The Imaginative Language of Fairy Tales
Once upon a time.
A phrase that opens a threshold.
The light in the room changes.
The pages turn slowly.
A voice begins to tell a story.
The child listens.
Outside, the world continues, but for a moment another time begins.
A time made of dark forests, speaking animals, black ravens, red berries, horses crossing the night, castles hidden among the trees.
The images arrive.
They do not ask for explanations.
They remain.
Imagination
When I was a child, my father used to read me Russian fairy tales before sleep.
I remember the voice, the rhythm of the words, the particular attention that belongs to that moment before dreaming.
Years later, I read the Grimm fairy tales to my son.
The same images travelled through another voice, another room, another time.
Perhaps some stories do not truly belong to those who tell them.
They pass through us.
Like an underground river.
They change as they move through different lives.
Living Thought
A fairy tale heard in childhood does not remain in the past.
It continues to work within us.
The forest we encountered in a story may return many years later, when we find ourselves standing before a threshold in our own life.
The hidden house.
The journey.
The unexpected encounter.
The wound.
The transformation.
These are not only elements of a narrative.
They are images that have accompanied human beings through time.
Perhaps living thought is born in this way:
not from something we have learned,
but from something that has continued to grow inside us.
Form
Every creative gesture perhaps begins in the same place.
Before the word.
Before the colour.
Before the material.
In that moment when something has not yet found its form, but is quietly waiting.
Some images do not disappear.
They remain.
They change with us.
And one day they return, asking to become visible.
