Anything Can Happen If You Let It

I expected a night of enjoyment. I expected the kind of magic that only something with a Disney touch can provide. I expected to hum along the words I knew so well. I expected to delight in watching my adopted niece enchanted by the dance and the music. What I did not expect when I walked into the Amsterdam Theatre last night was to hear Mary Poppins feeding me wisdom along with that spoonful of sugar.


This is a children's story after all. I didn't recall  learning anything more from the story than all the words to  Chim Chim Cer-ee and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. If Mary Poppins  had served me up a deeper message back in the Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke version, I didn't remember.


Until she uttered those words. "Anything can happen if you let it." 


The words ran through every cell of my being.
Anything can happen if you let it.
Of course it can!  I know that. I believed that as I child. I forgot it for a very long time, buried under that pile of twists and turns life takes us on.  I've studied and worked long and hard to relearn that wisdom and embrace the truth of what she was saying.


Making things happen was about allowing them to.
I could think of a long list of spiritual teachers from Abraham Hicks to Florence Scovel Shinn with a version of this I had read. But Mary Poppins? Is that really where I heard it first?


I caught the face of my niece who sat mesmerized by the lights and the music. A little girl, who if not for the love, generosity and never wavering faith in this very belief  of the woman who is her mother, would still be sitting inside of an orphanage in Guatemala instead of the oldest theatre on Broadway surrounded by her cousins and aunts and grandmother. 


Whether she heard Mary Poppins as I did last night is of no matter. It is in her cells as it was in mine. And if along the way she forgets she will have moments like last night when it hits her and she will feel the full truth of the statement. She might do as I did, start counting up all the miracles that she can remember that manifested when she allowed them to.  Starting with the one that is her.