The Fairy Years

Magic is real—we just pretend it isn’t. This reflection explores imagination, therapy, and rehumanization through a father’s eyes watching his daughter believe in fairies—and what it means to believe again as adults.

Magic Is Real

Magic is real.
We just pretend it isn’t.

My daughter believes in fairies right now.
A friend told me she misses “the fairy years,” and I had trouble recognizing that there will come a day when my daughter won’t believe.

I tell myself I’ll keep the faith.
I’ll believe in fairies for the both of us—until she has kids of her own, and we get permission to believe again.

Secretly, I hope the fairy years last forever.

Seeing Bigger

We look for fairy houses and fairy doors.
Today we found one tucked behind a tree—its tiny doorway stuffed with grass and bark.

I love that her world is so big.
Bigger than most.

She not only believes in what she sees;
she believes with her imagination.
And what a beautiful gift that is.

How tragic that most of us see our world so small—
a little blue dot spinning in space,
a speck among billions.

But we are not small.
We are full of magic and creativity.
We are fairies.
We are sacred.

Forgetting the Magic

Why, then, do we pretend to be anything else?

Because the systems we live in tell us who to be—
and most often, that word is consumer.

We have to spend money just to be in public.
That’s why I love libraries so much.

They are the dying temples of loitering.
The last places where you can just exist.

Let’s bring back the magic.
Let’s believe again.

There are no rules.
No one will get upset with you for pretending.
The beautiful thing about pretending is that you can hold it so lightly.

Therapy as Remembering

When I sit with people in therapy,
what I’m really inviting them into is belief.

Not belief in a doctrine or a diagnosis—
but belief in their own capacity to heal,
in their own goodness,
in the possibility that something inside them still knows the way.

The best therapy is rehumanizing.
It helps you remember that you’re not a problem to solve
or a brain to optimize.
You are a living conversation between soul and circumstance.

When we talk, we are not just processing thoughts—
we are rebuilding trust in the unseen:
the body’s wisdom,
the mystery of timing,
the quiet way the heart tells the truth.

That’s what my daughter reminds me of every day.
She doesn’t separate imagination from reality—
and maybe that’s the secret.
Because healing starts when you believe something more is possible.

When Pretending Turns to Believing

Something strange started happening when I began pretending again.
I started to actually believe.

It began with signs and wonders—
little winks from creation.

A hawk.
A deer.
A coyote crossing my path in broad daylight.

Wild things appearing in the rhythm of Bay Area life, reminding me:
We can pretend wilderness doesn’t exist, but it’s always there.

Then creation not only winked—
it started to speak.

Its language wasn’t words,
but experience.
A knowing.
A witness.

A realization that I am part of reality,
and reality is in constant conversation with me.

And I can talk back.

That, too, is therapy.
A conversation with what’s real—
a remembering of what’s been here all along.

Rehumanization as a Sacred Act

Maybe that’s what belief really is—
rehumanization.

A return to wonder.
A decision to see the world not as a system to manage,
but as a living field that notices you back.

Therapy, at its best, is the same thing.
It’s two humans meeting in that field,
trading stories,
holding space for one another’s aliveness.

It’s not about becoming perfect—
it’s about becoming real.

The Invitation

So what do I want to say to creation?
I wonder.

But I already know.

I want to go into the woods
and look for fairies with my daughter.

Because maybe healing isn’t about learning to think better—
it’s about remembering how to believe again.

Where Wonder Becomes Healing

At Sacred Work, this is the heart of what Katie and I try to protect: the parts of you that remember magic. The parts that haven’t given up on possibility. The quiet intuition that knows there is more to life than coping and optimizing and surviving.

Most people don’t come to therapy because something is wrong with them.
They come because something true inside them is trying to reemerge.

Therapy, when it’s done well, is a return to wonder.
A slow walk back to the place where imagination, intuition, and humanity still live.
A place where your story is held with reverence—not analyzed to death.

In our practice, the work isn’t about fixing you.
It’s about helping you hear yourself again.
Helping you reconnect to what’s alive, what’s sacred, what’s quietly calling your name.

If you’re longing for a kind of therapy that feels human and imaginative and deeply real—
a space where your inner world is treated as something worthy—
we’d love to walk with you.