A very magical year, and being old enough (again) for fairy tales
Dear friends,
We’re a people who like to draw tidy circles around seasons and years. Tie them up with a bow, and call them “done” or “good” or “finished”. I like this too. I like a clean line, an obvious goal, a tidy recount of the thing I just did.
2019 was exactly none of those things, being equal measures of glorious, difficult and at times devastating. Yet when I recall the moments of this past year, the word that floats into my mind every time is magic. Partly because there was an undeniable golden thread that wove itself through my days, and partly magic because at times it was hard to see - requiring me to learn a different kind of looking.
The year began for me last Christmas with the C.S. Lewis quote “Courage, dear heart” adorning my wall and my heart through a series of serendipitous events, and was followed a couple of days later with an invitation. In later months I’ve navigated through growth in my business and work, surgery for my child, flying myself to the other side of the world, and borrowed courage from friends in my neighbourhood and across the globe.
Suffice to say — every time I look back on 2019, I will see that golden thread — and my recovered childlike heart has it on good advice that this strand is threading its way into 2020 already.
The golden, magical thread has of course been present through all my years. For too long though, I’d buried it under the burdens of life, unable to see its glimmer, forgetting what magical opportunities could — in the land of possibility — always be laying before me.
After a season of reconnection with my self, my creator, new friends, and my childlike hope — I’m thankful for all the ways golden magic has touched me in this season.
Here’s to courage and childlikeness.
Here’s to having eyes to see.
Here’s to noticing—
Emma
“My Dear Lucy,
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” — C.S. Lewis
A Prayer for a Childlike Heart
adapted from Macrina Wiederkehr's Season of Your Heart, and reprinted in the Literary London journal.
May we not be too sophisticated to wonder, to take off our shoes, and to be touched with the magic wand of littleness.
May we see within our childlike selves a simplicity and ordinariness that makes being an adult easier to accept and miracles easier to see.
May the child in us stay alive so that we can grow in holiness. Amen.