Waiting for Fairies

What are you waiting for and where is it?

I went to visit Iceland, with limited knowledge of what to expect.  When you travel you can research the places you are going -see images and read histories-but the experience will always come with unexpected impressions. 

I had heard that Iceland was a place where you could see the natural world, without the layers of human intervention.  Wild and powerful.  Untamed beauty which is the home of so much folklore and many Islanders believe in the fairy folk- known as the ‘hidden people’.  According to folklore the story actually starts with God and Eve.  Eve hides the less attractive people from God when presenting her children, so he says they shall be hidden from Adam and Eve and humanity would gain no joy or benefit from them.  These troll creatures, with their unkempt hair and scruffy clothes (which is what kept them from being presented to God by Eve), are magical folk, contrasting greatly to the elegant fairies I often picture in association with magical beings. 

In the fairy handbook, created by the editors of Enchanted Living magazine, it is stated that the beauty standards for fairies don’t align with many fashions, and you are not too old, curvy or any kind of diverse, to be admired.  The guidelines for contemporary magical aesthetics, align with the sense of hope which connects magical beliefs throughout the ages, including Shakesperes time and the Victorian era, whether they are literal beliefs or fantasies projecting our dreams into artistic expression.  We can express magic through art, literature, food, decor and probably most importantly, our clothing fashion.  Marking our personality and character through our clothes, follows body language as non-verbal communication.  

I was once told not to wait to be confident. It is not necessarily innate and it isn’t an outcome of a good thing or something to be deserved.  It was a way of communicating and presenting oneself. Yet for the trolls, hidden from us, their magic is written on their faces through the telling of stories, describing what they look like and who they are.  An established aesthetic that is instantly recognised. How different do we dare to be when presenting ourselves outside the stories that are written?  

     

In Iceland, where nature takes precedence, there was much ‘waiting’ for nature.  Because we were not in charge.  It wasn’t directed by human systems.  We waited for a snow storm to subside, sheltered from a wind until the bite wasn’t as strong, waited to see the Northern Lights, stayed back from the shore-in fear of the sneaker waves a.k.a killer waves.  Nature didn’t wait for answers or excuses.  It had priority and we had to know how to keep ourselves safe.  We didn’t earn the right to disrupt nature and often we couldn’t.  It was a reminder of the responses which are in our control and that some things will not be.     

In other parts of the world, like the UK where we are densely inhabited, we have suppressed nature to the point we have to go in search of it, be reminded of it, support it and believe in it.  Our technologies have elevated us so far away from the natural world that it is like the hidden people-a mystery living alongside us.  Our engagement with it is often deliberately sought out and not something embedded in our lives.  Our ‘waiting’ is for technological updates and deliveries which evade us from moving.

We need to consider: how much of technology aims to stop us moving? Something so simple like the remote control for the television, the computer in our pockets which creates opportunities for us to avoid moving, in so many situations.  And now tools to do our thinking for us.  What is our role?  Opportunity is found in making a life easier and the trends in the entertainment and arts industries are about selling experiences.  We want to stop the laborious work and have experiences which bring our body and feelings to life, frivolous dopamine excursions. If we constructed an economy where we could all be people of leisure, where would we find our meaning?  

For those who form our economical structures and have resources to create progression in these technologies, there will be those who cannot keep up.  Piling progress on inequalities exacerbates these in the world.  The city centers are more expensive and many people are being pushed away from them.  The strife for progression shuns the vulnerable and disadvantaged and pulls the rich and powerful in close, building up our cities, further separating us from the natural world.

Our arts, our fashions, our stories, are hope.  They have morals and ideas for which our collaboration to build civilizations was built with.  But we are in a new chapter.  A chapter where the folk morals of generosity, helpfulness, integrity and honesty is not rife in the excessively privileged and the stories we tell, need to act like a spirit level for empathy.  Our fairy selves are to bring joy, but our progress is to move away from fantasy and describe our reality.  To ‘write what you know’.  And everyone needs to include the natural world in their repertoire because we are human beings and we are part of it.  Confidence to explore a world outside our own, is the ultimate empathy practice and curiosity can occur when we are mindful and open up to our surroundings.  We don’t have to wait to discover.