[continued from previous message]

All the boys in town wanted to be with her. She was emanating warmth, tenderness, softness and gentleness - a pink cloud about her that felt like cherry blossoms or orchids - and while she knew she could not be with everyone,
she wanted to share with
people the beauty inside her so that they too could see what she saw and be kind and joyful like her. Her parents said that she needed to toughen herself, so she swam in ice-cold river, hiked long distances in the mountains, jumped off of cliffs and
walked through brambles. And throughout all this she remained as she was: Loving, compassionate, soft.

She meditated in a tree, and it came to her that all that the world needed was love. She decided to test that idea by going out into the forest and finding wolves. At the sight of a person they started howling; however she radiated so much warmth from
her heart, that the wolves came to her and let her pet them. After that she said, "Wolves are actually very sweet. I know how to tame them with love."

But people did not believe her, and town people saw all this with disturbance. In effect, they saw someone whose very existence – whose very nature – was a refutation to their worldview. So they attacked her.

She did not know how to answer these people. And although she was right - what she was, was right, and what the world needed and had long needed - she started
to think that there was something wrong with her. So that, although every man in town wanted to
be with her, she left the town and married the hunter in a village far away. He
was obviously unhappy, and she thought that she could make him happy by loving him. That was a bad mistake.

He wanted her for all the wrong reasons. He saw her outer beauty, even as he had no value at all for the beauty she had inside. Seeing her gentleness, he thought she would be compliant and obedient. However, when he tried to make her
abort their infant
and she refused, he turned into a monster. For fifteen years he made it his project to completely destroy her and wipe from the world everything for which she stood. He brutalized her, tortured her emotionally, attacked everything in her and even shouted
at her any time she laughed. The love that made it possible for her to tame wolves, he saw as a threat to his project: To control everything and everyone in his environment and make them believe the kind of love and beauty and promise she gave to be
nonexistent, so that they would acquiesce to a bestial existence in which he was in control.

She thought that she was responsible for what he was doing and saying. And while she was willing to let him do whatever he was going to do to her, she refused to let him destroy their children. So that, when he made it his project
to do to their children
what he had been doing to her - and when her children told her that they would rather live in a dump than in that hell house - the Riding Hood left her husband and set off on her own.

Her father was at first angry at her, but as she explained to him what had happened he became more understanding. Her mother said that she had been unlucky. After they saw what had happened, they said that she had gotten taken advantage of because of her
trusting nature - and tried to tell her what she needed to do to make sure that
people did not take advantage of her again.

On her own, she again started painting. Her experience allowed her works to have depth that they had not had before, and many people found it fascinating to see her new message: Of beauty that passes through horror and retains its hope, tenderness and
love. And while the town women were still grumbling about her, more people were
able to appreciate her and what she was doing.

One day a troubadour from the Never-Neverland was traveling through the village. He sang sad songs about love lost, about injustice in the world, about
tragic fates of people in his country. She came to talk to him, and he fell in love with her instantly.
He saw her spirit - tender, warm, gentle, caring, and unbelievably beautiful -
and he knew that he had discovered the most magnificent human being he'd ever known. Someone who was loving, spectacular and heroic. Someone who was beautiful all the way to
the bone and had kept that beauty alive in impossible circumstances. Who was in
her very being a principle of what the world can and should be.

He started writing her songs that celebrated her spirit and unbelievable beauty. Songs that put into words the goodness and tenderness and kindness she had within. Songs that expressed in words what she sought to express in her paintings and what she had
in her soul. Songs that sought to impart, in writing, the magnificence that she
was.

She loved him, and he loved her. One day he held her, and as he let go she started walking away with a heartbroken look on her face. "No," he said, and held her again, and kept holding her until the pain was gone. "I want to burn up in my love for you,"
he told her on another morning. They went to the mountains and held each other on the ground amid blooming clovers and daisies, as the setting sun in the west
sent its last rays through the clouds and alit them in pink. They swam in the river, and,
saying "let me be your ocean," she let him recline into her. He placed his soul
inside of hers and from it sculpted his songs.

Meanwhile the people in town said that there was a scandal. They said that the town princess was having a romance with a crazy troubadour. Town people - wife-beaters, philanderers, child-molesters, nagging wives, people in loveless marriages - looked
down on them and said they were freaks and claimed their relationship to be sick when it was the only loving relationship in town. Her children told her that they needed to protect her from the troubadour - the man who loved her beyond anything in the
world - after having done nothing to protect her from her brute of a husband. Her brothers were cruel to her, and her parents beseeched her to go back to the
town of her birth, where they said people were more appreciative and more understanding of her
and would treat her better.

The troubadour realized that he would be unable to keep the Riding Hood, and he
let her go back to her parents' town while continuing to write songs about her.
She had shown him beauty beyond his wildest imagination; and as he saw and celebrated this
beauty his eyes were opened to the sublime in the universe. A whole new dimension of life opened up for him - a dimension he had not known before, and that contained enough inspiration for a lifetime of songs and a lifetime of beauty and joy. And though
the troubadour and the Riding Hood were apart, she continued inspiring him for years thereafter, and his works found appreciative audiences among people in different towns and villages all around the land.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)