Let the Dreamers Come to Me
Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!
- William Butler Yeats
On a recent and very ordinary Tuesday evening I felt the magic that is fairyland breeze through my heart. I had not been among the fairies for a long, long while. This whimsical, little breeze came in the form of a young girl, not all of twelve, who slowly opened a tiny little purse and let fly one little felt fairy after another and laid them carefully in a row before me as she confessed with a shy smile, “I have grown quite attached to them. Funny how I will miss them when they go”. Her words revealed such an ingenuous charm that I was quite moved by the beauty of it. Captured in her eyes, for the briefest of moments, I witnessed that vulnerable flicker; the telltale sign of an artist. I carefully picked up each fairy and made sure to ask about the particulars. These were her creations. And it was clear that she wanted me to find them as unique and priceless as she did. With furtive eagerness, she waited for me to pronounce them good. I chose a little fairy family and a happy grandmama fairy with a gray yarn bun. Their maker was genuinely pleased with my choices and it was clear she was feeling the flush of accomplishment; the joy of her art being passed on to another. She crafted each fairy a beautiful little box before she placed them into my hands. Art had been entrusted to me. Bits of felt, string, stray silk flowers, and the heart of an innocent little girl. I felt peculiarly honored and humbled by this gift of self; this fragile yet beautiful unfolding of an artist.
In my less hopeful moments, I have wondered what is to be the fate of fairyland in our STEM laden world. Are children still wandering in the beautiful lands of their imagination now as much as we did back then? This little girl seemed to say yes, but I knew her for a year before I realized this was so. It struck me then that we don’t always look at children and see everything all at once; even more so is this the case for artistic children who unfold like proverbial rose buds, one slow, mysterious petal at a time. We need to make a greater effort to carefully open our adult hearts to that mystery underneath the seemingly ordinary. For, we talk about children, we defend their right to be born, there are endless books on how to deal with potty training or the teen years. But we don’t always take the time on a daily basis to simply look at them or hear what they are actually saying. If we did, we would be astounded by how much of Heaven is still left swirling within them. That is what motherhood is for; why fatherhood exists. That we be astounded by our children and learn to protect their Heaven.
True, it can be exasperating for a no-nonsense, list making, time-tabled mother to see her son staring out the window doing nothing but dreaming and forgetting quite where he put his shoes. It can be disconcerting for a dad who is one hundred percent goal oriented to wonder why his twelve year old daughter is up there making little houses filled with tiny people and dreaming her life away in that little world. It is easy to worry about these kind of children when we are in the thick of “real life”. But we must make a solemn pledge not to worry, and to find the patience to carve out and protect the quiet spaces that surround these little dreamers, because they are our future poets, painters, and writers. Art takes time. If we learn to watch carefully as parents, we may be privileged witnesses to the magical process of art unfolding before us – all those things that need to happen before the art is even created. When they are staring out the window they might be trying to eagerly experiment with the perfect words to express the delight they feel in seeing dappled light on the sidewalk, or trying to process in their child’s heart a new and overwhelming feeling; the luxurious sensation of awe. They are beginners at this dreaming, and beginners simply need time to slowly process who they are and what they are to do with the world that astounds them. It is a platitude, but a profoundly true one, that you can’t rush art. Letting them just BE in childhood is your gift to them. We see this in the childhoods of many artists that have dotted history. William Morris was left to tromp the fields of the verdant English countryside with his sister as a child day after summer day. He learned all the flowers intimately, knew the birds, clouds, and slowly over time began to internalize them and the feelings they produced in his soul. All of that seemingly ‘useless’ time spent in his childhood was to later reveal itself in the most exquisite wallpaper, furniture, and tapestries England had ever seen. Emily Dickinson carefully prepared and tended an herbarium as a young girl and read many books about nature in her long, quiet days at home. All this knowledge garnered over girlhood was to reveal itself in the brilliance of her poetry. If she had not wandered and ‘puttered’ in her garden; if she had not reveled late into the night reading the words of the best authors and experimenting with her own words, these poems would never have had their brilliance. Gerard Manley Hopkins could spend an hour or so just looking at raindrops on the blades of grass outside his door in wet knee’d wonder. If he had not, we might not now have the famous and exquisite words: “Glory be to God for dappled things...” Artists need time. This time most importantly begins in childhood. It is the unique gift we parents can give. Our budding artists will come to honor us as their champions in the end, and they will bring something so unique and beautiful to the world that awaits.
Giving them this gift of time ensures us a very unique gift in return. Artists, even budding artists, are a mystery that refuses to be boxed. They disrupt our efficient ways of doing things. Busy parents need everyone to tow the line, to get the dishes done, the beds made, the errands run, the schooling finished by dinner. These are practical realities. If, however, they have been entrusted with a little dreamer, he or she will definitely put a kink in the works of that efficiency. They will always be one step behind. They will be playing inexplicably with their fairy dolls when it is obvious that the car is running and waiting. They will open the dictionary to find out how to spell a word for their book report and can be found an hour later with their nose still buried in the O’s chirping out loud to no one in particular, “this word comes from the ancient French. Imagine that.” Sometimes they will start saying all the words aloud just to hear the glorious sound of them on the air. Then they will say them in different accents. The book report is completely forgotten. Some children will play the same piece of music over and over and sit in the dark listening in wonder as we try not to wonder if they are not altogether fey. They are simply listening to all the separate melodies they hear buried there. They will want you to sit and listen too. Another will climb high into a flowering tree and try to stand at the very end of the branch to be closer to the sky, while you run out to the yard with dishtowel in hand screaming for them to be careful up there. They are not listening. They are in fairyland. One will inexplicably be wearing her pointe shoes to load the dishwasher and we will need to dodge the suddenly inspired pirouettes coming and going past the stove as she hums the Nutcracker ad nauseum. It is not for the faint of heart to be the parent of a dreamer.
We will be tempted in our more frazzled moments to wonder why these children just don’t ‘fit’ into the efficient machine of life; why they are so eccentric and unaware that they are wasting precious time. We feel a sudden impulse to fill their days with practical things like sports, so they can be like everyone else. We find ourselves worrying because we know they must learn to navigate a world that waits for no one. We are gripped at times with the real fear that they will be lost. But God does not see as the world sees. He sends us the lovely irksomeness of Heaven intruding into our human control through these little dreamer children who remind us of what matters; that the world needs to be looked at, marveled at, luxuriated in. That God lifts the veil between earth and Heaven far more than we expect. If we slow down to watch and listen, to carefully look at all the fairies dancing on their desk when we go in to make their bed, listen patiently to words pronounced with wonder from a dictionary, marvel at the lithesome grace of a pointe-shoe’d dish washer, we may suddenly realize how truly beautiful the world is that we have spent so much time trying to hurriedly ‘get through’ and navigate instead of just sitting to marvel at. This is why we have dreamer children so filled with the poetry of His grace. They are the voice of God intruding into our busy days and asking us to see. We are the lucky ones to have been chosen by God to embrace them in their full, eccentric loveliness. It is His solemn request that we take care of them and protect their art. We will come to be acutely aware that it is God’s world that matters, not the world created by the fast paced, efficient humans, and that He who clothed the lilies of the field will not fail to take care of these artists in the future; these whimsical, eccentric, exasperating lovelies whom He knit with such special care in their mothers’ wombs. He only asks us to give them our time and our careful attention. To let them dwell for long swaths of their childhood in the innocent fairylands of their imagination.
As I open these little boxes and lift each little felt fairy out one by one, I rejoice that I have been entrusted with the art of a lovely young girl, whose parents have protected her imagination, an imagination that “rides upon the wind and dances upon the mountains like a flame”. That is no small thing, and I realize anew that all is grace. Even little felt fairies carry the news of His marvelous workings in the world. Praise Him!
