Coronavirus : The Evil Fairy That We Tried To Forget.
A benevolent king and good queen wished for a child for many years but had none. One day as the queen was bathing in a spring, dreaming of a child, a magical frog appears to her aide and grants her this wish — within a year she will have a daughter.
As promised, within the year, the queen gave birth to a baby girl. Overcome with joy, the king prepared a great feast to which he invited all his neighbors, family and friends from throughout the kingdom. To the festivities the king also invited the fairies in order that they may be good to the child and protect her. There were 7 fairies in his kingdom but he only invited the 6 of them that were good fairies — leaving out the fairy that was known by all to be cruel and spiteful.
Towards the end of the feast, each of the fairies presented the child with a magic gift. Each of the fairies blessed the infant princess all the qualities that a princess would hope for — beauty, wit, grace, dance , song and goodness. However, before the festivities could end, the evil fairy made her appearance. She was angry and wanted to show her spite for not being invited to the feast. She cursed the infant princess — when she is fifteen years old, the princess would prick herself with a spindle and fall down dead. One of the fairies, while unable to remove the curse, made it so that she would only fall into a deep sleep for a hundred years.
As every fairy’s blessing came to pass — as the princess grew to be beautiful, modest and clever — the king and queen, ever desperate to prevent the curse of the evil fairy, ordered that every spindle in the whole kingdom be destroyed. No one in the kingdom was allowed to tell the princess about the curse or the evil fairy to spare her the worry and sadness.
On her fifteenth birthday, the princess awoke, excited to be another year older. As everyone else was still asleep, she wandered the castle to keep herself occupied until finally she came upon an old, forgotten tower with a rusty key in the lock. She turned the key and entered to find an old woman with a spindle.
“Good morning, Granny,” said the Princess, “what are you doing?”
“I am spinning,” said the old woman.
“What is the thing that whirls round so merrily?” asked the Princess and she took the spindle and tried to spin too. She had barely touched the spindle when she pricked her finger and fell into her slumber and the entire castle followed her — everyone from the king and queen to the horses in the stables feel into a deep, deep slumber. Around the walls of the castle a hedge of brier roses began to grow, beset with thorns, that grew higher and higher each year , until finally the castle was beyond view.
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Us ‘moderns’ have forgotten what tales like these really mean. We have forgotten that the good fairies in this story stand for the ‘good’ part of nature. In this story, we are the kings and queens that forgot that nature is a duality — good and bad, promising and dangerous , beautiful and ugly.
Over the many thousands of years that our civilizations have evolved, we focused on the giving, beautiful side of nature , the good fairies, and forgot the evil one. We forgot that all the safety and security we have in our lives — the grocery shelves always stocked, the water always in our pipes and medicine always within reach — has been afforded to us by the castles that we have built.
I urge you to pull up google and run an image search ‘Nature’. Here’s what most of you will see.
As far as most of us are concerned, this is as deep as our conception of nature goes. We imagine that because we spend summers in a lake house or go ‘camping’ with our pick up trucks that we know what nature really is. And with our limited conception, we tailor our lives and behaviors to match. We optimize our lives and habits to situations that we imagine are the natural state of things. So went happily about our days, fitting our habits to match this model of reality. Because there is always food, we forgot that this is not normal — we forgot that our bodies are capable of fasting for long periods for a reason : We forgot that times of famine were regular enough that evolution preserved our abilities to withstand them.
We had our feasts and never invited the evil fairy and even went so far as to deny her existence. We buzzed about happily worrying about paper straws , creating our safe spaces and preventing kids from skateboarding. Because our conception of nature is that it is ‘all good’ and therefore needs nothing but protecting, we forgot what she’s actually like. We forgot about and at best ignored, Maleficent.
I had to specifically search these on google because even searching ‘bad side of nature’ only showed results like the following:
We have forgotten that ‘nature’ is doing all it can to kill us, every second of every day. As a result, we have forgotten that the world we have taken so for granted only exists in so far as we acknowledge this part of reality. In Sri Lanka people are in lines in front of pharmacies as curfews come into action. Of the people in line, most of them will be in line to purchase diabetes drugs such as metformin. Of these, most of them will be type 2 diabetics who have eaten their way into their situation. These are people who were never told that it might be healthy to not eat for a while, that it might serve a purpose. Ironically, these same people will go from the pharmacy straight to the grocery store.
Nations all over the world, especially prosperous western societies, are finding this so difficult to manage because they have gone out of their way to forget what the true state of nature is like. We assumed that going out with our friends every weekend and yearly music festivals were the way things are supposed to be. We forgot that how ‘nature’ actually wants things to be is us covering in caves, not knowing where our next meal will come from and dying from something as simple as a prick from a spindle. We don’t know what it’s like to not have food in the fridge so we can’t even fathom that it’s okay to not eat all the time. We don’t know what it’s like to not take antibiotics for everything so we don’t know what our own bodies are capable of healing.
We stopped inviting maleficent to parties and now we’re paying the price when she crashes the party anyway. Like the spindle showing up inside the castle, the last place the king and queen would expect after eliminating all danger from the kingdom, the ‘evil’ side of nature will keep showing up, especially within our castles whether we like it or not. Like the good fairy being unable to remove the curse entirely, we will never be able to get rid of the curses of nature entirely either. It is sewed into the very fabric of existence. Nature, in the final analysis, just is. It doesn’t make a distinction between good and bad. We draw the good out of it by shaping it — vaccines created by using the disease itself, fasting so we know what to do when we are hungry— by inviting maleficent to the party and understanding what she’s like, we learn how to deal with her.
Once we start doing this again, we have hope of a happily ever after. Once we deal with the curse put on us through our own ignorance, by the passage of time if nothing else, we will wake up once again. That is what I hope COVID-19 will do for us. In that way, we can make sure that this story has a happy ending.
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From time to time, drawn by the legend of the sleeping beauty, princes tried to force their way through the hedge and into the castle but they found it impossible to get through the thorns. After many years passed, a prince arrived and heard an old man talk of the sleeping beauty. He also heard that many princes had tried to enter and died, caught in the thorns. The old man tried his best to dissuade the young prince but, unswayed, he went on to the castle. It happened that the 100 years had just ended and the walls were covered with beautiful roses. The shrubs parted ways to let the prince pass. Walking through the silent castle and sleeping inhabitants, the prince finds his sleeping beauty laying asleep in the old tower. As he touched her lips with his own, she awoke, smiling. Throughout the castle everyone rose from their deep slumber. The prince and princess lived on happily ever after.
