Faery Tale Read Free Page B

age forty-eight, he found himself with a wife who loved him but could no longer live with him and a family coming apart at the seams. While my sister gracefully tiptoed around his moods, I was too oblivious (or defiant) to take him seriously. As a result, I bore the brunt of his fury.
    In third grade, during Mr. Yale’s class, I would requisition the hall pass and retreat to the bathrooms, which during class time, were blissful, spacious, private. There, I didn’t have to pretend to be a happy, normal kid. I could sit and, for just a few moments, allow myself to feel the way I was feeling. It was there, next to the discarded paper towels and bits of unused toilet paper, that I could ask for what I really wanted and feel that someone, or something , might actually be able to hear me. Since then, the bathroom has been my own personal church of sorts. When most women retreat to the ladies’ room to powder their nose, I retreat for a spiritual tune-up.
    When I began to look at my life in a different way, I wondered how many people, like me, needed to seek God in the bathroom. The world is falling apart, and outside the playground is splintered and dark. Where can we go in our daily lives to feel the things we need to feel? To feel the soothing balm of faith? To feel loved? Safe? Happy? What about hopeful?
    More important, what has happened to the magic we were surrounded by as children? The loss of our magic, our innocence, is the worst sort of emotional deforestation. My biggest fear is that if we continue to stifle this loss, half the people on the planet will forget what their forest even looked like in the first place.
    The more I thought about it, the more I wondered where our modern culture has left faeries today. If they were ever “here,” where did they go, and why did they leave us? As I began looking closer, I found that faeries still had a huge following—believers—all over the world. Perhaps these believers would be able to help me believe once more. Perhaps, with their help, I could even find a faery, sit it down for some nectar or something, and ask, “Where did we all go wrong?” The heaviness I’d felt on my heart began to lighten.
    And my adventure was just about to begin.

2
Hunting Trolls in Paradise
    Yes, faeries do still appear to humans—often, in fact, especially if one learns the best way to seek them out.
    â€”EDAIN MCCOY, A WITCH’S GUIDE TO FAERY FOLK
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    I WAS sitting on a plane bound for Cancún, Mexico, my mind a fluttering mess.
    Are the power outlets the same in Mexico? I don’t speak enough Spanish. I really shouldn’t have taken this time off from work. Does this seat recline? Ooh! My own little TV! Do the pilots for JetBlue receive the same training as the pilots for regular airlines? Or do the affordable prices signal some sort of half-baked pilot training?
    Soon , I thought, we could all be dead .
    If we all died, the chain of blame would regretfully run back to my poor friend Raven, who’d organized this trip. When she asked if I would be interested in going south of Playa del Carmen to participate in a week of yoga and meditation with a group of women, my sense of adventure kicked in and I couldn’t say no.
    But even more than time to bliss out on the beach, I had faeries on my mind. In doing some research I’d discovered there was a type of faery rumored to live in the ancient temples of Mexico—essentially “cousins” to the Celtic faeries or trolls—called Los Aluxes (pronounced al-oosh-us). I told myself this could be an interesting experiment. I’d do a little poking around while there, and if I found there was something to this faery nonsense, I’d go for it: try to make a formal, once-in-a-lifetime adventure of this faery search. Mexico could be a great place to begin. After all, if I could find evidence of faeries in Mexico, the least likely of places, couldn’t I