I love it when...

...I find a great author that really understands me.  :)  

A couple months ago (funny how time flies), Sara made me buy a book titled Keeping A Princess Heart in A Not-So-Fairy Tale World by Nicole Johnson. 

"Like most people, we want to be smart and real-world minded.  We don't want to be Pollyannas in other people's eyes.  We want to stand on the side of truth and justice and fact the dark side bravely.  And this is right.  But the danger, as we seek to understand evil, is that our hearts give way.  We spiral down from understanding it in context to a resigned acceptance of it.  We descend from sadness over the ways things have gone awry to anger that we ever hoped the world would deliver anything different.  Before we know it, we've lost our footing and along with it wonder, awe, imagination, nobility, beauty and grace.  We find ourselves sliding down the hillside of our hearts to become casualties of the fashionable (and understandable) cynicism that pervades our culture.

Fairy tales can help.  They have the uncanny ability to bring to the surface our submerged disappointments.  Cut loose by a good story, they can bob around, revealing our cynicism, our anger, or the cruel way we've treated our dreams.  Isn't it surprising how often we are mean to our own hearts for hoping?  We want to teach ourselves a lesson for wanting too must for for getting our hopes up yet again.  We flog and whip ourselves for doing what comes naturally in the face of disappointment -- longing for something better.  We strongly believe that we would rather inflict pain now than open ourselves up to that kind of hurt again."

I wish I could sit down and have coffee with Nicole.