There is a story that Wise Women Tell of a motherless child who makes her own way in a world that seems to her by turns kind and cruel. On good days she is able to care for her needs in creative resourceful ways. In such times she cobbled together her own red shoes, from rags she’d saved.
I am told *the movie* depicts these as ballet slippers.
I envision them as stitched together felt Mary Janes, something along the lines of what this person makes.
Or perhaps those are just my Original Red Shoes.
On other days she goes for hours and hours trying to gather enough food in the dark, scary forest. One just such a day, she is seen by a fine old lady in a gilded carriage (or 'cage' as a friend aptly, mistakenly, put it). This grande dame determines to give the girl a better life that she might forget her former one. “You are to be my daughter”.
'But she isn’t her daughter', I think to myself. 'She may mother this little girl, but the child has already become streetsmart and accustomed to making her own way, however naively. She has already lived the loss and to be called her parent will take years of living in, not mere hours of mutual acquaintance.' But that is my own digression of the tale.
Returning to our faerie story, the woman takes the girl's former belongings and burns them all. Although now bedecked in all manner of finery, little girl immediately feels the loss of her Dear Old Shoes. The grand lady takes the girl shopping for her baptismal clothes and in the shop the girl spies the most Delicious forbidden pair of red shoes. Unbenkownst to the slightly blind grand dame, and with a wink, the cobbler sells them to the girl. These diabolical red shoes take the girl on a literal whirlwind of a journey, upon which she meets an old red headed veteran soldier, misses the death of her patroness, and is propelled in shame from door to door begging neighbors and strangers for mercy. The red shoes have exhausted her and yet she cannot stop dancing. Eventually she finds the executioner’s cottage and begs him to chop off her shoes, even at the expense of her feet. With most grievous unwillingness he does so and the shoes dance on without their previous owner. She lives out the rest of her days as a cripple, serving others just as the shopkeeper had done before her and never missing those red shoes.
I encountered this tale last week when the Phoenix Friends of Carl G Jung hosted Lynda S. Steele, LCSW who discussed addiction. I so was taken by her lecture I decided to attend the next day’s workshop. Both events were- as another friend put it-magical.
And yet, after recent events I've experienced, I felt the unwelcome, exhausting intensity within myself of too much process. While I’d keenly felt the loss of those original Red Shoes as we processed in group, I wondered why I felt such loss, and ironically found the key in process itself.
Being the chick that had her sh*t together, the smart one, the deep one, the one that thinks to much and talks too much, set me apart from my peers for better or worse. It was convenient for me and for them to think that I was too smart, or too spiritual, too intense or too… whatever… to participate in those activities which I disliked. I protected myself from exposure to drugs, teenage sex, and other potential trouble. More and more, however, I realized this sensibility got in the way of friendship, too.
My need for information comes from the illusion that deep process with another equates a deep relationship. All to often I have found however that the feeling after a previous night of sharing too much is akin to hungover regret.' True relationship comes from a living out in time- this is true whether the friend is a mutual group member, a coworker, a relative- any kind of relationship needs breadth to make it whole. By doing so, one is free from the illusory constraints of being the smart or wise one- or any other role for that matter.
And so I work hard to remind myself - when people change the subject away from ‘deep’ topics - no matter how deep, or intelligent, or wierd I am, at the end of the day it comes back to relationship not only in process, but in letting go, in engaging mundane and fun things. Celebration and letting go, I am reminded, are disciplines, just much as the acquisition of knowledge. And, by engaging more in the latter, I doubt I will find myself in danger anytime soon of becoming any more 'normal'. I think my wierdness is here to stay.
