“Careful the tale you tell, that is the spell.” ~ Stephen Sondheim
I recently got to see the play, Into the Woods, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
To say this play was merely good would be an understatement! The acting was tremendous, the singing was splendid, and the set was creative and beautiful! But what shook me to my core was the story, brilliantly told; we make wishes, and sometimes they come true. And then what?
It is wonderful when wishes come true, because wishes make our life better and brighter. But the power of a wish is temporary, and then our life goes on; good times and bad times will continue to be part of our everyday experiences. One day we’ll be a princess with shoes of gold, and then the next, we may be squashed by a giant!
Something will happen, and it will break us apart; it’s inevitable. But what heals us, and maybe even makes us stronger, is our ability to tell a brighter story. We get to decide what’s right. We have the choice to let go of the story of “why did this have to happen,” and instead, embrace a tale that empowers us, and reminds us that even when the light is hard to find, we can still hold on to it.
I once heard that if you want a happily ever after, you have to know where to stop the story, because there’s really never a happily ever after, or a guarantee, that things will be good for the rest of our life. Instead, things go well, and then things fall apart. And then, they just go well again. And then, they fall apart again.
Every day we have the opportunity to cast a spell that will bring us our happily ever after, and the spell is the tale we tell.
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