So many little girls find alignment with one specific Disney princess. Mine was Sleeping Beauty. I always thought it was because of her blonde hair and brown eyes. She looks like me. But, I know better now.
At birth, you are born with all the genetic coding and cellular potential to be a full, thriving human. Your parents provid the biological scaffolding, but life and time cause you to expand your identity or lose parts of it. I believe that identity is whole upon birth, but we lose our way. Luckily, however, some of the interests we had as children provide prophetic breadcrumbs to the way home. And one example of that, for me, was my quiet fascination with Aurora.
As an adult, I came across the original account of the sleeping princess. Found in The Tale of Tales, written by Giambattista Basile in 1634, “Sun, Moon, and Talia” is the story of a married king who happens upon an abandoned palace and finds a beautiful woman in a deep sleep. Basile writes, “Crying aloud, [the king] beheld her charms and felt his blood course hotly through his veins. He lifted her in his arms, and carried her to a bed, where he gathered the first fruits of love.” Unconscious, her form is violated, and the king returns to his life and forgets his deed and the woman.
And yet, the proof of his violation remains. She becomes pregnant and births twins: the sun and the moon.
Still asleep, fairies come to assist the woman and her babies in their first days of life. They attempt to place the newborns on the woman’s breasts so that they can nurse, but instead, they latch to the woman’s fingers. The twins suck out the cursed splinter that caused the woman to fall into a deep sleep. And she awakens.
From the darkest moment, she is given the gift of a lifetime: the cure to her ailment. The result of the most atrocious of violations against a female becomes the very antidote to the curse placed upon her.
The sun and the moon in the tale represent polarity: masculinity and femininity, the spiritual and the physical, life and death, shadow and light. It is the balance of opposites that becomes the cure for the “unconsciousness,” the reconciliation of seemingly opposing pieces of one soul. This kind of balance has proven impossible for so many of us, because we are unable to co-exist with our own contradictions, face the dark parts within, and nurture what we perceive to be unacceptable about us.
For many years of my life, I was lost in the “wrong medicine,” unconscious to the parts of me that had lost communication with each other due to heartache. An unseen ghost scattered the pieces of me, but a simple pain woke me up. A simple pain sent me on a journey. And a simple pain brought me back to life.
Every human will, one day, receive the call.
You, my dearest reader, may have already been beckoned.
It's the moment where everything is lost. The rug is pulled out from under you. The tower falls. The light goes off inside and you can no longer see.
For me, it happened abruptly, and additional smaller calls have occurred in their various seasons since. But, all in a moment, I was offered an opportunity at reconciliation with myself, and I gave an absolute "yes" to the journey. It was an initiation into a new life, into my true calling where my identity was called forward and destiny was instilled. In the beginning, I did not know what was to come. I certainly did not have a blueprint or a map. But everyday, I was given just enough light to get to the next step. And I never expected that the robustly contented woman I see in the mirror today, with her simple life and her full heart, would be the result of a million tears and a million masks falling to the floor.
And it was the nature of the heartache that produces the freedom I always sought.
And during my own initiation into self, the the primary sensation was an unrelenting hunger to see the face of my Creator and to fall in love with my own heart.
And so, I did.
And so, shall you.
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