Turning a Dragon into a Princess
Note: The M.U.P Files are a new community corner of On the Horizon Line. Look for stories from our friends and family related to expanding their hometown horizons. Let us know if you want to contribute!
Why “The M.U.P Files”? Because these dispatches from the desks of our loved ones will be “magical unicorn ponies” that fly across the sea to greet us on distant shores. Their writing will be our bridge to shore while we sail the world.
* * *
by Margi
I woke up this morning feeling inspired. I am usually good for a pithy quote and a fart joke or two, but this morning when my eyes opened I was thinking about the Mark Twain quote that Bri posted yesterday, about the adventures that each of us take in our lives. The moments where we just say yes to some newness and an unknown outcome.
I feel the change happening in all of us, lately. Acutely. Like Bri and Rob’s sailing adventure is an allegory for what we all live day to day. Packing and unpacking, emotional packing and unpacking; I hear their story in myself, I feel their tears and their joy. It is more fundamental than a change in location, the different cabinet from which one grabs a cup for coffee or tea in the morning, the different route to work. I feel shy in its presence because this road is not a road down which I have walked before. Change is beautiful and it is brave. It can be scary. So when my alarm went off at 7:30 this morning I turned to Rilke’s “Dragon Princess”. We are all solitary.
For him who becomes solitary all distances, all measures change; of these changes many take place suddenly, and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way we can; everything, even the unheard of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.
So, I choose to go forward. To be an explorer in my own mind. To raise the sails in my heart so that they may catch the wind; so that when they do I will wake up on some remote beach I never thought possible; so that when the seas are dark and stormy I can feel them, and when the storm clouds part the sun on my face reminds me that I am human. So that when we will come together again as friends, with deeper love and maybe slightly better music (we all hope that by the time Penny grows up that at least a few songs will be tight), I will be more me than the person you hug and say goodbye to in a couple of weeks.
We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principal which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are the beginning if all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
