Untitled - CSUN ScholarWorks - California State University, Northridge

V)
Vl
QJ
-o
·o
0
u
(j)
.::J.
QJ
..!:
......
.8
t:
(j)
u
Vl
(j)
0
70
I am not afraid. Not of another person coming. No one is
coming. It is only myself I face in this silence, my mind
breathing in the whiteness, reflecting it, my mind
expanding to fill the space between the frozen creek bed
and the dark canopy.
As a young girl I dreamed of being the fairy tale
princess so familiar in stories like Cinderella and Snow
White. These tales told me to desire passivity, physical
beauty, the handsome male energy to save me from the
dangers of the patriarchal world. Those were my conscious
daydreams. I didn't know enough to question them. But at
night, it was the goddess herself that called to me from the
matriarchal world. It is I that you want. I am the power. You
are powerful through me. And I saved this information away
deep, buried where no one could see it or contradict it.
Thus it is the shattering of the magical mirror that is
the impetus of the Snow Queen tale, in which the young
male character, Kai, has the unlucky fate of catching a tiny
piece of that sharp glass in his heart and thus begins to see
the world through the distorted perspective of one who is
unloved and unloving. He is easily lured away from his
family when he hitches his sled to the back of the Snow
Queen's sleigh for a ride, She flies away to her palace of ice
far away in the north, leaving his family behind to wonder
at his disappearance. In this version of the joumey myth,
the little boy has become the damsel in distress as his
young female friend, Gerda, begins her joumey as
protagonist to find and save him. But I know that her
joumey lies not outward in the world but rather in the
deep, deep down place of the ice palace, to the goddess
herself.
Gerda first goes to the river where the villagers believe
the young boy has drowned. There she throws her new red
shoes into the river hoping for an exchange. One pair of
new red shoes for her best friend. The river's water carries