A winter’s snow has fallen all the day long. Sit by the window, pour the steaming tea, and imagine walks through woods long, long ago. The crone is ready to tell a tiny tale, so open your mind and heart and find what meaning you will. 

A young widow wheeled her perfume bottles in a cart to the goodly summer fair. There a minstrel sang of broken ships and maidens held hands as they whirled. The widow caught the eye of a handsome merchant selling doves from a cage, and smiled.

“Ugly witch!” he said, and spat upon her dress.

Hurrying past the merchant, she found a patch of muddy garden at the edge of the fair. She pulled back the cloth over her cart and arranged her perfume bottles for view. “For luck! For love!” she sang out. “For good humour!”

Villagers pretended they didn’t see her. Late in the day, a gaggle of maidens shouted that her perfumes did stink. A peasant boy threw a cabbage at her head. The young widow knew her perfumes contained good things. “Please,” she begged, holding out the bottles she so loved. At last she ran to hide in the woods.

It was the same at each goodly fair. The widow arranged her beloved perfumes in her cart and received cabbages to the head.

One clear autumn day she overturned her cart in a fit. “They don’t want what I have to give,” she lamented. Many a night she imagined the queen learning of her beloved perfumes and what might happen next. A Decree Against Cabbage! Come winter the young widow swore never again to think of her perfumes. She took up rug-braiding, and come spring she died inside.

To her surprise, she felt fresh and new. Laughter poured from her mouth at the notion that cabbage mattered at all.

The young widow knew her perfumes contained good things. At the next goodly fair and each one thereafter, the widow stood at her perfume cart and offered what she had to give. How could she not?

She loved. She loved. She loved.   

Heaven on earth is like this.  

Do you feel like who you are or what you have to give isn’t wanted by the world?

Love overwhelms all. Even feelings of rejection, or the experience of rejection, or confusion, or monumental sadness.

Love. Is. Absolute.

Whatever you love, include it in your life. You may need to pay the rent or weed the yard, and do that. But never, ever leave out what makes you fresh and new. Even if it makes no sense to others around you (they are not responsible for your soul), or it’s impractical (why would that matter?), or your small self tries to talk you out of it (let that part of you die and find laughter at what the small self took so seriously).

The Real You loves, and loves, and loves. The Real You IS heaven on earth. It has been all along. That’s what brings the laughter.