The Peasant Woman Who Felt Strange in the World, a fairy tale for enlightenment

Women cook together in the kitchen, laughing and sharing stories of their wild youth. And yet these women still are wild no matter their children are grown. Given to adventure and wisdom and love, each morning they wake to wonder over the world in which they find themselves. The crone listens to the laughter and stories and remembers one of her own. Come, bring your coffee and sit in a circle around her. Listen to her tiny tale. Open your mind and heart and find what meaning you will. 

 

 

There was a peasant woman who lived as she should, selling eggs from her chickens at market, beating rugs for fine ladies, and suffering the puckered lips of men she did not wish to marry. All was well. And yet, something was all wrong. It always had been.

“No one really knows me,” she told the birds, the flowers, the pigs. “And I don’t know them. I can’t bear small talk! It leaves me empty. I feel so strange in the world, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

One day she did come upon a traveling fortune teller dressed in colorful scarves. The gypsy smiled at her and crooked a finger as she went into her tent. A powerful intuition drew our peasant woman to follow. It was dark and pungent inside. A small oil lamp burned, and incense. “Where do I belong?” our peasant woman asked. “How can I feel normal?”

The fortune teller nodded her head as if she understood the question perfectly. She peered into a common wooden bowl filled with water. “Ah, I see the truth,” she said. “You do not belong in one single place!” 

Our peasant woman sobbed and paid all her purse coins as the fortune teller cackled with glee. Fleeing the tent, our peasant woman became like a gypsy herself, traveling from village to village, working for warm shelter, but often living in the woods where she would eat mushrooms for her dinner and dance about a fire. No longer did she hope to belong anywhere.

From then on, people believed her to have no power of speech, for she never spoke a word, abhorring small talk.  Do not pity her.

In summer she took long walks on hills where grasses did sway, and she swayed as well, holding out her arms and feeling the wind as she imagined the grasses could do. Come autumn, she tended an elderly wife, praying in silence alongside the husband. Leaves fell from the trees and the wife met the ground, too, and the peasant woman moved on. Come winter, she did stitch warm clothing for children and earned coins. These she took to taverns when the heavy snows arrived, and  listened rapt to stories of tricksters and ghosts and faraway lands. Come spring, she was sore glad to wash herself in rivers and sun herself as did the flowers.

But one fateful evening, she happened upon a maiden weeping upon a doorstep.

Our peasant woman understood why the maiden did cry, for she knew what it was to be disappointed in the world. Tears came to her own eyes, and she wandered alone into the forest for many days, surviving on mushrooms. One evening the right sort of mushrooms appeared. 

She was grass, swaying in the wind. She turned red and gold and twirled from the trees and melted into the ground. She was cold because others were cold, laughed because others laughed, cried because others cried, and worked because others worked. Next she became a fish and did swim because others fish swam. Finally she bloomed into a single, blue wildflower.

Our peasant woman did speak words, the first in a year’s time. 

“The fortune teller spoke true. I do not belong in one single place! I am much too big.”

Her laughter was good and true. Hereafter she made small talk and deep talk, and one was not greater than the other. It was all the same, spread evenly upon the earth, herself included. There was no place she did not belong. 

Heaven on earth is like this.

 

Often, we seek a ‘tribe,’ meaning a group of like-minded people who share with us common values, worldviews, and maybe a mission for how to serve the world. It’s satisfying and nourishing to live or work within such a tribe. At the same time, it’s critical to keep in mind that ultimately, there’s not one single group of people that’s like you and another that isn’t. Such a belief creates separation in your mind, where in reality, no separation exists. You breathe air, you have feelings, you struggle, you have DNA, you live beneath a sky, you evolve, and you do not live in isolation, you cannot, because these are experiences shared by all the world. Look closely, and it will be apparent that though you may work and play within a smaller tribe, you belong to no one single tribe, for you are part of all the world. Your belonging is stitched into the very fabric of the world.

Interconnected. At one with. Living and breathing and BEING with.

So you see, if you believe that you have no tribe of which you are a part, and feel lonely or unknown, remember that’s a small thing compared to the Belonging that is naturally yours. It may be that when you realize this, you find yourself more easily able to find those others in the world with whom you’d like to work and play. And yes, that is good.

I wish you a deeper and truer and wilder life today.