Where Did all the Elves, Gnomes & Fairies go?

Where Did all the Elves, Gnomes & Fairies go?

An Historical Overview of the Whereabouts of Gnomes, Elves, Fauns, Faeries, Goblins, Ogres, Trolls, Bogies, Nymphs, Sprites and Dryads, Past and Present.

A long, long time ago, the Earth belonged to the creatures of the wood. By creatures of the wood I mean gnomes, elves, faeries, etc. They tended it and took care of it, played in it, danced and sang in it, cared for wounded animals, worked out disputes between species, sat on mushrooms discussing matters of importance and drinking Labrador tea, rode down streams on leaves and bark, parachuted from trees on dandelion seeds. This was the world into which mankind was born. These early days, when man was but a newly arrived dinner guest who hadn't yet taken over the house, are fairly well documented in the literature and folklore of the world, so there's no need to go into it here. What I am interested in, and what I am asking you to be interested in, is the question, "Where did all the gnomes, elves, faeries, etc. go?"

The friction between man and the wood creatures began with the discovery of agriculture. With this discovery civilization arose and spread. The forests were cleared to provide wood for shelters and fields for pastures and crops. Mankind had set up camp. No longer just a visitor in someone else's world, he pushed the wild back from his newly built doorstep. At first, this wasn't a problem. There weren't that many people and everyone else felt that it was only fair to allot them their own half-acre to do with as they wished. Some of them even decided to help out. Gnomes moved into the barn houses and helped with the gardening chores. The devic spirits of the vegetables helped humans better organize their crops and plan rotation; taught them the correlation between planetary and lunar cycles and the agricultural year. They taught them to plant radishes when the moon is in Cancer, harvest when the moon is in Taurus. Many trolls felt that the heaping piles of manure were a change for the better, and decided to stick around too.

The rest of the wood creatures just backed off into the wood, occasionally playing tricks on the new settlers, like turning the milk sour, rearranging furniture, tipping cows, tickling people's faces in their sleep and once in a while stealing babies and leaving bundles of wood in their place.

But man's dominion spread (and spread and spread and spread) and the forests got smaller and smaller and smaller. Things got real crowded in the woods, and things were getting worse in civilization. Most farmers weren't listening to the devic spirits anymore. People found they could increase their output by disregarding the needs of the earth. They were raising productivity and killing the soil. Petrochemicals were just a step away. Most of the devic spirits and gnomes fled. The trolls stayed. Today, they live mostly under bridges and in the shallow mucky ditches beneath the metal grating on farm roads that cows are afraid to cross. Be sure to honk your horn before driving over one of these. A troll may be hanging from the grate, swinging over its living room, as they are apt to do after rolling in muck and manure. If you don't give a warning honk, you may run over its fingers, and it's not a great idea to get either your name or your license plate number on a troll's shite list.

Now, there is little wild land left at all, and even that is shrinking at an unprecedented rate. There is simply not enough wild space for all the gnomes and elves, fauns and faeries, goblins, ogres, trolls and bogies, nymphs, sprites, and dryads.

So where are they?

Are they dead?

No.

So, where did they go?

The answer is a bit surprising. They didn't go anywhere. We did. Early humans had an intuitive knowledge of their role in nature, just as bears and raccoons and mice and every other critter does. They understood, from the ways of the wild around them, that nothing ever comes from nowhere and nothing ever just disappears. Things change form. Death is necessary for life to continue. They offered up their kills as sacrifices to the gods of nature. They offered praise, prayer, sacrifice and song to the spirits of the wild, to brother buffalo, brother deer, and brother tree.

Now we know that everything that ever existed continues to exist, in one form or another, and as far as we can tell, they were more aware of that back then than we are now. So, the sacrifice, song and prayer did not ensure the immortality of the slaughtered, either in body or spirit. That was already taken care of. What it did ensure was the continuance of the connection between the spirit of the slaughterer and the spirit of the slaughtered. Killing is risky business. The membrane separating the internal from the external is not necessarily as thick or as clearly defined as we have come to believe. Every time we kill, we risk killing the reality of that thing inside ourselves as well as outside. We risk breaking the connections that lead in and out of the membrane. Taking a life to feed life requires a keen understanding of the natural law of give and take. When we lost that understanding, gave up the songs, the sacrifice, the prayers, we lost the connection. Saying grace is not enough.

When we lose those connections, everything becomes dead - fish, rivers, frogs, mice, even each other. There is no way they can reach inside us any more. The five senses we are left with are not enough. We have given up those connections in exchange for the freedom to clear-cut forests with skidders, turn cows into milk machines and chickens into egg factories. We can experiment with animals, club seals, wear fur, and exterminate entire species. Not a twinge of guilt. The lines have been severed.

And we are all under the impression that it is the forests, the creatures, the spirits and the wild lands that are disappearing from the universe and not us. This is not so. Thinking like that is like thinking that if you stand on the end of a limb and saw that limb from the tree, that the tree will fall and you will remain standing. Bugs Bunny might be able to get away with that, but we can't.

It is we who have fallen away from the real world into a world where we may carry out our twisted sterile dreams without threatening the earth and its inhabitants. Ever wonder why the trees, stones, rivers and streams, birds, bears, frogs and snakes no longer talk to us as they did in the early tales of Native America, the Hindu, the Africans, the bible? It's because we're not around to talk to anymore. Every clear-cut, every vivisection, every mechanized slaughter of cow, pig or chicken moves our dream world further and further from the tree, making a reunification, which is still possible, more and more difficult.

Somewhere not so far from here, in the real world, the ancient forests are still standing, the buffalo roams the prairies, the sky is full of condors, the deer and the antelope play, and dodo birds still wander the sandy beaches, bumping into things.

Where there are still wild lands in our dream world, strong connections still exist. Bridges, tunnels, portals. Occasionally a traveler will get lost in the wilderness and find himself in the real world, returning the next day to find that a hundred years have passed, or never returning at all.

There are more ephemeral connections as well - brooks and waterfalls where you can still here voices from the other side, if you listen carefully enough... When they sit by these waters, they hear loud clanking and screams. When they eat magic mushrooms, everything STOPS glowing and condos rise where forests stand. Our children can see their world in their dreams. Their children see our world in the nightmares.

And there is another connection. Sometimes agents from the other side infiltrate our world in an attempt to expedite reunification. Believe it or not, they miss us over there. Sometimes - more often than you might think - they send souls over to our world to be born as human babies. There are quite a lot of them actually - gnomes, elves, faeries, sprites, etc. running around in human bodies, doing crazy things like writing on walls, working in co-ops, running inns in the mountains, talking to themselves in the streets, making pottery, practicing witchcraft. They are planting biodynamic gardens, sitting in the back yard naked, arguing with satan. They are in asylums pumped full of Thorazine, in a classroom on Ritalin and lithium. They live with Indians. They run recycling centers. They are starting revolutions, corrupting the young, inventing paranoid conspiracy theories, making up religions. They're directing movies, gobbling acid, drinking heavily and writing poetry.

The transition from their world to ours is not an easy one. It's not easy on the soul and much is lost. They may have no idea who or what they are at first. They may or may not find out. They WILL know they are not like other people. They will know that this world is not theirs. They will faintly remember something better, where things made sense and worked like they ought to, where love and magic had the power to heal.

They will know what makes other people happy does not make them happy, and that what makes them happy makes them happier than anyone else alive.

They will see things others cannot see, hear things others cannot hear, feel things others cannot feel, and know things others do not know.

They will laugh a great deal or cry a great deal or both.

They will love humans individually, but have a hard time with humanity as whole, and that will occasionally approach loathing.

They will have a handful of very close friends, and often be very lonely.

They will be unhappiest when forced to act like a human and do things that humans do, want what humans want, or when they are convinced that they actually are one.

Things will not be easy for them. Because of their memories of the other side, the world will seem to them a wondrous calliope with just a few teeth missing on one of the cogs. Because of this tiny deficiency, the music is off key, the horses are crashing into each other and the children are frightened, bruised and crying.

The solutions will seem obvious, but no one will listen.

They will repeatedly be punished for shouting FIRE! in a crowded theatre, when the buildings really are in flames but no one else can see....They will get slapped on the wrist for pointing to the EXIT signs when everyone else is running around screaming and trampling one another.

They will be zealous, fanatical and didactic in their beliefs. They will feel utterly confused.

They will have ecstatic visions and babble incoherently. They will be extremely articulate.

They are prone to long periods of silence. They have no idea how to say what they really mean.

They spend a lot of time with children and animals.

They will become drunkards and dope fiends, organic gardeners, soap makers, carpenters, madmen, magicians, jugglers and clowns, lunatic physicists, painter and scribblers, travelers and wanderers...

They will dress in bright colors, frumpy sweaters or all black.

They will smoke too much and drink too much. They will eat only macrobiotic foods. They will develop addictions to Mountain Dew.

They will often be accused of living in their own fantasy world.

They will make great lovers. Yeah, even the trolls.

They will spend too much time either making love or thinking about it.

They will speak to inanimate objects. They will have much brighter eyes than everyone else. They will expect their magic to work in this world and their love to heal, and will be crushed by this world, and often won't expect it.

It will come close to killing them.

They will visit the places where the connections still exist: the waterfalls, the mountains, the oceans, and the forests. They will draw on all the power they have, and sometimes, sometimes, the magic will work. And everything will be wondrously easy. The teeth will grow back on the cog on the calliope, the tune will right itself, the horses will bob gracefully up and down, around and around, and the children will giggle and sing with cotton candy stuck to their cheeks and noses.

They will spend their days trying to reconnect a branch that millions are busy sawing away at. Often it will be more than they can bear.

While the rest of humanity is busy working on new and more efficient ways to lay waste to the Earth with the push of a button, they are saving it. A handful at a time.

They will share a common conviction that they are the only sane individuals in a world gone mad.

They are right.

© 2004 Buck Young

http://www.metatech.org/07/fairies_elves_gnomes_trolls.html

Fairy and Elves in Tolkien and Traditional Literature

Fairy and Elves in Tolkien and Traditional Literature

Beginning of article

Introduction

MANY OF THE MARVELS OF TOLKIEN'S SECONDARY

WORLD ARE, as expected in a legendarium sprung from his longing for a body of legends dedicated to England, motifs drawn from English traditional fairy-tales, often reinterpreted under his particular vision of how they "should be." Thus there are, among many other wonderful things, magical bewildering woods, dragons like those of ancient legends, stout Dwarves (unlike the classical dwarfs!), (1) and specially Elves, the central characters of the mythological ages.

However, there is a persistent silence about "fairies" or "fays" (except in the earliest writings), which, judging by their name only, could be considered one of the principal elements in fairy-tales. Only in his earliest poems and in the Book of Lost Tales did fairies play an important part. But soon he abandoned terms such as fairy or fay, and chose to stick to its synonym elf. This fact has been attributed to four possible reasons (cf. Fimi 58-60): (a) unlike fairy or fay, which come from Old French, elf has an Old English origin more suitable for his project of a "mythology of England"; (b) in English literature the creatures of Fantasy had generally received an imprint of playfulness and prettiness both inconsistent with the

serious and tragic characteristics of the tales, but this affected the popular fairies and fays to a larger extent than the more archaic elves; (c) the term fairy also became charged with sexual connotations that Tolkien would have preferred to avoid; and (d) after the Great War, fairies ceased to be a popular literary theme, and that could have discouraged Tolkien, too--although in many other points he radically detached himself from Modernist trends.

Thus Tolkien preferred to name the Elder Children of Iluvatar by the Germanic word, and used the Old French terms sparingly, reserving them for specific contexts in which their original sense was suitable. (2) That fact, together with Tolkien's occasional commentaries about his dislike of the style of the contes de fees in that language (Letters 274), and his explicit regret of "Goblin Feet," a representative piece of Tolkien's early fairy-poetry (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One [BLT1] 32), might lead readers to underestimate the importance of the "fairy" element in his later

work. The objective of this essay is to show that many typical characteristics of modern fairies were not simply avoided by Tolkien, but integrated into his Elves, albeit transformed or reinterpreted in order to keep the internal coherence of his mythology.

That transformed continuation was also applied to the term fairy itself, which was respected by Tolkien. That word is actually one of the first elements discussed by him in his essay On Fairy-Stories. In that essay he declared his interest on the word's meaning of "Otherworld beyond the five senses," and usually spelled it archaically as Faerie, Faery or Fayery to mark the difference (On Fairy-Stories [OFS] 85)--just like he preferred the spelling Dwarves rather than Dwarfs. But such special use is usually regarded as an exception; on the other hand, Tolkien's disdain for fairy as a synonym of elf is often argued, on the basis of its foreign, French

origin and its fanciful connotations (see above, and also Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth [Road] 56-7; Burns 23; Spangenberg 186). This apparent ambiguity in Tolkien's regard for that word can be explained by the greater antiquity of the abstract meaning, in contrast to its later, distorted application as a name for elvish creatures. However, such a straightforward opposition is a simplification of the literary facts about the word.

Etymology of fairy

As commented on above, Tolkien had a special interest in the original, abstract sense of fairy, so it is worth exploring in detail how that word entered and evolved in English language, although it is a complicated matter, since its earliest attestations are scanty, and a great part of its history would be explained by the unrecorded oral tradition, which is beyond our reach.

By De Rosario Martinez, Helios

Academic journal article from Mythlore, Vol. 28, No. 3-4
Article details

http://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-227196959/fairy-and-elves-in-tolkien-and-traditional-literature

Tales of meeting real Fairies

A collection of tales describing real encounters of meeting fairies

Is it a Fairy or is it a Faerie?

My first encounter with a fairy was just off the local popular bridal way near where I used to live in County Durham between Rolands Gill and Medomsley. I had a period when I would jog about a mile or so up the track in an attempt to get fit. Often however, I never made the mile as I would either be dragged into the wood by some fun nature spirits wanting to play or by Herne the hunter to be led to some interesting energy areas. On one such occasion I was led through the undergrowth until I emerged by a stream. There was a small overhanging tree on the other side which seemed to have some sort of being sitting in its central branches about two meters from the ground.

How big are fairies and do they carry wands?

As I got closer, it resolved into a white creature holding a long stick type thing which actually twinkled at one end – sorry but I just could not handle that this could be a magic wand. What really confused me was that it seemed quite big (about two feet tall (60cm)) and seemed eh! somewhat overweight. As I believed that fairys were very small – say no more than six inches tall (15cm) and slim this encounter caused me slight confusion. As did the fact that it actually seemed to have some sort of magic wand. Communication went something along the lines of;

‘Are you a fairy?’ – ‘Yes I’m a fairy’ – ‘Eh!! – Are you sure?’ – ‘YES‘ ‘Aren’t you eh!! . . . too eh . . . big? . . for a fairy? . . . ‘ – ‘!$$??£‘ ‘ . . . and is that a magic wand? . . . . . ‘

I don’t think she was impressed with this exchange; she went a little sulky. So, a fat over sized fairy stretched my boundaries about fairies. She seemed to be lonely and wanted to keep to herself. I never asked if she could cast spells with her wand. (For more detail of this encounter then read this post here)

Confusing encounters with fairies continue

So, that was my first encounter a mite confusing and this unfortunately continued with the next encounter too . . . . So, while at Bellingham in Northumberland on another walk I spotted a figure sitting in a similar looking tree (they do seem to have a preference for a tree that has an open branched area part way up to ‘lounge’ in). However as this Being was about four feet tall and male and wearing green (green!!) it was very definitely not impressed with my chat (Well I some how thought that faerys were only female and green was for pixies?).

‘Hey – are you a fairy?’ – ‘Yes’ ‘Well how come your wearing green like a pixie?’ – ‘!$$??£‘ ‘Hey . . . . Eh!! . . . are you male?’ ‘I thought fairies were only female?’ . . . . . . . ‘NO!!! – I AM A MALE FAIRY‘

Female and Male fae sightings

I could just imagine him thinking – “Don’t humans know anything?” (For way more detail of this second fairy encounter then read this post here)

At a certain point during my encounters I realized that what I was seeing, was only what they wanted me to see with respect to my understanding. I realized that different people would see the same Being differently and that what they saw would be representative of their own background, understanding and expectations.

So, with this in mind the next time that I was out in the woods and felt the presence of a fairy it was my wish to see this being as itactually was rather than how it chose to presented itself to me. This was somewhere north of Rothbury outside a small place called Callaly if I recall correctly.

Seeing a Fairy as she REALLY is

The result was that I saw a large amorphous white cloud over a group of trees, this cloud is in reality what a fairy really is to a fairy – an intelligent energy form. As I tuned into a this cloud it coalesced and flowed down becoming more concentrated and eventually presented itself in front of me in the form of the fairy-tale fairy (much like the picture on the right). She was very beautiful and was quite amused with our encounter. I felt privileged to be in her presence, to see her as she really was and then to see her as she chooses to be recognized. It seems like my wish came true.

When you are accessing other realms to see or sense whatever is presented to you, there is always some feedback system at work. The beings you are accessing may have some ability to control their presentation; nature spirits do this.

For example the main nature spirit energy form Pan I have seen in two different forms and in one of he has so far presented himself between 2 meters tall and 30 meters.

The other factor is yourself, your past experiences and your engrained beliefs and ideas, these will ‘warp’ the interpretation of what you are presented with too.

What do fairies really look like

Well it follows from the above that it’s going to be very hard to be definitive. I have tried with the pictures above to edit and ‘play’ with them to more accurately depict the underlying energies. Some pictures that I really like because they present much more of the ‘flavour or taste’ of this realm follow;

All of these are copyright © Stephanie Pui Mun Law and are from the web site shadowscapes click on a picture or the banner at the bottom to visit her site.

Who believes in the fae and do they really exist?

There is a an attitude amongst dimensionally challenged scientists that people will simply ‘imagine’ or ‘create’ in their minds what they believe. This is a fairly obvious assumption from a group of people whose training in part is about staying distanced from personal experience, feeling, imagination and even intuition while striving to be ‘logical’ and ‘rational’ and ‘observant’.

This attitude and orientation actually prevents people from properly and deeply engaging with their own internal processes, feelings and landscape. If you fully engage with your internal states; your feeling states, mind states and processes, intuition, imagination, senses, dream states and spend time consciously in them then you will become familiar enough from repeated experiential ‘experience’ with your own internal workings to know their boundaries and limits and therefore have no problem telling the inner internal from the inner external (like I do).

I am sensitive enough to my feelings and emotions for example to know the differences between feelings arising spontaneously in this moment or whether they are ‘reactive’ feelings being provoked in response to a past trauma or block. I even know the subtle differences that tell me that a feeling originates not in this life’s but in a past life.

The above exchange with fairies confirms that what I ‘believed’ or more accurately what I knew about fairies did not result in my internal memory or ‘belief’ states confirming this.

What is belief? When is a belief a ‘belief’?

I have trouble with the ‘B’ word, in terms of how people define what is a ‘belief’. You could say that belief exists when ‘repeated’ experience is lacking. Repeated experience of seeing nature spirits, fairies for example takes a person out of the realm of belief and into something else.

In this respect I ‘believe’ in Centaur’s, because I myself have not seen one BUT I have heard of others whom have.

For me it’s highly likely that just about EVERYTHING that has been consigned to ‘myth’ or ‘legend’ relates to peoples experiences of getting in touch with other dimensional realities that are somehow intersecting with this one in other times when a ‘stupid & superstitious’ rationality was less prevalent. As a species, humans are progressively disengaging from ‘feelings’ and subtle sensory states while barricading ourselves into a severely limited mind.

From the above I have to be adamant that I ‘DON’T’ believe in fairies, in the same way as I don’t have to ‘believe’ in the seat I’m sitting on now for me to sit on it. I have interacted with ‘fairies’ for quite a long time. Quite simply these ‘people’ exist, and they are some what much more friendly than many ‘rational’ types even when you bother them with stupid questions.

What to do NOW?

Some people coming here want to get in touch with Fairies themselves. I have a page HERE to help YOU connect with and encounter fairies or any nature spirits, so go there and read this and on that page is a link to another page to help you become more aware of these beings too.

Anyone want to make a fairy house? Then have a look at this page HERE. (this will open this site in a new window so you can still read what is here). On this fairy house page below the picture there is a link called ‘rules’ which takes you to a page of rules on making a fairy house. Also on the first page on the right click on the picture below where it says “How to build your own Fair House” for details of doing this or click HERE to get this page to open in a new window too. Have fun.

What is your ‘experience’?

In the mean time how many of you reading this have interesting tales of your own? Have you seen a fairy or another nature spirit type?If you have then tell us about it below! Don’t be shy?

http://www.realitywalker.com/nature-spirits/fairy-tales-and-tales-of-fairies/

Little People Among the Flowers

BY CINDY H.

It must be 17 years ago. I promise you fully I had taken no drugs and was totally sober. My boyfriend at the time and I left a nightclub in Camden North London and decided to walk to Regents Park. It was high summer and the sunrise was already on the horizon. A while later, the sun had just fully risen as we walked past a flower bed. The flowers were tall, just below my knees.

I heard rustling. I turned to investigate and heard giggling. I stood agog as, Why would flowers giggle? Two small heads peeked around the last flower, one over the head of the other, as if the lower were crouching, looked at me, giggled and ran off back through the flowers. I took one step toward the flower bed, and decided against investigation.

I think I was in complete shock. I asked my beau if he had seen anything and he, of course, had seen nothing! I know what I saw and feel very privileged indeed!

I thought perhaps it had been another couple. They were male and female, but there was just no way they could have been human given the dimensions. I was very tired when this occurred, I'd been awake for 20 hours. It was as real to me as giving birth to my children. 

The History of Dragons

The History of Dragons

For more than seven centuries, dragons have played a role in lore and legend.
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The Jabberwocky, from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872.
Although the time that dragons first appeared in myths isn't known for sure, they can be traced back as far as approximately 4000 B.C. Dragons are said to have been able to live almost anywhere, depending on the type of dragon mentioned. Their habitats range from the center of the earth to the middle of the ocean. They could also be found in caves, fire, or anywhere dark and damp.
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Stories of dragons appear all throughout history and almost every culture has their own idea about dragons. Some reasons for this could be the finding of dinosaur fossils. Dragons could be used to describe the indescribable bones of unknown creatures. There are stories about dragons in every part of the world, with the exception of Antartica. Even though there are no people in Antartica, which in that way would seem to make it attractive to dragons, the climate proposes a problem for these creatures who like fire or live in water, but not ice water.
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One type of dragon, or sea monster, was feared back in the

time of Christopher Columbus. During this time when the world was thought to be flat, these dragons were said to be at the edge of earth, waiting to eat any one who dared to sail that far into the ocean. This story kept many people from exploring farther into the world. Maps were even made marking the place where these dragons lived. At the edge of the map the words "Here Be Dragons" was almost always printed.
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A knight and a dragon.
Dragons have also appeared in stories that go back to the time of the gods in mythology. The story of Perseus and the Dragon of Posdeidon tells of a vain queen who almost sacrificed her daughter to the dragon, had it not been for Perseus.
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Dragons appear most in fairy tales and myths. In most cases the dragon is the keeper of some treasure, either gold and precious jewels or a maiden in despair. A knight in these stories must come to rescue the girl, or to retrieve the riches. To do this he must slay the dragon.
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Almost all young children have heard stories of dragons. A story that arose from the Middle Ages is about a knight, later called St. George, who rescued a princess from a dragon and in return was able to baptize the Pagan people to Christianity. The story says that every year a maiden was sacrificed to this dragon. One year when the princess was going to be sacrificed, St. George decided to rescue her. Using his sword, Ascalon, he was able to stab the dragon and later slay him. This may be one of the most popular heroic stories involving the death of dragons, although there are many. The story of St. George and the Dragon has been told for centuries and the event was even painted by the great artist Raphael.
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A norseman fights off a sea dragon.
Like St. George and the Dragon, many other stories have been told about dragons and the heroes who kill them. One story like this comes from Norway. The king left his daughter in the castle while he went away on a long trip. He left her a tiny dragon to be her guardian. The princess was skeptical of the tiny creatures, fearing that it could not protect her. However, the dragon soon grew into a large monster. He soon became too good of a guardian for the princess when he grew large enough to wrap his body all around the castle and not let anyone in or out of it. When the king returned home, even he was not permitted inside the castle. The only thing to do was to kill this dragon, so the king offered his the marriage of his daughter to anyone who could kill this dragon. No man in Norway was capable, but a man in Sweden finally killed the beast. As his reward he married the princess and they returned to Sweden together.
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Another story is about another young man who fought a dragon for the reward of bringing the king's daughter to his master for marriage. In this story Tristan is tricked by another man who wants the princess for his own wife. In the end Tristan cut off the dragon's tongue as proof of his accomplishment and the lies of the other man were discovered.
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During the times of dragons in England, anyone who killed a dragon was awarded knighthood. In ancient Rome, dragons were thought to hold the mysteries of the earth. Romans looked to dragons as a source of knowledge and used them as symbols of strength for their military. They used two forms of dragons, one which was used for heroism, to protect them, and the other, a fearsome dragon, used as a threat.
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A wizard fighting a wyrm on a cliff.
Other tales about dragons are more about their toes then the dragons themselves. How many toes a dragon has is quiet significant. Many different kinds of dragons are said to have 3 toes. The 4 toed dragons are said to be the earth dragons. But the 5 toed dragons are the most respected of all. Only a king or a high noble had the privilege of wearing a picture of the 5 toed dragon. In ancient times if a peasant was seen wearing the symbol of the 5 toed dragon, he would immediately be put to death.
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Dragons seem to have come from exaggerated myths about huge snakes, lizards or other reptiles. One type of dragon is actually called the Wyrm, and has a very snake-like form, with a dragon head. Another smaller form of dragon is called a dragonlet. These dragons are also venomous and

can be deadly. In the story The Dragonlet of St. Pilatus, only man with a bad temper and skills with a sword was able to defeat this monster that was only the height of the hero. In almost every culture and all throughout history there are stories of these magical creatures  called dragons.

http://www.draconika.com/history.php

In the Name of Love

In the Name of Love

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Elites embrace the “do what you love” mantra. But it devalues work and hurts workers.

“Do what you love. Love what you do.”

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The command is framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as “well-curated.” A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog and has been pinned, tumbl’d, and liked thousands of times. Though it introduces exhortations to labor into a space of leisure, the “do what you love” living room is the place all those pinners and likers long to be.

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There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem with DWYL, however, is that it leads not to salvation but to the devaluation of actual work—and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.

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Superficially, DWYL is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? And who is the audience for this dictum?

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DWYL is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.

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Aphorisms usually have numerous origins and reincarnations, but the nature of DWYL confounds precise attribution. Oxford Reference links the phrase and variants of it to Martina Navratilova and François Rabelais, among others. The Internet frequently attributes it to Confucius, locating it in a misty, orientalized past. Oprah Winfrey and other peddlers of positivity have included the notion in their repertoires for decades. Even the world of finance has gotten in on DWYL: “If you love what you do, it’s not ‘work,’” as the co-CEO of the private equity firm Carlyle Group put it to CNBC this week.

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The most important recent evangelist of DWYL, however, was the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs. In his graduation speech to the Stanford University Class of 2005, Jobs recounted the creation of Apple and inserted this reflection:
You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

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In these four sentences, the words “you” and “your” appear eight times. This focus on the individual isn’t surprising coming from Jobs, who cultivated a very specific image of himself as a worker: inspired, casual, passionate—all states agreeable with ideal romantic love. Jobs conflated his besotted worker-self with his company so effectively that his black turtleneck and jeans became metonyms for all of Apple and the labor that maintains it

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Do what you love. Wear what you love.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
But by portraying Apple as a labor of his individual love, Jobs elided the labor of untold thousands in Apple’s factories, hidden from sight on the other side of the planet—the very labor that allowed Jobs to actualize his love.
This erasure needs to be exposed. While DWYL seems harmless and precious, it is self-focused to the point of narcissism. Jobs’ formulation of DWYL is the depressing antithesis to Henry David Thoreau’s utopian vision of labor for all. In “Life Without Principle,” Thoreau wrote:

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… it would be good economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.

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Admittedly, Thoreau had little feel for the proletariat. (It’s hard to imagine someone washing diapers for “scientific, even moral ends,” no matter how well paid.) But he nonetheless maintains that society has a stake in making work well compensated and meaningful. By contrast, the 21st-century Jobsian view asks us to turn inward. It absolves us of any obligation to, or acknowledgment of, the wider world.

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One consequence of this isolation is the division that DWYL creates among workers, largely along class lines. Work becomes divided into two opposing classes: that which is lovable (creative, intellectual, socially prestigious) and that which is not (repetitive, unintellectual, undistinguished). Those in the lovable-work camp are vastly more privileged in terms of wealth, social status, education, society’s racial biases, and political clout, while comprising a small minority of the workforce

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In ignoring most work and reclassifying the rest as love, DWYL may be the most elegant anti-worker ideology around.

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Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
For those forced into unlovable work, it’s a different story. Under the DWYL credo, labor that is done out of motives or needs other than love—which is, in fact, most labor—is erased. As in Jobs’ Stanford speech, unlovable but socially necessary work is banished from our consciousness.

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Think of the great variety of work that allowed Jobs to spend even one day as CEO. His food harvested from fields, then transported across great distances. His company’s goods assembled, packaged, shipped. Apple advertisements scripted, cast, filmed. Lawsuits processed. Office wastebaskets emptied and ink cartridges filled. Job creation goes both ways. Yet with the vast majority of workers effectively invisible to elites busy in their lovable occupations, how can it be surprising that the heavy strains faced by today’s workers—abysmal wages, massive child care costs, etc.—barely register as political issues even among the liberal faction of the ruling class?

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In ignoring most work and reclassifying the rest as love, DWYL may be the most elegant anti-worker ideology around. Why should workers assemble and assert their class interests if there’s no such thing as work?
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“Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is a privilege, a sign of socioeconomic class. Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and co-sign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can bestow DWYL as career advice upon those covetous of her success.
By Miya Tokumitsu

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In The Name of Love

It’s Time to Dance

It’s Time to Dance

Posted by Moonlight Gypsy
Everything has its time in life. There are moments to smile, moments to cry, moments to reflect and moments to stand up and be strong; there have always been such moments and there will always be, as this is a part of life. Of course, for many of us, such moments often collide together bringing us a collaboration of feelings and experiences in the blink of an eye. Then there are those seemingly endless moments where we feel almost devoid of anything; those gaps or spaces in-between the spaces of life that somehow seem empty and without meaning. No one ever said being human was easy...
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In a single moment we can feel as though we are at the

epicentre of a whirlwind so strong, we can hardly stand up; we struggle to stay upright, battling to go on. And then, just like those few moments after a storm has passed, we find the stillness and the quiet before the world wakes up and becomes itself once again, and this moment brings us insight, wisdom and clarity, helping us to carry on and inspiring us to live our lives as richly and as fully as possible. Of course, both states of being are a part of the bigger whole as we cannot have one without the other. Like the day that follows the night, storms come and go in life, moments pass and, as Heraclitus once declared, ‘you can never step into the same river; for new waters are always flowing on to you’.
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Change is a part of life and the more conscious of change we become, the more aware we are of the millions of moments that come together to make up the whole. Life is not about the number of moments we have but about the quality of those moments. We can never know what lies around the next corner in life, and why would we want to as surely such knowledge will keep us even more acutely focused on the future and away from the present moment? The best gift we have in life is the present, and rather than define ourselves by the past or by aspirations or hope for the future, when we live in the present moment, life becomes richer, fuller and more energised as we stop living conditionally and start getting on with the business of making the most of each and every moment.
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When we stand on the edge of the boundaries that we imagine and perceive in life, we realise that those boundaries are only there because we allow them to be. When we take a deep breath and re-align, the boundaries fall away as we once again feel centred and unrestrained as we step consciously towards the true infinity of life. Life is, by and large, what we make of it. Stuff happens, change happens, shift happens (often without the f) and although we are not always in control of this, we are in control of how we perceive and respond to such situations.
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Life is a precious gift, and when we begin to truly appreciate this, we realise that there is no room for harbouring anger or bitterness, or clinging on to resentment or pain. When we do, the only person that truly suffers is the one that stares back at us when we gaze in the mirror. Whilst all of our experiences shape and define the paths we walk in life, we do not become them unless we choose to. When we step beyond the boundaries, we begin to feel the freedom of never stepping into the same river twice, not as a way to avoid responsibility or accountability, but the opposite: to consciously and wholeheartedly come alive once again.
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The river flows whether we want it to or not. Life happens. Stuff happens. And yes, some of it isn’t nice; some of it is hideous, painful and beyond reason. Yet, at the same time, life is for living, and the more we embrace this, the more we will realise that it’s not just us that suffers and struggles, in fact, we see that suffering, pain and struggle goes beyond social standing, wealth or intelligence; life is difficult for everyone. It’s not about us personally; never has been, never will be. Of course, knowing this doesn’t actually change anything, but it does lift our heads up away from isolation and disconnection towards realising our own strength and acknowledging that we can either remain victims or we can embrace life once again.
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Everything has its time in life and we have a choice: embrace each moment (leaning into any discomfort) to become free, or we can keep on keeping on. When we choose to embrace each moment, we fully appreciate the value of life and we become more aware of the preciousness of life. Such a realisation wakes us up and inspires us to dance more consciously with all that life has to offer; we become integral parts of the Whole and feel the life force flowing freely within.
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As the river of life continues to flow and the currents chop

and change, it is time now to find the strength within to let go and to become One with the flow, opening up to living authentically, joyfully and consciously. In essence, it seems that this is the time to dance...
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You are encouraged to share articles as long as copyright and contact information are always included. Thank you for your courtesy. Sarah-Jane Grace www.sarahjanegrace.com
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Copyright © 2006-2013 Sarah-Jane Grace. All Rights Reserved
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