Can a fairy village save the world?

Thoughts on the power of small acts of beauty, love, and care

The sign screwed into the bark of a tree read “Fairy Village” and it was painted with small colourful flowers. You’ll spot it no more than a few hundred feet into your walk on the on the Caledon Trailway Path in Tottenham, and once you do, it won’t take you long to begin spotting fairy houses and fairy doors and other such fairy-related things.

Being that is was mid-October, the path had a mix of colourful deciduous trees and unchanging coniferous trees. It felt like a play was taking place before us and all the actors were getting in the right places on stage as we move through autumn’s colourful crescendo into the austerity of the year’s cold and dark months.

There must’ve been 100 fairy-related accoutrements along this path and each time you discovered one, your eye would immediately catch another. From doors high up on trees to caravans hanging off branches to cottages nestled in the crevice of where tree trunk met ground.

“People are amazing,” I said to my wife as our daughter ran ahead to find more evidence of fairies. “They don’t have to do this, but they do, and look at how much joy it brings.”

Not to turn a good thought so quickly into a criticism, but I couldn’t help but think, in that moment, that there are too few people who are doing good just for the sake of doing good. Like whoever put together the fairy village. They’re not looking for compensation, they’re not looking for clout, they’re just going about their lives — like we all are — finding ways to make their little corner of the world more beautiful and welcoming. It’s like communal homemaking. I think the academics call it placemaking, which I kinda like.

But homemaking and placemaking only happen when you are invested in the place you live. And for many reasons, fewer and fewer people are invested in where they live.

To use our family’s situation as an example, we rent our apartment and we’ve been in a mindset for the past five or six years in which we constantly banter around the idea of moving somewhere less expensive, somewhere cleaner, somewhere smaller. Even though we haven’t left (yet), living with one foot out of the door can zap you of any desire to invest physical, mental, and emotional labour into your home and community.

Thankfully, to the benefit of our family and of society, there are people who have deep, lasting ties to the place they live and they build fairy villages and clean up other peoples’ garbage, and go to council meetings, and so on and so forth. They’re engaged because they’re invested.

And the thing with being invested in a place and a community is that is slows life down for you. You can wake up every day from now until the day you die and know that this is where you are going to live, so you can focus on making it great. Contrast that with the mental exhaustion that comes with feeling like you never have a home or that your home isn’t worth caring for. Growing up, people dismissed and scorned the idea of one day having a home and a family and a white picket fence, but I don’t know… that seems like the exact thing so many people crave now, does it not? It means you put your stake in the ground and said, “This is mine, and I am going to care for it.”

You can change the world, even just the little world you inhabit daily, by building a fairy village or tending to your white picket fence.

Am I wrong? I feel like that’s exactly right.

There is a sign on the way out of the fairy village that thanks you for visiting, just like a sign you’d see on the way out of some postcard-like town that makes you feel as though you are leaving somewhere nice, somewhere safe, somewhere you want to return to again in the future.

And just beyond that sign was The Giving Tree, which was something I’ve not seen before. Passersby were invited to write notes of encouragement and uplifting messages to people, like us, who stop to take notice. Some folks used the tags to express their love for a special person in their life. It was all so… nice.

The very public, well-traveled path was filled with families, which wasn’t a surprise given that it was Thanksgiving weekend and the weather was just about perfect. Kids were running about, dogs were bolting in and out of bushes, and fishermen found quiet spots just off the beaten paths to cast their lines in search of bass and sunfish.

It was everything a short family hike through a bustling little town ought to be. Sure, there was garbage strewn about and too many dog poop bags hung from trees (one is too many), but the goodness of it all drowned out the negligence of the delinquent few who can’t help but try to spoil it all.

The work we do in our communities doesn’t need to look perfect, it doesn’t need anyone’s permission — certainly not the government’s permission — It just needs me and you to care one percent more.

So, in an effort to express my desire to care more about where I live, I am going to decorate one fairy door this week and place it somewhere outside in our community. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Will you join me?