A quote from one of my favorite books has set the stage for an ongoing process in my life. The Velveteen Rabbit is a tale of a little boy whose toys dispense wisdom to each other,  the child and the reader of this classic. The rabbit, who is a bit insecure and wondering if the tot will favor him, asks the insightful Skin Horse how toys become real.

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit        

I sense that we are all born real, but somehow that gets schooled, acculturated, media-ed, beaten, religion-ed, politicized, criticized and drugged out of us. By the time we are old enough to voice our emotions, we have forgotten our genuine identity, which is Love. The thing about being real is that our shields are down and we risk vulnerability. When we are vulnerable, we are like that bare naked bunny whose hair has been loved off. We have a choice. We can decide that we want to be pristine and kept in a box, like a Star Wars action figure that we want to be worth a lot of money down the road, or we can come out of our container, as we get down and dirty with life. Emotional boo boos and bruises could be part and parcel of that adventure. We bump up against other ‘real’ human beings with their own baggage to haul about.

I have been on both sides of the box, shielding myself by ‘playing it safe,’ with the mistaken belief that I was protected from pain and have dashed out into the world, emotionally buck nekkid. I had feared that by exposing my darkest secrets and deepest heart longing, people would run screaming. Not so. If anything, they drew closer, since they felt a kinship. When we dare to bare, we give others permission to do the same.

Here’s to being blissful bunnies, even if we have to get shabby in the process~