Food for thought: fear not

by chuckofish

St. George window in the Princeton United Methodist Church by Tiffany Studio of New York City

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Alexander fighting dragons, Le livre et la vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre, Paris, c. 1420–25

Kunisada dragon

Arthur Rackham

‘St. George and the Dragon’, by Wassily Kandinsky, 1911

‘The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun’, by William Blake

The Reluctant Dragon by Maxfield Parrish