the vanished fairy
Dear clever Child,
What a perfect match, your seventh tooth in your seventh year! And your smile changes yet again.
You are a different Child from the one I visited in early December, aren't you? You have undergone a significant change on the inside, a significant maturation. And now I ask myself some very pressing questions: what is to become of me? what becomes of the imagination? what becomes of magic and the sense of expansiveness and possibility?
Oh, Child, only you can answer these questions of mine in your heart.
Do I get sent off to that sad waiting room of indifference where older children discharge their once-beloved creatures of enchantment, perhaps until a younger one summons me again? Am I, to you, a code word, now? Am I a symbol of disillusion and barrenness?
You will have to decide what to do about me, the idea of me. You can choose to carry my magic and whimsy and creativity with you forever, or you can turn to sand and stone and say that reality has nothing of these elements. I think that your mother carries me around in the same way she carries her former child selves who no longer are but who still resound. I think that to people like her, reality is not dead.
A very vibrant reality rests on people like her (people like you, I should like to say!) to give my magic and whimsy and creativity hands and feet and a breath of life.
So now you have grown and are learning to use that efficacious and wondrous machine of the brain. Use it! Piece the world together and understand that if you know one thing deeply, you also know what lies beyond it, because the entire world (physical and conceptual) is connected. Use that good, sound logic! Use it also to stay safe. Use that good sound logic to whiff what smells like caca. There is a lot of caca in the world, it's not all roses...
...but never, my child, never, confound the work of the brain with the work of the heart. There is no need to turn away from the heart and its immense intelligence. There is no need to harden into the sand and stone of cynicism. Reality is not dead. It's just that most of it is invisible. Most of it is tucked away in the hearts that will carry its secret load of magic. You can have a well-grounded brain and a plume-light heart that lifts and floats and carries the world within itself. You can have them both my child. Whoever tells you otherwise (..sniff..) must smell like caca. You deserve them both and must work for both. Keep learning, practicing, discerning... and realize that you'll never quite know (this realization keeps the heart pure and enchanted).
The moment you know something fully it is flat-dead, and so is your curiosity (the zombie of curiosity being cynicism). There is nowhere else to travel inside something fully known... but I bring good tidings! Knowledge is infinite. And thus, the world is and will always be alive because it will never be fully grasped.
Some of this might be abstruse for you, today. I am sorry, but letters outlive the moment (one of the thousand reasons I like to write to you) and this belongs in the hands of every Child to come.
Future Child, clever, sophisticated Child: who I am, this tooth fairiness that I am, no matter the externals, will never perish.
I love you very, very much and look forward to your next tooth.
your personal
Tooth Fairy
