One Love

Childrens' books are some of my favourite literature :)  Beautiful full page illustrations of power and depth, endless invention and possibility, the re-writing of any aspect of self or psyche or quality, happening again and again and again.  I have a large collection, scattered among the shelves of friends worldwide.  A few titles which simply must be recommended include The Rainbow Bridge and Weird Parents by Audrey Wood, Iduna and the Magic Apples by Marianna Mayer, Knots on a Counting Rope by Bill Martin Jr., Let's Call Him.... by Tim Myers, and Bajo le Luna de Limon by Edith Hope Fine.  The one I am writing about today, however, is The Rough Faced Girl by Rafe Martin and David Shannon.  This story stems from a long standing oral tradition among the Mi'kmaw peoples residing along the east coast of present day Canada.  


A coming of age story resting in the Cinderella archetype, The Rough Faced Girl is about a beautiful older daughter who is mistreated in the context of her father's second marriage.  The fathers two younger daughters are given many trinkets and beads, new moccasins and the finest dresses.  The Rough Faced Girl, however, tends to the fire and the cooking and the ashes.  Her inner dignity builds strength in her throughout the book, and in the end her fire-born ability to see and know the larger world of spirit becomes both her joy and her nourishment.  It is a lovely story for any young woman to read.


Often as I walk with nature, noticing the breeze around me, the birds in flight, traces of others footsteps, blossoms which have have gone and returned again - I think of the rough faced girl - how she saw the face of her beloved in the rainbow, in the stars, in the midst of the lake and the seeds and the sigh of the grasses.  I know her feeling, the love connection to all that is, and it makes me very happy. 

In the picture above, the rough faced girl is in a canoe with her beloved.  The other night I too had a dream about a river.  I was fully in the river, it had many bends, beautiful clear water, long river grasses, fish, and I was swimming.  Along the banks there were many scenes: some farm scenes, some stalls offering beautiful textures and colors, some mills with fantastic methods of running themselves.  People were in all of the scenes, lovely people.  And I would swim through them, talking to the people, sunning my face, feeling the water cool and warm and flowing around my body, looking eye to eye with the fish, laughing and free and checking it all out with perfect timeless joy.  I loved them all!  In the end, though, it was a bend full of gold on the water, light-filling-out-all-the-spaces, in which I... climbed ashore.  And laying in the empty open golden fields of tall billowy grasses ~sigh~ I rested.  There, with my beloved.


Huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu