31/08/2024
It’s ok to take your time and work through your fears gradually and with support. As the fabulous writer, Tania Kindersley, says “there is no shame in saying ‘not today’”
I love The Red Mare stories. They are both wonderfully reassuring and inspirational at the same time 🧡🧡🧡
And out my Tern Bird and I go, into the woods, through the oak grove, stepping surely over all the fallen trees. She picks her way with confidence and courage and I spy the Scariest of the Scary Bridges and I think, ‘What the hell! Let's do it!'
So I offer it to her and she looks totally appalled and makes rolling, snorting noises through her elegant nostrils and I bounce gently up and down on the bridge and say, ‘See? See? It can deal with a whole human!’ and she looks at me as if I’m batsh*t nuts in the head.
We walk away from the Scariest of the Scary Bridges, in total agreement and without a moment of regret. We’ll do it another day.
And that’s it. That’s the story.
I could just leave it there and people might shake their heads and squint their eyes and say, ‘That’s all she wrote?’ But stories are never just stories. They are symbols and guideposts and signs and suggestions. They are brimming with universal, connecting truths, so that strange humans, thousands of miles away, will nod and smile and say, ‘Yes, that’s me.’
What’s the lesson and the glimmer and the guidepost of this story? Well, you are brilliant, so you’ve already worked out that THE SCARY BRIDGE IS NOT JUST A BRIDGE. Oh, no.
The scariest of the bridges was, once, where trolls lived, like in the Billy Goats Gruff. If I could not get across the bridge, for any reason, they would storm out of their dank hiding place and say something like, ‘You are useless. And everybody knows it.’
Now the sweet trolls are slumbering. They are eating honey. They saw Tern and me and they said, ‘Hey there!’ in dreamy, sleepy voices. (Those trolls, of course, were not intrinsically horrid. They had a difficult upbringing and they were operating off fear, which always makes people cross.) They said, smiling, ‘We’ll see you later.’
Because, thanks to the Red Mare Self-Improvement Plan, I no longer have to define myself by a sodding bridge.
Oh, my goodness, the liberation of that sentence.
Not crossing the bridge is NOT failure. We’re just not ready for it yet.
I’ve got some valuable information, which is that Tern and I need to do some more connection and trust work. We’re pretty merry together and we can get some delightful stuff done, but the sleepy trolls can see that we’re not quite there yet.
This does not mean that I am a pointless human being.
It means that we’re not quite there yet.
And the beautiful thing is that you, my dear reader, might not have a novice thoroughbred mare to walk through a Scottish wood, or literal tree trunks to step over, or actual wooden bridges to navigate, but I’m going to bet that somewhere, deep in the forest of your mind, there is the Scariest the Scary Bridges. We all have one. Some of us have several. And the stories we tell about those bridges make all the difference.
