Iara Lima

“Fairfarren.”

Some words seem to be born already expressing how much we miss someone.

The expression became known in the film Alice in Wonderland (2010), directed by Tim Burton. It does not appear in Lewis Carroll’s original books, but the word were enough to synthesize something that, curiously, exists in many stories: the wish that someone may cross a long journey and find a good path.

I have always liked Alice’s universe.

While many children chose a favorite princess, I chose precisely the girl who fell down a rabbit hole to discover a world where almost nothing obeyed common logic.

Perhaps because Alice never sought a kingdom. She sought to understand a world that changed all the time.

This text, as you have already noticed, is Meraki.

Because I want to tie together some threads that, for a long time, walked separately within me.

In literature, mythology, and psychology, there is a figure known as a psychopomp one who plays the role of guiding someone through a crossing.

He does not always lead the dead; often he guides the living when they leave behind an old form of existing and do not yet know how to inhabit the new one.

In Alice in Wonderland, the White Rabbit fulfills exactly this role. He explains nothing, just runs past, and Alice chooses to follow him.

It is curious to notice how many guides appear like this in life they don’t push anyone. They just pass before us, awaken a question, and go their own way.

In Carroll’s story, another guide appears: the Cheshire Cat.

While the Rabbit leads Alice to the door, the Cat teaches her how to walk once she has already entered. It is he who says that everyone there is mad, and that in that place, seeking absolute normality might mean losing precisely what makes the journey possible.

This image of animals as guides does not belong only to English literature.

In different traditions, animals appear as mediators between the human world and other dimensions of existence. Among many traditions, shamans establish a deep dialogue with nature, understanding plants, rivers, and animals as participants in the same network of relationships.

In Celtic traditions as well, we find narratives in which deer, ravens, salmon, and other animals cross the boundary between the everyday world and the world of the sacred. Not because these cosmologies have a common origin.

But because different peoples developed similar ways of understanding a living nature, inhabited by presences, cycles, and teachings.

The more I study these traditions, the more I realize that all of them seem to ask the same question: Who accompanies us when we cross through a change?

Alice, deep down, is not about telling the story of a girl, but of anyone who, one day, needed to leave the world they knew to discover another completely different one.

A few years ago, a dear friend chose exactly that movement. He moved to Ireland. Since then, our conversations have crossed an ocean.

Now he is leaving again. This time, however, he also takes with him an embroidery made by me.

I like to think that a piece of my work will continue to keep him company on that crossing. Perhaps that is what embroidery also does it does not always prevent distance, but it finds a silent way of remaining present within it.

And that is why I like the expression created by Tim Burton so much. It does not merely wish a good trip. It wishes that the crossing be fruitful. That the paths be gentle. That there be good encounters along the way. That a White Rabbit always appears when it is time to leave.

And a Cheshire Cat when we no longer know where to go.

Just as I began this text, I wish you: Fairfarren, my friend!