Fairies & Shirley Barber

I was in Emily’s room the other night, looking for a particular book of poems (from which in fact the poem “On the Ning Nang Nong” came from) and I got slightly distracted by the books from my childhood. In particular, the magical fairy stories written and beautifully illustrated by Shirley Barber.
Did anyone else ever read the fairy stories from Shirley Barber as a kid?
Perhaps you may recognise her artwork, which is truly remarkable and magical and so unbelievably enchanting... well at least I have always thought so and still do, especially looking at them now.
So of course I decided to read the stories again, but mainly I looked at the pictures, which have so much incredible detail that one can be captivated by them for hours. The garments of the fairies look so light and flowy and graceful; the fairies themselves are all extraordinarily beautiful and their hair enchants me so much the way it is so long and beautiful and their hair pieces just make everything look so perfect...

Can you tell that my biggest childhood wish was to become a fairy?

The little girl saw a shooting star for the first time in her life. She had heard about them before of course; all proper fairy tale books have including the wishing upon a star story before.
“Daddy, look!” she squealed, “I saw a shooting star!”
“Quick, make a wish!” her father told her, “If you were the first person to see that shooting star then you can make a wish upon it! It might even come true!”
So the little girl squeezed her eyes tight and wished with all her might
“I wish that I could be a fairy.”

Fairies always looked like they lived in a magical, faultless world where everyone was beautiful and kind and helped each other. Their world was perfect.

Even as a very small child it appears that I somehow knew that the world was and still is imperfect, and perhaps this is why I wanted so badly to become one of those stunning fairies and live in a land far off...

Now I have a better grasp of our world and I have come to a different conclusion.

Our world is perfectly imperfect.

There are certainly some very ugly things in our world: poverty, murder, rape, betrayings, stealing, pain.. the list is endless.

But also endless, and I believe even more so, is the list of all the wonderful, magnificent, glorious, perfect things that there are in our world.
It is these things that make our world perfect.
Because our world is perfect.
It has the most perfect balance of perfect and imperfect things in it, and this is what makes it so remarkably perfect and flawless, indescribably so.

Please, let’s keep our world so.
Continue to appreciate the perfect things here, but never forget the imperfect ones.
We can try to eliminate the bad things; we never can but because our world is ever-growing so is the number of bad things. The thing is that it’s the good things that need effort to make happen; the bad things will just happen anyway. If we want to keep the balance then we must compensate the growing number of bad things but creating a contrasting growing number of good things.

This takes effort, but I believe that we can all do it.

Don’t ever forget the good things, for becoming bogged down in the bad things will never help anything get better.

This is for those who may believe they have a problem now. Remember the good things, because it always, always gets better. I’m not saying that your problems don’t matter; I’m just saying that there are other more important things to worry about.