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Maybe you've seen faeries. Maybe you haven't. Up until the point he finished his 1978 bestselling book, Faeries, neither had Brian Froud.
But after completing the book, the faerie world suddenly opened up to him. "When I went on a booksigning tour, I started to see faeries all over the place - in Seattle and San Francisco, in a park in Portland and on a riverside bench in Chicago," said Froud, an English artist who lives in a 15th-century Devon longhouse situated in Dartmoor National Park.
"It tended to be either in small plantings or areas where there were trees in cities. Often nature is a doorway to faeries, but at the same time, they're not exclusive to the countryside. They are an urban phenomena as well."
Froud believes that it is only with the heart that one can see faeries. "I feel that you see faeries not through your eyes but through your heart," he said. "When I have seen a faerie on the street, it's a visual image in a specific place that's real, but it's an internal thing."
He reminds those seeking the mythical creatures that faeries inhabit the interior of the earth and the interior of all things, so the first place to look is in the interior of one's self.
The best time to see them is at dawn, noon, twilight, midnight, during the equinox, at Halloween and when we are half-asleep.
"Any time that is betwixt and between or transitional is their favorite time," Froud said. "They inhabit transitional spaces - borders and boundaries, such as the bottom of the garden, in a space between man-made cultivation and wilderness, or the edges of water where it is neither land nor lake, neither path nor pond. Be patient. They are often too busy to prove they exist. They know they exist.
Faeries hit the No. 4 spot on the New York Times bestseller list when it was published 25 years ago. (I remember spending hours poring through his book as a kid, immersing...