THE STOLEN CHILD
By W.B. Yeats
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid our faery vats
Full of berries
And the reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of
moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters of the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.
"In this way......in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us---not always in one momentous event but in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss."
~John Irving .
Many thanks to Jayde Dangel
for the Faery Art!
Glen Car Waterfall, Co. Leitrim, Ireland
(photo by The Neenster)
Every
parent who has small children knows how difficult it is to get the little
critters settled down when it's time for bed. Down through the centuries,
parents of many nations have each developed their own unique ways of
bringing peace to the ritual of bedtime.
Our Celtic ancestors, long ago, invented a method to tame the kiddies that
many feel has worked wonders in this regard. It is the legend of the
Changelings. Many of you have, no doubt, heard stories about the
"little people." Some parents call them trolls, others refer to
them as leprechauns, and still others speak about the "faery
folk."
The legend demands that children always obey their parents when it comes
time to go to bed. They are to tuck themselves in quickly, close their
little eyes, and quietly scurry off to dreamland. Should they, for any
noticeable time, tend to resist the call for sleep and quietness, they run
the risk of being carried off to faeryland, where the faeries will keep
them prisoners forever. These "naughty" children, according to
the legend, will no longer be able to see their parents, and in their
place the little people will leave a "Changeling."
In essence, a Changeling is the body of a child that no longer has the
"kid" inside. The body walks, talks, goes to school---but the
child inside lives somewhere else, far from waking awareness. The children
who heard of this legend apparently had such belief in it that there
seldom was a problem going to sleep, ever again, after the legend wove its
spell.
Parents sometimes do cruel things, in the dispatch of their role as parents. There are traumas, belief systems that inhibit growth, cruel viewpoints that are designed to manipulate little minds, etc. We invent monsters to intimidate our kids, and then spend years trying to convince them that monsters are not real.
PROBLEMS WITH SLEEP
The great metaphysician, Gurdjeff, introduced some fantastic material back
in his day. He asserted that all of physical life is a dream, and for
humans to remain here in physical form each of us has to be entranced,
deep in a kind of soul sleep.
We have spoken in other transmissions about the Veil of Forgetfulness.
This is a semi-permeable etheric membrane that surrounds the consciousness
of a person in physical form, blocking from his remembrance the knowledge
of who and what he is within the greater scheme of things. This enables
him to focus here in this context of reality, without being distracted by
his many other simultaneous involvements elsewhere.
The inability to properly focus into this Earthly "dream" of
physicality, is very similar to a child who has difficulty going to sleep
at night. The little mind keeps spinning, spinning, and he or she has no
ability to relax and journey off to dreamland. Or, in waking
reality, the child cannot bond with parents, or a life situation, and the
contract to be here gets aborted, and the child leaves. I am told by
Spirit that this is one of the biggest reasons for deaths related to SIDS.
THE
STOLEN CHILD
Forgetting about or casting off an important part of childhood (like
spiritual guides and playmates) can constitute a major trauma in the life
of a young person. For a beautiful visualization of this process, one
needs only to check out a copy of the movie "Heart and Souls,"
released some years ago (usually available in any video store). The whole
story plot of the film
centers around the subject matter we are discussing here.
To forget the magical part of self is to lose the essence of what it means
to be young and alive. Many people fill psychiatric couches today, looking
for missing components in their lives--events and occurrences that might
have resulted in huge levels of depression and emptiness they feel later
in life. Though every life has its bumps and bruises, and each one takes
its toll---few people fully comprehend how badly they were injured when
they decided, in a moment of time, to let go of their imagination.
When parents use children as surrogate spouses, or place demands upon their little psyches that require them to prematurely become adults, the "child part" of them departs. From then on, they function as the parents want---but a part of them leaves. The story of Peter Pan, with its many references to "The Lost Boys," is a perfect example of this. Those boys, living in Never-Never Land, were children of trauma and heartbreak. Some of them abandoned, and others driven away, they run off to an etheric refuge of their own making.
There
are many who come to me, and tell me about gaping holes in their memories
of childhood. When they do, I know that they are speaking
about the empty spaces vacated by a "Stolen Child." As the
poem says, their world had become more full of weeping than that child
could understand. So.......parts of that child departed, leaving
only a blank space.
THE BETWIXT AND BETWEEN
The faery kingdoms are real! They exist in a realm which the Celtic
peoples call the "betwixt and the between." This is the level of
consciousness that separates and borders sleeping and waking. Everyone
passes through there as they go in and out of slumber. It is the
Gateway into the ever-expanding, ever-wondrous Multiverse. It is the
entrance into infinity!
There is truth in the legend of the "Changeling. " However, the beings who dwell there are not
monsters or beasts whose purpose in life is to devour and enslave little
ones. Rather, they symbolize the very essence of
*child-ness* that have been strangled out of children by adults who did
not honor and respect their ways or their presence, along with their gifts
of playfulness and wonder.
In fact---faeries, leprechauns, and those who inhabit the Devic Realm are
said to actually symbolize the *STOLEN
CHILD ESSENCE*
of those very parents who perpetrate the control and abuse upon these
kids. Also, they could also symbolize the soul essence of many wise and magical
OLD
FOLKS
that society never has time to honor anymore. They have been so many
things to so many people--across time.
It seems that both ends of life's spectrum can flee from our world when those in control have no patience or interest to deal with the gifts and perspectives which they have to offer. Their habitation becomes one of the many domains which we speak of as META-REALITY.
Daniel Jacob.
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