It’s really and truly Spring here in the North!
The temperature has vacillated: warm then cold to the point of snow (from which I looked the other way). The trees were in suspended animation for longer than I can remember in my thirteen years up here: buds just starting to open, put on pause. It makes me think of Snow White in her glass coffin: beautiful and timeless and not living or dead, really.
I wonder what she dreamed then, what the trees felt as they held that pose. Though I’m against non-consenual fairy tale kissing of damsels of any kind, the story is the psyche: the prince and the sleeper are both you. What part of you has been asleep, caught with the words in her throat, unable to swallow something? And what part of you is noble and good and valorous; which you in the greater You sees beauty, innocence, goodness, stuckness and is moved to action? To serve, awake, help?
That’s the sun and the trees.
That’s the ravens flying past my window, building nests and finding mates.
That’s me walking through town looking for beautiful things to pick up and touch. Or writing a letter while lying on the rocks at the water’s edge. Or riding a new bike down a smooth road at dusk when the lake is pink and platinum blue.
We’re always waking ourselves and each other up. Because we’re always making, giving, taking poison apples? Yes, but I don’t think it’s as dire as it sounds.
You includes the maiden, the prince, the helpers… and the witch.
And what if the witch isn’t the villain we need her to be in the literal, Disneyfied story?
There’s a beautiful poem by Karin Boye that starts, Of course it hurts when buds burst, otherwise why would Spring hesitate?
Who knows what journeys Snow White went on while in that deathly sleep– what Underworld she visited within herself? Who knows how keeping watch over her glass casket transformed the dwarves? Who knows what the prince needed to save with something as gentle as a kiss?
The dwarves didn’t go to work in the mines. The prince didn’t slay a dragon. And Snow White got some fucking sleep.
The timing always turns out to be just right. For fairy tale characters. For trees. For you and you and You.
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