When I was a child, I loved reading myths and fairy tales. I read through them all: Greek, Roman, Chinese, Arabic, Native American, Norse; and the fairy tales – Hans Christian Anderson, Grimm’s, and folk tales from many cultures. They captured a world that I felt to be real in some way and I held deeply to their lessons and example.
But one thing always frustrated me. They all ended with the idea “and they all lived happily ever after." Wait! I wanted to know more about “happily ever after”: What was it like? How did this mysterious world unfold for my beloved characters? How could I fill out my pictures of this magical place and where did it exist? Was it always somewhere else, or could it appear in my life?
Although these questions faded to the background in the busyness of growing older, they have never really disappeared. Every once upon a time, in a reflective moment, they re-emerge. That is when I check in with my life events and experiences, I reflect on their overall tone of satisfaction and consider, have I found any clues to happily ever after?
Now much life has been lived and I have become more familiar with happily ever after. What have I found?
First, I would say that happily ever after rests in the experience of sovereignty, of self. Life has brought me experiences and choices and I learned through those relationships and choices what is true for me, where I stand. Standing in self is where happily ever after begins.
Secondly, happily ever after is always reflected in relationship, whether that relationship is with myself, with another, or with the wider world. It is not a physical place with one single set of coordinates; it emerges through a dynamic engagement between people, the natural world, and the fluid circumstances in life.
Thirdly, it is fostered by a stance – an attitude. I have come to find that, just as in the stories, it is a result of welcoming and engaging our life with openness, humility and honor for the beauty and possibility within each person and situation. Through my attention I empower the best in my world and draw out the happiness that is within it. Within the spaciousness of my love and appreciation happily ever after emerges through a constantly renewing dynamic that accepts and stands present to self and to other with honor and respect. Standing clearly and joyfully present to my life is what creates a happily ever after world.
But while right choices and self-reflection, open and respectful appreciation, tolerance and love are important and valuable skills and attitudes, these lessons did not draw out the full magic of those happily ever after endings in me. That has only emerged out of searching for the sacredness within life. It is my effort to engage both my incarnation and the Sacred that has provided the foundation for opening a meaningful, integrated happily ever after life.
Incarnational Spirituality is the worldview and practice that has brought sacredness and incarnate life together for me. It explores the possibility that the earth itself is not only a place that receives light but like a sun is also a source of it; and each individual, similarly is a source of creative action in their life. We are not only receivers of blessing but we can ourselves generate it. The earth experience is ultimately one that expands the sacred, gifted mystery of life, the ultimate Happily Ever After.
From this foundational principle of the generative nature of all life, Incarnational Spirituality goes on to posit that our earth is a co-creative partner to us adding its own unique intelligence and gifts. It encourages a dynamic relationship between self and world, creative whole to creative whole. It is this view of world and self that has created a transformational shift in me and has brought the idea of happily ever after out of childhood dreams and into an applied reality.
Happily ever after can be very different for different people. For one it might include a bustling city life, for another quiet country living, or a large family experience or a focused life of study. There are infinite expressions of happily ever after– as many as the grains of sand in the earth. I have defined some markers for myself that have been common to the various shapes and options I have explored.
I can embrace myself. I have the resources within myself to fulfill a life. When I stand simply and fully in myself and look honestly at my strengths and weaknesses, I am enough – no more, no less and I have the capacity to fulfill my life’s promise. Most of my fairytale friends had something to learn about themselves, about finding and using their particular gifts before happily ever after could enter their lives and so do I. Affirming, with humility by standing in my own gifts for shaping a life is integral to creating my particular happily ever after. The first incarnational principle is standing.
I can embrace the parameters of my own life. I look first to what I have to work with in my existing options, and how I can enhance them. When I look at my experiences as a path to learn from rather than an obstacle to avoid, possibilities begin to unfold. If I find myself admiring another’s gifts or experiences or opportunities, I see that as an indicator of something that has interest and relevance to me. I don’t like the experience of envy, it cuts away at joy for me. But it doesn’t go away just because I tell it to go. Over time I have had to learn to embrace my envy as a signpost to an interest and desire that I have been ignoring. Now when envy comes up, I try to step back and look to what exists in my world of opportunity as the foundation for this new interest. Looking to essence, I ask how the qualities it represents can be nurtured in my life.
I can embrace others. I am the executive director of my life and guardian of its resources and I am supported by and responsible to the community around me. The meaning and relevance of any life comes out of its connection to the community of life in which it exists. I want and need to recognize the multiple layers of community which surround me. I am a partner offering respect for others and respect for myself to shape a happily ever after world that can sustain itself over time.
I embrace the unknown and unexpected. One of the things that was not easily developed within my experience of happily ever after was the need for adaptability and the unknown. To my childhood understanding, the fairytale world seemed ordered with specific directions that the hero or heroine learned to follow to accomplish the task. When I look back at those fairytales however, being able to be responsive in the moment was a test that every adventure seemed to include. Their capacity to respond to the unexpected with grace and creativity was the key. Most of them had some experience of leaving their path, forgetting their instructions or challenging the rules in some way, and that brought the tests of learning they required. They then would overcome the tests with hope, trust, determination, and often the gift of friends. Including flow and change as one of the foundations of happily ever after feels very risky and dangerous; life is definitely a deep wood filled with unknown creatures. Gradually, I have come to recognize that there is no one right path through but multiple good options; it is the choices we make at each crossroads along the way that are important. To include the unknown from the beginning as a part of our life equation is important.
These markers of happily ever after have come to my attention slowly over the years, at first dropping in and out without my noticing how they appeared or why they disappeared. But gradually one learns to plant oneself in life and notice what widens the field of happiness within it. My understanding grew even more specifically when I began noticing there was a felt-sense for the energy of happily ever after. There was a quality to the experience that I felt in my body, a resonance of connection that was outside of a mental and emotional consciousness. This felt-sense drew my attention to noticing the commonality of these essential threads when logic or psychology could not see them.
What is also interesting about these markers is that as strategies I could be good at any one of them in a particular moment of concentration, but bringing them all together at one time was difficult. Something else was required to create the whole picture. It related to where and how happily ever after can exist. Happily ever after is a fluid and responsive land, changing to meet the needs and serve the blossoming of each person and therefore it can only exist in the present moment, refreshed by our choices and relationships as they unfold.
I have a quote from an unknown author posted in my office that upholds me and provides much support in this area:
“To love God is to love the two things closest to Him, Change and a good Joke.”
The respectful acceptance of whatever and whoever comes–whether it be help from small creatures, or mysterious old ladies, advice from talking mirrors or magical lamps, and respecting the unexpected gifts within the opportunity and relationships that come to us all–speaks to the willingness to incorporate and engage the unknown elements of life, the spark of possibility from which new things emerge. The joy of shared laughter is another hallmark. But as I noticed recently, it is love that is the objective. It is love that brings parts together into a new whole.
In the incarnational framework love is held in the principle of emergence. It brings together parts so that they rediscover their wholeness. It is the glue that binds the parts into a whole.
My work with incarnational spirituality as it has developed in me over the years has helped to craft the idea of happily ever after into a structure of life that enriches and satisfies. An incarnational perspective acknowledges each person’s thinking, feeling, and action through the choices, the attitudes and intentions they express. From there it embraces a community of life both subtle and physical that upholds and builds through mutual respect and responsibility. I love noticing my own unicorns, wise ones, magic fairy wishes, elves or woodland creatures who appear in my life as friends with gifts, personal challenges met, or books falling open off the shelf with just the right thought to point me to a problem’s answer.
Within this experience of choice, happily ever after is affirmed as a very individual experience; there is no one perfect expression that fits everyone. With every small or large choice I make, I venture out and away from the shared, known world to explore new territory.
I have noticed that happily ever after requires me to stand in a place that affirms individual sovereignty and an interconnected weaving of relationship with others–friends, family, society and the natural world around me as well as subtle levels of beingness from microscopic and atomic levels of matter into energetic levels of intelligence. All are unique and responsible for themselves, all are interconnected and ultimately accountable to the whole within which they exist.
It empowers me to become the heroine who shapes my life through a connection to the sacredness of all life and my response to the experiences that come to me. Happily ever after is a way of receiving and engaging experiences which results in a life well-lived.