The Picture

THE PICTURE

I am not from here. I am from a world so different from this. It was a world of love and of happiness and of peace. Where laughter and music and dancing merges as we celebrate the dawning of new stars. Where time and space is but a constant loop in the continuing cycle of the Universe. Where we are all at one with all beings that walk our world and flew are skies. At one with the whole cosmic connectedness unfolding before us.

I am from a world called the Fairy Ring and I am a Fairy of Light. We would fly our sky as we bring the light from the stars to our world. And every time a new star is born, we would celebrate. The Festival of Light bathes the whole ring with glowing spectrum of colors as we sing songs of infinite love, as we dance to the beat of the whole cosmic.

In one of our many travels amongst the stars, I found a treasure. It was a picture. A picture of a family from a young planet called Earth. There was something about the picture that moves me. Perhaps because we don’t have what you can call a family in Fairy Ring. Yes, there was oneness and infinite love. But there was something about the tenderness in the mother’s smile and the gleam of pride in the father’s eyes and the wonder in the child’s face that makes me yearn how it is to belong to one. To a family.

It was during the Festival of Lights when I decided to do the journey. As the drum beats and songs fill the air I shed my wings and went into the picture.

And finally I was part of the picture I have long treasured. I am now Jukka, male, 25 years old, eldest son of Jack and Jane Jalopanien, brother to Melissa. I have lost my wings and became part of humanities race with time.

Oh how different everything was compared to the picture. The minute I blended in, I realized it. Mother’s smile that I thought was of tenderness was grim bitterness of dreams she gave up to have a family. The gleam in Fathers eyes was not of pride but of yearning and lust for another woman, a younger woman than mothers. And the wonderment in the child's eyes were not wonderment at all but fear - fear of the next fight that would ensue, fear of abandonment, fear of not being able to belong anywhere else, fear of what is out there.

The minute I realized this I wanted to come back to the Fairy Ring. But I have now lost my wings and can no longer fly back. Or maybe I can regrow my wings if I choose to but I chooses tp stay. To share the light within me. The light powered by the whole cosmic connectedness. And so I stayed. To shed light to my family. To shed light to this world – to Mother Earth – that has long been enveloped in the darkness of duality.

For it does not matter anymore where I am, what I am. Where we are, what we are. For we are one. Fairies, Humans, Stars, Light, - we are all the same. We are the child of the Universe. And the Universe is unfolding itself as it should.