myth for periwinkle

The fairies didn’t used to bother with us. They went in their own way in their own world. They lived in their own time, far from our marshy-made, our stone-made, our very soil-bound bodies to comprehend. At that time we were much more like soil. What I mean is that we didn’t know anything about ourselves. We were just walking around the world like video game characters who has no controller. We did not even respond when we accidentally walked into lakes or slipped on banana peels or kept trying to walk into trees or even walked right off cliffs. I don’t know why we were useful other that forage for lions and pumas who didn’t feel like hunting. We were such an easy target.

It was really amazing that any of us survived at all. Though we still had children and everything - somehow.

Obviously, the fairies didn’t think much of us. They tended to the flowers and the fish and all the insects and amphibians, because they are all so very complex. We never were, you see. No, they didn’t create us. I don’t know who created us, but they obviously were completely distracted when they did. So here we were.

But there was one child. One little child, a toddler that one fairy saw and adored. I don’t know what was different about this child. Maybe it was the way her eyes gazed at a bumble bee. Maybe it was her hands as she ate her food. Maybe it was the way she danced or laughed. But the fairy began to visit the child each day and teach the child about the plants and how to listen to birdsong - these are the first things to notice in the world, always.

When it was time for the child to grow up, the fairy put a flower in each of her eyes. They were the blue of day with the purple of fresh night. They were the red of the cardinal. With this color embedded in their eyes they could see. They could see the in between place - they could remember all that they had learned in those precious first years of life. And the child gave the flower to their child. And slowly we all began to perceive the world and in our actions bloomed empathy, and from empathy we reached grace.