Troll

A dark morning, a cold stillness. Today the temperature sits at 45 degrees fahrenheit and thankfully, we sit inside the fable house. Today is Friday.

You will find them in places like caves or under bridges, and they often are huge creatures that are often described as troublemakers. They look like the one here. This was one of about nine trolls to be found in the south bay botanic garden. If an adult was standing next to this troll, they would be about the same height as the two toes closest to the ground!

The troll here was in meditation on "trash" - Kamma Can – takes things that we humans throw away as trash, and sees potential. All the stuff around that has been made into troll jewelry is nothing more than the discards that were not seen as having any use.

One person's discard - another person's treasure. We see this all the time.

This troll reminds us that even in our refuse, there can be found the spirit of creativity. Maybe that is the thing we need to rediscover in our daily lives - the spirit of creativity that allows us to open the door to imagination, which in turn allows us to open the possibility of shifting from destruction to development. The development of our consciousness as well as development of the material things that exist in the world.

The new skills that are needed to survive into the years ahead will require more creativity, more capacity to see potential, and more ability to shift into the gear of our awareness of how things can be made more useful and beautiful. Out of disasters and destruction, the space opens to allow for the emergence into the unknown. And the unknown may not be terrible; it could equally be beautiful. Mostly we go there through stories, myths, folktales. But we live in a time that is calling upon the world to live into new stories and to create new folktales that will inpsire future generations to live well and to care for one another.

The lessons we all learned about how to see ourselves in this world came from stories we were told as children, and for many - those stories opened up the idea that there is more to living that what we see in our time. There are magical things that can happen. There are important lessons to be handed down from one generation to the next. There are invitations to allow the imagination to be set free so that new discoveries can be made - some of which could really make life much more rich and fascinating, not limited and scary.

The troll is an icon. It is the mythological troll, not the verb "troll". Mostly, we hear about the trolling on the internet and the terribly unhappy and nasty expressions of disagreement on issues that seem to occupy all the news these days.

This troll, the noun - is a creature of imagination. It is the manifestation of the imagination made of abandoned wood, discarded junk, and the spirit of creativity in the heart/mind of its maker. And the effect: delight, wonder, and awe.