What a wonder each day is! Today turned the key of pure delight. It started with a walk in the woods, a visit to the gnome trail, and Sophia joyfully splashing in the little creek both coming and going and segued into planting a field of flowers where lawn once grew.

The gnome trail is a local delight. Friends of the trail have placed tiny gnomes, intricate fairies, little houses so real I’m sure the spirit folk are inside watching my every move, along a stretch of trail situated well up the bank from the main path. Without a plan, a collaboration of individual offerings took shape, giving birth to a precious tiny folk village.

Walking the path, I am bewitched by the gifts of love, ah there’s another … oh look, tucked back in there … I have to slow down. I almost missed that one.

Tiny eye candies and imagination stations dot the off-the-beaten-track trail, beckoning me, and other children, young and old, to escape reality and immerse ourselves in the ancient scents, the acknowledgement of untapped possibilities, in an enchanting alternative world of wonder.

It’s easy to get caught up in the world as most see it and miss the beauty that is always here, here amidst the pain and suffering. The hate has always been here. So has the cruelty. It’s just more visible now. I could let it bury me, bury the kindness, the compassion, allow it to drive the light into the dark, but that’s not what seems to be happening.

I am surprised and enchanted by the direction life is taking me, spellbound by the magical unfolding of infinite aliveness. Rather than anger, I find appreciation. Beliefs blinded me, beliefs that kept me from clearly seeing the growing pain, the burgeoning distrust, the toxic anger. That blindfold, painfully ripped from my eyes, left me more capable of feeling, more real, more authentically here, more able to love it all.

Had the dissolution of our seemingly safe world (safe at least for some of us) not occurred, the illusion would have remained unchallenged. I would have continued to live in my fairytale world, bundled up in ideas that were nothing more than life spun from the propaganda machine that is predictably revolving like the earth around the sun.

Life is a propaganda machine, self-created, collectively fabricated and I no longer find myself attracted to the spin, regardless of whose spin it is, no matter whether it seems good or awful, heavenly or hellish. It’s propaganda, biased, misleading and it’s only real if I buy into it, if I walk the trail and find myself pulled inside one of the little houses.

So, I walk the trail and smile at the fascinating stories, the devilish detours, the bright and shiny pennies on the ground. I just don’t pick them up anymore, or when I do, I know it is what I am doing so it doesn’t hold the charge it used to.  

I am love. So are you. It’s what’s here when I slip from the influence of all the storied tales, when I am simply here without stories of right and wrong, good and evil. Stories remain. That’s what life is, although I am finding rather than be at the effect of them, I can rewrite the stories any way I choose. To a gal whose entire spiritual path was surrender, that’s a new perk.

Today I am rewriting life, at least my version of it. In my story I am conscious of story-ness and my eyes are open to seeing the beauty in all stories. Some are more painful and yet, the pain is what showed me the fallacy of a few remaining beliefs, big beliefs, big unseen beliefs, so I am grateful.

We live in an enchanted storybook, unaware that we are creating the story as we go. We get drawn into the witch’s cavern and scream and try to run, not realizing she’s not what we think. She’s an exquisite character with gifts to give if we will only open ourselves to receive.


Amaya Gayle is the author of 6 books, the latest Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY

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