JOY ALONG THE WAY: FREEDOM, SUNSHINE, A LITTLE FLOWER

When I turned the page of my Mary Engelbreit calendar to July, there was the message, "Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower." Mary always has a message or maybe only a single word for each month. She attributed the July quotation to Hans Christian Andersen, which prompted me to revisit Hans. I couldn't remember from which fairy tale the quotation had come and since it delighted me so I thought I'd like to find and read it again, if not for the first time.

I took my Super Information Highway over to the Public Library and came home with a suitable number of books about and by H.C.S. I thought it would be a sort of "needle in a haystack" adventure considering the many tales of Andersen, but a pleasant, nostalgic adventure.

I hadn't got very far into my revisitation of Andersen before I came across the word, heavy-minded, in the foreword. Humm, heavy minded. Hadn't encountered that word before.

Would it be the opposite of light-minded, such appellation being assigned to the not-so-bright. You can find light-minded in the dictionary but not heavy-minded.

Taken out of the context where I found the word, I began to apply my own theory of heavy-mindedness. Surely it would be someone with multitudinous brain cells who could contribute to the theory of atomic spectra and formulate the theory of special and general relativity (Einstein). Or someone who could present the thought that the idea of a thing is more important than the thing itself (Plato).

Putting the word back into the author's (Walpole) context, I'm sure I never want to be heavy-minded for this new word described one who would be unperceptive and would never understand the wonderful fairy stories, wonderful because they are filled through and through with that sense of oddity and loneliness that gives human beings so much beauty.

I digress here a bit to note a similar thought from Emily Dickinson. Speaking of one whose life was dingy (dirty, shabby, drab) she says, "He danced along the dingy days. And this bequest of wings was but a book. What liberty a loosened spirit brings." Surely a loosened spirit is not heavy-minded. Heavy-minded people would never see fairy rings in the grass, nor empathize with Shakespeare who had a character say, "Where the bee sucks, there suck I. In a cowslip's bell I lie . . ."

Having settled in my own mind what it would be like to be heavy-minded, I got on with my search. I suppose I could have called some Hans Christian Andersen buff, or Engelbreit herself and saved a lot of time. But how better to spend one's free time on a summer day than finding something to read that dealt with sunshine, freedom and a little flower.

I looked in the index of Andersen's fairy tales for a title that would be suggestive of light and airy things and decided to turn to the tale, "The Butterfly." Found my quotation immediately. The hapless butterfly, fluttering its life away because it had become too particular about the flowers it chose to visit found itself, when winter came, to be cold and weary. However, it found a warm and comfortable place inside where it thought it could then live forever, but came to realize, "To live you must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower."

To that I would add only, "And stop fluttering, heavy-mindedly along the dingy ways.

REJOICE

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast MIssourian.