Beauties in the Briar Patch,
I hope you don’t mind me calling you that.
Let’s bloom. I’m stalking the stories with you. In the greening, rising, growing, emerging sense of the word. Let’s stalk our stories and green them. So we can Bloom them. There are so many hidden secrets in the briar patch.
My friend Kitty Love in Asheville (ritual tattoo artist) put these images on me before I fully understood why. If ever I forget, if I fall asleep, when I am caught in the tangle, I can look at my arms and remember. I too bloom. Am blooming. Am remembering. And fruiting/seeding. I too am a cycle of story.
In the briar patch, there is a tangle and a twist, lots of thorns. It’ gnarly. It grows for a hundred years. A hundred years in a fairytale is not just one hundred years. It could be a lifetime. Or an epoch. Perhaps it’s a new incarnation. Or the ending of one story and the complete rewriting of a new story. It isn’t a new chapter. It’s a new book. It’s a wheel, a cycle coming to completion. For a new bud to awaken. To remember. What it forgot. Perhaps it is eros pregnant with itself. The rose that blooms despite and because of the thorns inside the gnarl, the twist and the tangle. The feral grit that makes the pearl.
It is the wild remembering dreaming itself awake. You, me, and everyone else is inside this crazy wild briar patch. Is beauty sleeping? Is she awakening? What is the awakening beauty in you? What is the awakening of the kingdom in your inner kingdom? What is the King’s son truly seeking, when the briar patch opens just for him? What in you is longing, seeking for renewal?
Image: Zuzana Uhlikova
I will tell you why I like fairytales. I had a little hardcover book of fairytales by Arthur Rackham when I was seven. It had illustrations. In it, were stories. I taught myself to read when I was too young to tie my shoes. I read fairy stories. I was drawn in to drawings, doorways, spells, the repetition of things, secrets hidden.
Like the forbidden room inside Bluebeard’s story. I wanted to go into the secret room. I wanted to know what was inside of it. I didn’t care if it was gruesome. It fascinated me. What must it be like to discover a hidden secret, a hidden horror? What an awakening? I knew there was something deeper to it but I didn’t know what. I loved this story. I feared this story. I dreamed of this story. I skipped over pages of cats in boots for this story. It was something wild and strange. It tarnished my inner tiny seeking keys with blood. The blood of symbolic remembering. It pricked my curiosity. Thorns on the briar patch. It seeded something into me. That took years to mature and awaken.
Arthur Rackham Illustration for Bluebeard
It’s truly not a story for a 7 year old. Seven year old consciousness is still linked to dream consciousness. The way fairytale moves through our evolving, changing consciousness is a Mystery Way. But yes…it seeded something strange, foreign, forbidden into me. Into my roots. Into my soul. A deep, dark and wonderful desire to know. To penetrate mystery. To have a key to each room. Even the forbidden one. All of it. I wanted to know. I am a seeker in a field of delight inside of fairytales.
The Fairytale Path is a layered path. It is a path of patience. I imagine a snail walking with me on the path. It can also be quick as a lick lightning bolt. However, as Baba Yaga says, to know too much too soon is to grow too old too quickly. Some symbols, some keys, some archetypes are not yet meant to be decoded. In the right timing. Snail time. If not this lifetime, then the next. Blood and Soul and Seeds and time are funny like that.
.Katerina Plotnikova
Sleep is the greatest tool for uncovering secrets in a fairytale. The sleep inside of the kingdom isn’t a stagnant thing. Just because it appears frozen on the outside doesn’t mean that something deeply meaningful and active isn’t occurring on the inside.
Whether the sleep the body needs every night to restore and replenish, or the sleep between lifetimes, in between lives, or the sleep of the seed in the dark earth before it roots and sprouts, or the sleep of the kingdom, as its consciousness changes from one state of being to another. Sleep may not be active on the outside, but what of the soul, and its journey when we close our eyes? How do the mysteries breathe life into our dreams, into our sleep, so that we can awaken, in stages, or immediately, into certain knowings and revelations that we have been seeking?
Or golly, do we just give it all over to AI? AI can interpret Briar Rose in compelling ways, but it can not do the work of the fairytale inside of our souls the way that time and sleep can.
Fairytale is a doorway into Soul. A doorway into Transformation. The Soul’s Hidden Call to Adventure.
Thank goodness for girls with red capes. Passion and willpower can move you beyond the conditioning of the grandmother. But also, Red. It’s in the marrow. Ancient remembering. From the grandmothers before their conditioning. Before stories were written. Before stories dismembered our truer way of seeing/knowing/being. When stories warmed the hearth inside with their wild and well worn words.
I say you can wake up inside of a fairytale. I say, a fairytale can Transform you.
Magic. Words. Powerful creatures.
Some say the esoteric codes of gnostic christianity are embedded inside fairytales. What is gnostic christianity really? Western initiatory mystery about life/death/life. About the journey of the soul. Waking. Sleeping. Forgetting. Remembering. Soul. In its eternal expression, changing bodies. Leaving the world. Returning to the cosmos. Returning to the world. Changing its consciousness through us. As our bodies change, as our emotions changes, as we learn how to ground into the ground of our being, and awaken. Inside of equanimity. Inside of truth. Inside of becoming. Rooting. Sprouting. Stalking. Budding. Blooming. Fruiting. Dying. Seeding. Sleeping. As we Rise. Fall. Rise through time. Through aeons.
image: unknown
Some say fairytales they are fragments of myths. Others say fragments of dreams. Or fragments of earth magic, earth wisdom. Some pin them on victorian moral codes. Folk soul stories. Animistic ways of being. Some say they originated orally during the time of Atlantis. When Consciousness was profoundly different than it is today. There are so many mysteries inside them. Shapeshifting and talking animals. Tiny people and little grey men. Strange hags with bobbing heads. Talking horse heads. Children losing their heads. Children being resurrected in the form of golden birds. Crab kings. Nixies at the well. Surviving a time in the Belly of the Wolf. Witches who try to eat children and grown men. Ball gowns made of gold hidden inside of tiny walnuts. Crafty tailors who outwit Giants. Giants with one eye.
Every single thing in the book of fairy has a deeper, hidden meaning. Every color. Every number. Every timeline. Every single thing. And much of it matters not to you in a run through…but there will always be certain things that catch you…somewhere in the briar patch of fairytales, something will lodge itself into you. Something to land in more deeply. To simmer with. To find.
Fairytale is a resurrection song. In the way of flowers.
Every fairytale is a secret. A key.
Somewhere, a bloom….the fairytale, waking us to something hidden on the inside. The fairytale, restoring us. After a one hundred year sleep. Somewhere there is a prince…the part of you, active, destined, poised to penetrate mystery. To awaken another part of you…soul, timeless, before this body, and the one before —how far back does soul grow, does soul growl, does soul simmer, does soul stir…. Soul is multifaceted. Multi layered. Multi dimensional. Multi-mysterious. Ever bringing new possibilities to the surface. New adventures. Doorways. Awakenings.
Psssst……Fairytales awaken things.
Pass it on.
Story with me!
I’m offering another Story Session through Substack (for paid subscribers) Live on Zoom. Friday - April 25 - 10:30 am Mountain Time -Please come if you are curious about The Way of Fairytales -The Way of Seeing through Fairytales. Let’s be Seers together. And Write our way into mysteries. It will be a Blooming Story.
Upgrade your Membership to become a Paid Member -receive a live zoom Story seasoning once a month. Writing prompts. Discounts on Readings, Workshops and more! Community & Belonging with other seekers, artists, myth and meaning makers.
This poem below, kind of says it all but in a different way.
9 Minutes In
I find myself staring
at the kingdom. The hedge. The place where
my grandfather was told by his grandfather
that the kingdom sleeps.
And it is quiet. And it is deep silence.
It is a church. A sanctuary.
A blessing. The hedges
are singing my name.
In the thorns —skeletons-
of those who could not
Wait. Did not listen. Could not truly see.
I could swear that the
trees are bowing.
Making an arch-leading
me through. And blooms.
White Pink.Five pointed Stars. Roses. Wild Roses.
Wild Roses. They scent the air with mystery perfume.
I am and am not dreaming.
I am the only thing
Waking. I am awake
for this moment.
This moment is my
Destiny.
To wake the Rose of the Soul.
To wake the Beauty sleeping
at the Heart of the
forest.
The kind of waking
that heralds the birth
of the new order.
That echoes
into the tribe
into the kingdom
that wakes all the
sleeping parts
that knits and spins
and threads wakeful ness
back into nature
that embraces soul
that is pure enough
To penetrate the inner
layers. To penetrate
the inner layers
to penetrate
the inner layers
I am here now
and I hear
the waterfall
and the children laughing
in the apple tree
and the fire and the rose
are again
one.
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