The greatest thing you'll ever learn Is just to love and be loved in return

The Sprites

Has it ever happened to you? You sing along to something only to realise that it was a song recorded years before you were born. Sometimes it’s from another century and there is no possible reason why you should know the lyrics or tune.

Or, there is a conversation and suddenly you hear yourself contribute a piece of information or a fact you didn’t know, indeed, couldn’t have known. It can make you suddenly think. “Where did that come from?” Friends look at you with a quizzical expression. You begin to puzzle and wonder, casting your mind back and then the clouds descend. How could you have known it?

Don’t worry. I can clear the fog. There is a chance, a small chance, that you are a Sprite. Now don’t blanche at the thought and don’t get confused about what you understand a sprite to be. Really don’t, because a sprite is not what folk tale and legend tells you. They couldn’t tell the truth because no one could or would really understand. But if you think you could be a sprite then read on because you should know.

OK, it should be just us now

Well, a Sprite lives through time. We have been here since the very beginning but very few of us go back that far.

Now how can I best explain this? 

Ah, this might help.

You know those flies that live on the top of water. They just suddenly appear and skate across the surface causing tiny ripples before flying off again.

Well imagine time as the surface of a gently flowing river. Everything is happening below. If you could go back to the source of the stream you could see the very start of time. But we can’t go backwards. Sprites, like life, can only go forward.

And so we do, touching the surface of time for brief moments. Brief moments to us but the period of a complete life for a human. Over our time we live many, many lives creating tiny ripples in time before flying off to land somewhere in the future.

We are always there when great things are happening. It’s our job to try encourage people, to give them the support to do great things, to help them believe. It doesn’t always work because there is evil out there – it comes as fear, doubt, laziness, jealousy, selfishness and other shadows that rob people of their hopes and dreams.

In our lives we have seen so many, many things that our heads would explode if we could remember them all. So each time we leave one life to land at our next we have forgotten everything. Well, not quite everything and that’s why sometimes you find yourself singing a song you don’t know or saying something you never knew.

This is particularly true with our last Sprite life. You see, being made a Sprite is a sort of punishment for having once been a person who fed and delighted in the shadows. So when you are Sprite you can’t really interact with people, can’t build proper friendships, it is like being a spectator in life. You might recognise that in you. Standing at the edge of parties and groups wondering what people find to talk about.

That is, until you find last life, and you never know when that might be because for a Sprite life to end you have to have great fortune, the greatest.

You have to be loved unreservedly by someone and that is hard. A Sprite finds it difficult to be part of life, to be part of people, to be part of a relationship but it can happen and that’s half of the miracle. We are difficult, moody, distracted – no ones ideal partner. So if you are lucky enough to find someone who can love you unreservedly you are truly lucky indeed. The other half of the miracle is also hard. You have to love them back too and without reservation. Don't fear it, it is the most liberating feeling in the world to realise someone means more to you than your own life.

I have a lot of memories from other lives coming back to me now. They can confuse my head but I can make myself smile by just thinking about the person who loves me. I stare in wonder into the eyes of someone who can make this life real. A human who loves someone without reservation. 

There is a song that came back to me the other day. I don’t know when I first heard it but one thing is certain, my Sprite life is over.

There was a boy

A very strange, enchanted boy

They say he wandered very far

Very far, over land and sea

A little shy and sad of eye

But very wise was he

And then one day,

One magic day he passed my way

While we spoke of many things

Fools and Kings

This he said to me

The greatest thing you'll ever learn

Is just to love and be loved in return