A relevant work as we try to find light in these challenging times, famed author of Little Women (1868) Louisa May Alcott wrote this collection of fairy tales for her childhood friend, Ellen Emerson. Flower Fables was, in fact, her very first publication.

"To Ellen Emerson,

For whom they were fancied,

these flower fables

Are inscribed,

By her friend,

the author." (Louisa May Alcott, Boston, Dec. 9, 1854)

These lush tales, featuring fairies, elves, and sprites in the form of wildflowers interacting with the natural elements, emphasize the need for kindness and love in our connections with one another and reflect Alcott's reverence for nature.

Eckhart Tolle has suggested that flowers could be viewed as the enlightenment of plants: "Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves. Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge between the world of physical forms and the formless."

Certainly, and tragically, the creature in the 1931 film version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus sees flower and child as one, and is heartbroken when he accidentally kills the child. Would that all monsters had such lovely souls.

Echoes of The Stolen Child by Yeats. Perhaps the fairies took her:

"Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand.

For the world's more full of weeping

Than you can understand."