know that, as a child, I somehow believed deep down that the stories were ultimately true.  That good would always win and that I would be able to overcome any obstacle, win any battle, if I just believed in myself and kept up the effort.  As I began to grow up, that outlook began to change.  Good, it seemed, did not always win, obstacles could loom impossibly large, and that which did not appear evil to begin with sure did seem to turn out to be!

The level of hopeless unending self-doubt that can permeate one's existence is no less suffocating than a pit of quicksand as large as the earth itself.  Signs and miracles and knights in shining armor seem to be nowhere to be found.  It's then, at the bottom of that all encompassing quicksand, that the true signs, and miracles, and origins of positive energy are revealed .... as it turns out, those are only found in ourselves.  The terms "sign", "miracle", and "knight in shining armor" in those stories, are simply metaphors for the inner strength and perseverance that we must find inside if we want to truly overcome the obstacles, the evil, the twists, turns, and conundrums that life throws at us.  As for myself, I figure I'm about head and shoulders out of the pit, trying to determine where the strength and positivity comes from for the rest of my self-extraction.  Learning every minute ..... wish me luck!  I'll keep you posted.

~ The Girl In The Little Black Dress

Learning to Dance in the Rain

There's a saying that I've been thinking of lately: "Life isn't just about learning to weather the storms.  It's about learning to dance in the rain."  The more I think about that adage, the more it seems to make sense. The general advice given by well-meaning friends and family to someone going through rough times is to "stay strong", or "chin up", or "nothing lasts forever".  They want us to be the happy, positive person that they know we can be, as opposed to the sad, depressed, upset, wallowing mess that we become under intense circumstancial duress.

There's a scene in the movie Forrest Gump where the character Lieutenant Dan is in the crow's nest of the shrimp boat during a hurricane.  He's screaming at the storm, laughing at the storm, defying the intensity of the storm that would cause most of us to run for cover or cower in fear.  Now that may not be "dancing in the rain" ala Gene Kelly, but in my book it's similar.  Dancing seems to be a subjective verb that's open to interpretation.

Sometimes the "storms" in life aren't so much huge hurricanes that arrive, end, and leave us to make sense of the levels of perceived disaster left in their wake.  Sometimes the "storms" are seemingly constant squalls that feel like they're beginning to let up & give us some peace, but then another one hits, and another, and another, so that it doesn't ever seem that we're given a chance to truly breathe and move beyond the pain of the ones before.  To truly begin to enjoy that sunshine and calm that happens after an intense storm.  In the movie, Forrest and Lieutenant Dan are catapulted into a successful business thanks to that hurricane and their tenacity in not going back to port to hide from it.  It's not so simple to find the proverbial rainbow after the weathering of, or "dancing" in the rain of all of life's storms.  When it seems that everytime you find the strength to begin to get back up and put a smile on your face to handle life, another one hits to knock you back to your knees .... well, those rainbows don't appear through the clouds in a very apparent fashion. 

The thing about it is, all of those moments of circumstancial duress are not always random storms that appear and wreak havoc without our input.  Ultimately, our own decisions bring us to find almost every so-called storm.  Some of them are simply life passage storms, like the death of someone we chose to love, the breakup of a relationship we chose to be in, the leaving home of a child we chose to have.  Those seem intensely sad while going through, but the rainbows afterwards are easy to discern when we eventually look for them.  Some of them are more definitively our own doing in bringing the onset of, like financial issues or legal trouble.  Some of them, while ultimately tracing back to decisions we've made, aren't as easy to admit they're at least partially of our own making, like recovering from various diseases or addictions or injuries ..... so the "dancing" could really be confronting and embracing the pain in whatever form.  Not just cowering from it or attempting to ignore it until it's buried so deep it feels like it's gone, but truly facing it head on and embracing its existence so that it can ultimately be understood and moved beyond.  Dancing in the rain, embracing the rain, understanding the rain, accepting the rain ...... moving beyond the rain.  Synonyms?  Maybe if we didn't pigeonhole the verb dancing, the rainbows, or at least a bit of sunshine, would be easier to find in life.

~ The Girl In The Little Black Dress

Landscape Qualities

Hello Everyone!  Apologies for the long absence .... I've been working on getting my head screwed on straight, so to speak.  Still working through it, so I thought I'd begin back with a journal writing from the past few months .... more to follow!

The Hole
Arizona has fascinating landscape qualities.  Where, in North Carolina, there are mountains with trees and forests and fauna of a myriad of colors surrounded by shades of green of every hue, in Arizona there's dark red deserts peppered with random scraggly but strangely beautiful shubbery and cacti and large rock formations in shades of adobe and gray that don't seem to be joined together in any formal pattern, but simply appear throughout the aforementioned landscape as far as the eye can see.  We went to "climb" one of those rock formations called "The Hole".
The Hole is about as wide as a pair of houses, and as tall as a castle, with scattered, cavelike indentations and one single oblong opening at the top that tunnels from front to back.  As the whole thing is located on a bit of a hill, one can see all the way from Tempe to Phoenix when standing on top of it.  What struck me most was not the view, though it was quite beautiful.  The trail itself is what got me pondering ....
Everyone in our group began the journey to the top via a basic trail through the sea of red sandy dirt and pebbles circling the base, then up a rock stairway which was obviously man-made, but designed to at least pretend to blend into its surroundings.  Once at the top, one could go straight across through "the hole" to view the sights, or to the far left to climb around, or continue trail options to the right, which eventually would lead back around the face and down again to the starting point.  At first we all went straight through to stand in "the hole" on the front face of the rock.  To ooh and ahh and marvel and take photographs with about 20 other random strangers from all walks of life that happened to be there that day too.  Everyone split off in their chosen direction after that.  Some simply followed the wide path back down and around the formation.  A few circled it back up, as before, then followed it down with mild variations again.  One scaled the face to the very top and found climbing footholds to descend to the trail below.  I chose to take every alternative the trail down offered.  This took me back up and over the side of the formation, through a lovely yet partially hidden tunnel in the rock, scale back up a quarter of the face, then journey back down to the path's intended end via gulley-like openings.  Eventually, we all made it back down to the beginning, no matter which path we chose.  None of them were particularly gruelling or difficult, not compared to other trails I've hiked in North Carolina anyway, but the point is that we all made it back to our appointed location in our own way.
I guess life is a little bit like that rock trail.  We all begin life in essentially the same way, on the same initial path.  We all take those societally-created stairs to the initial stopping point and take a moment, no matter how brief, to survey our surroundings.  Then we decide, we choose, we join forces with others, we follow, or we simply wander aimlessly until it's time to make our way back to the starting point.  Some go the wide trail direct route, some go back the route they know from the way they came.  Some choose the treacherous climb up and over, some take that wide trail but circle it back again to reexperience.  Myself, I chose to wander through every available alternative trail of ups and downs, rocks and tunnels, scaggly bushes, odd trail formations that may not have actually been trails at all, mildly sloped climbs and dried out gulleys, to eventually reach that same spot with everyone else, but on my own in a roundabout fashion.  What do these path choices say about how we make decisions?  Life choices?  Confront issues?  Find happiness or solace?  Could my choice of solitary wandering trails on that rock be indicative of my life and how I've lived it to this point?  The more random and slightly difficult path did introduce me to images of natural beauty that I could have missed had I chosen the wide direct trails, affirmation of a level of strength and balance via climbing up and down unmarked areas, and most importantly, the fact that no matter what crazy random direction I advertently or inadvertently took, there is always some way for one to find the way back down to where you're supposed to be.  Just goes to show, there's no one right way, no one path for everyone.

~ The Girl In The Little Black Dress