{Education of the Heart} Book Excerpt

July 1, 2021. Princes William and Harry unveiling memorial stature of their mother,
Diana, Princess of Wales, in the Kensington Palace Gardens.

Excerpt from 

Education of the Heart 

final chapter

The Spiritual Mission of a Princess

{my still-in-the-works book}

With the enlightening gift of hindsight, hazy fragments of life can fall into place: “Oh, that’s what he was trying to tell us.” “Oh, that was the real message of her life.” Millions of words have been written about Diana Spencer Mountbatten-Windsor’s life and death. Some focused on the superficial and sentimental, the fashionably theatrical storyboard of her life; others focused on glorifying the virtuous humanitarian, even romanticizing her ‘saintly’ nature. (So it goes with a beautiful and tragic charismatic figure.) It’s a more mindful version of the latter that interested me. A flawed yet deeply empathetic princess, under the brightest spotlight on the planet, stands up to the short-sighted patriarchal powers-that-be, puts heart over head, kindness over duty, love over fear. That’s not only courageous, but in a cynical and discordant world, it’s downright subversive! And looking back, this was Diana’s spiritual mission, a mission that ties directly to this present moment as women’s voices are leading the conversation. This is the reason many of us are here during this tumultuous consciousness shift: to anchor the receptive, mystical, powerful, primal energies of the feminine and the reflective, grounded, gentle warrior energies of the masculine—to anchor old soul values, compassionate impulses, and the Earth’s promise of paradise.  

“When he turned 18,” reported royal correspondent Katie Nicholl, “Harry vowed to continue Diana’s charity work, making a public pledge ‘to carry on the things that she didn’t quite finish.’” When Prince Harry turned 36, the same age as his mother when she died, he had some of the same concerns that she had about royal life—its advantages and its limitations. “This is a man who said he wanted to continue his mother’s work,” added biographer Omid Scobie. “We’ve long mourned Diana’s place on the humanitarian landscape, and here we have Harry, who embodies her values and is willing to dedicate his life to them.” Inspired by Diana’s love and experience, and his own deep commitment and empathetic nature, Harry put his wife and son first. He chose his heart.

When we make that kind of choice, a new world opens up, our path becomes clearer, our wings lighter, and the once improbable becomes destined. We find the courage to love, then love again; to let go, then let go again; to let go of the past that no longer serves our evolution in being human. “Human evolution” is the game at hand, claims spiritual visionary Gary Zukav, and it’s also what’s at stake. In this decisive time of the transformation of human consciousness, it’s no longer viable to postpone the sometimes-painful interior work—whether it’s our rage or jealousy or grief—it’s time to face it. And Prince Harry has established a platform with a worldwide audience to courageously lead the way. It’s a hero’s journey, a heroine’s quest, an intimate rite of passage we’re all to take. It’s a journey of a lifetime and it’s the journey each of us chose.  

We may be in a time where it feels like everything precious is at risk. But it’s important to remember that in “between times” like these our perceptions change, things may not be what they seem, miracles happen. This is the era of reconciliation. As we explore this feminine heartbeat pulsing through the world—getting stronger, more powerful, more focused—we reach out to the masculine energies to join in, to make a quantum leap together in creating this new era of harmony. So it’s fitting that we revisit Diana’s life-gift that broke open this “head to heart” revolution as a reminder that love is the only way in and the only way out. ~

{Happy Anniversary...with Love}

In honor of Prince William and Duchess Catherine's wedding anniversary—they married eight years ago today—Vogue is highlighting “A Look Back at Prince William and Kate Middleton’s Royal Romance”….enjoy their story and slideshow!

{Goddess Journey} Part Two

Sharing another section from the “Goddess Journey” chapter of my book-in-progress, A Memory of Love: The Spiritual Mission of a Princess.

 The Reappearing Goddess

“In the middle of the 1970s,” a decade before most of the world became aware of Lady Diana Spencer—and before she added her own ‘goddess’ essence to modern culture—“a paradigm shift took place, partly inspired by the rapid development of the women’s movement,” wrote Lanier Graham. The author of Goddesses told of various books of the time that “revolutionized how people looked at the roots of their spiritual heritage.”

Before books like The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe by archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and When God Was a Woman by art historian Merlin Stone, then later in 1987, a heralded game-changer, The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler, “history textbooks had been stating or implying that the male had always been dominant in Western theology.” The consciousness-shifting winds of the more open-minded Aquarian Age were blowing through—energies we saw in the social upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s—and a truer history of women was being revealed. “Western culture had been dominated by the male-oriented values of Indo-European culture for so long that it took a social revolution—the women’s movement—to start to bring it into balance,” explained Graham.

Discoveries in archaeology, studies in mythology, scholars of social history and linguistics were finding that “goddess cultures tended to be egalitarian, earth-centered, and nonviolent,” and these findings were then being taught in colleges and universities. “The image of the earth as sacred and society as balanced between male and female,” Graham wrote in 1997, “has become a powerful inspiration to people in the women’s movement, the ecology movement, and many other new ways of thinking.”

Joseph Campbell reminded us: “The goddess represents nature. The god represents society. And when you have a mythology that accents a god over a goddess you have a religion that accents society over nature. Then with the Fall, nature itself is cursed.” As we felt these goddess nudges in the first years of the twenty-first century, it was only natural that women and family issues of health and well-being and concerns about the environment were in the headlines. (Our Mother Earth, after all, is metaphorically represented by women’s bodies.) “There is something coming up in our own consciousness now, with the ecology movement,” Campbell wrote over fifty years ago, “recognizing that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and the source of our own living.” It is this “sense of accord” that is so disrupted today. No wonder humans are so out-of-sorts; they have not been in accord with themselves, their very nature, since this break in consciousness. No wonder with the power of this reappearing goddess energy that so much fear-based, women-bashing backlash has been stirred up!

I had a real-life experience of this years ago, and a reflection of the hateful conflicts now on the rise today. In the late 1990s, a friend and I went on a day-long road trip from Atlanta to Huntsville, Alabama, to see an exhibit at the Space Center, where neither of us had ever visited. We turned off the expressway and while driving through the rural countryside, I saw a sign with huge, hand-painted letters; it was like a punch in the gut similar to what I felt on November 9, 2016. The message read: “FATHER CHURCH, YES. MOTHER NATURE, NO.”

That seems to sum up this violent backlash coming at us today, as I sit here writing in 2018—with the toxic masculine and the dark feminine trying to destroy the “mother” in all of us, the nurturing spirit of humanity, the health and well-being of our life-sustaining home, our sacred mother, our “Mother Earth.”

Lanier Graham gives us this history, writing at the end of the twentieth century:

...a few thousand years ago many goddess-oriented civilizations were destroyed by extremely aggressive Indo-European tribes. They demolished the old cities and then reconfigured civilization throughout most of the settled world from Greece to India. These barbarians worshipped aggressive sky gods and had scant room in their theology for goddesses; to them, women were little more than property and sexual objects. Not only did male gods become supreme, but females lost their sacredness, in a dramatic turning-around in human history that my friend Joseph Campbell called the ‘patriarchal inversion.’ It was even argued by some fathers of the early Christian Church in Rome that women had no souls. Twentieth-century men have at last started to realize that when males lost their reverence for that which is female, they also lost something within themselves.

The grasping, last-gasp obscenities of this “patriarchal inversion” were on display in the dignified halls of the United States Senate Building in Washington D.C. in the autumn of 2018 when leering, screeching white men defended their outdated network of cruelty and cronyism—no matter the cost or number of souls squandered—against one lone, brave woman speaking her truth. (And whether anyone was aware or not, she was representing the goddess spirit in us all.) This cowardly mischief was cheered on by a president whose motto seems to come directly from Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s patched-together monster, as written by Mary Shelley two-hundred years ago: “If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.”

This is what happens when humanity is disconnected from the “spiritual feminine,” Jim Fitzgerald wrote in “The Death of the Heart,” his essay for When a Princess Dies. “Since Reformation times, there has been a dearth of religious imagery, particularly of women, through which both men and women might maintain a connection to the spiritual feminine.” What imagery that remained left “a divine King but no Queen” in both the consciousness and unconsciousness of men and women. This created a split, according to Fitzgerald, as the feminine spirit became an object of “the rational mind”—and its profane opinions and deprived thoughts. “This split—of mind from matter, of spirit from nature—has continued to the present.” However, when he wrote this at the time of Diana’s death, near the end of a millennium, Fitzgerald was among many who sensed things were changing. “The values of the heart, not those of the mind, have begun to be sought after and appreciated. A new relationship to the Earth and Nature is growing. We are witnessing a change of heart.” 

The rise of Trumpery—and the hate it stands for and the “loss of soul” it reveals—is a desperate strike against this new heart energy. “I think it was this that Diana, as a woman of the times, equally a sufferer from the ills and neuroses of modern life, it was this new heart that she represented,” Fitzgerald added. And it is this “new heart”—a sacred calling of the “spiritual feminine”—that Diana and Charles’ sons inherited and now speak its message, as well as live its values, from their spot-lit world stage. These are aware, awakening men—who attracted and married aware, awake women—and they are rallying the “new heart” troops, encouraged along by the reemerging goddess consciousness their mother helped crack open!

I think of Diana and her sons when I read lines from a Sharon Olds’ poem about feeling less raw after experiencing such heartache, “as if some goddess of humanness within us caressed us with a gush of tenderness.”

[“Glorious Inanna,” third and final section of this goddess-focused chapter, posted soon.]

{The Real Fairy Tale}

My article, "The Real Fairy Tale," is in the latest issue of Season Magazine... ...reprinted below! (It is also part of my Why Royal Weddings Matter series for Confluence Daily, online magazine for women.)

THE REAL FAIRY TALE

With splendid pageantry and elegant costumes, royal weddings bring up “fairy-tale” dreams of love and romance. “Fairy,” an English word, comes from the French fée, which came from the Latin fatare, “to enchant.” No wonder royal weddings and “enchantment” go hand-in-hand—especially when there is an engaging tug-of-the-heart story with the charms of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

Following in his brother Prince William’s footsteps, Harry not only married the woman he loves, but his spiritual partner as well. Only a generation before—in the arranged marriage code-of-conduct royal world—such a “love first, duty second, woman with a past” arrangement for any heir to the British throne would have been, if not impossible, certainly one with consequences.

William and Harry’s parents’ wedding in 1981 stirred the hope of “fairy tale” and yet, as Diana and Charles’ marriage played out, any notion of “happily ever after” soon vanished. Theirs was an arranged marriage that pretended it was not. Although times were changing when they married, the social culture had not shifted enough to allow Prince Charles to follow his true feelings. Perhaps even more consequential, the Windsor family was shadowed by kinsman King Edward VIII who in 1936, with some political pressures, gave up the throne “for the woman he loved.” The scandal was a little too close in historical proximity for Charles to make a similar decision about marrying someone for love who didn’t fit the “queenly model.”

Nonetheless, almost seven decades after King Edward’s abdication, cultural changes were on Prince Charles’ side—thanks in great part, ironically, to his late wife insisting on bringing more heart into the royal family. In 2005, 24 years after his marriage of “dynastic duty” to Diana, Charles did not have to give up the throne nor start a palace revolt, yet, with his queen’s blessing, he indeed married the woman who had been his longtime friend and confidante—the woman he had long loved.

In this more modern and egalitarian grand gesture, Charles and Camilla’s marriage put the seal on “love over duty,” supporting Edward’s heartful claim that “he could be a better king with the woman he loved at his side.” With such a legacy, when it was time for Charles’ sons to marry, they fell in love with women who matched their vision and compassion—beautiful “commoners” with “backgrounds” no less!

So call royal weddings “fairy tales” if you must, but the conscious connection that Princes William and Harry made in their marriages is simply what I call the way life is meant to be when heads are clear and hearts are strong. Whether king or prince or commoner, “what your heart thinks is great, is great,” poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “The soul’s emphasis is always right.” ~ 

{The New Royal Marriage}

My article, and book excerpt, "The New Royal Marriage," was recently published on Confluence Daily....and I'm sharing it below with some yummy images! Enjoy....

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THE NEW ROYAL MARRIAGE

A few years after the grand and ritual-rich wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981—a time when the interplay of relationships, including the roles of men and women, were changing—spiritual teacher Gary Zukav released his groundbreaking book, The Seat of the Soul. He wrote about the end of the old marriage archetype (what he considered a “five-sensory” relationship focusing on the body and personality) and the emergence of “spiritual partnerships”—more consciously aware, “multisensory” ways of being in relationship.

   

Prince Charles was the last heir to the British throne to marry for dynastic duty first (and who was raised in that hands-off, secluded, in-training-for-the-crown severity); his sons were the first heirs to grow up with access to the openness of modern culture and with fewer restraints of the monarchy (thanks to insights of both parents.) This meant Prince William and Prince Harry could participate in a less-structured environment—but still be aware of their duty and place in the world—and be free to develop a loving, deep friendship with the woman they would marry.

Looking back, perhaps it was predestined for Charles and Diana’s spot-lit, world-stage relationship—fraught with jealousy, deception, and lack of mutual support—demonstrate an outdated model for marriage. Not finding the desired harmony in their own relationship, yet as destiny would have it, they produced two sons (one a would-be-king, one a prince of deep passion, both imbued with characteristics of each parent) who, as young men, apparently did.

We saw this deep connection during their weddings. I wrote the following about Prince William and Kate Middleton’s 2011 wedding in The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride, but it could also apply to the ceremony and lives of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle a few years later:

Like the best of weddings, William and Kate’s botanically inspired celebration had a sense of reconciliation and healing within relationships, families, communities, even religions. This is what I see their life mission will be about. And this nuptial day, therefore, was a blessing, a redemption for both Diana and Charles. “It was Diana who wired William with some innate radar to look for a soulmate who had a strong family bond,” wrote journalist and author Tina Brown. “She never had it with her own family, nor did Prince Charles,” but their first son has it and embraced it and included all of his families—Spencers, Windsors and Middletons—at the heart of his wedding day. And his Kate matched every royal moment with equal poise and tenderness, inspiring Brown to share about the bride’s choices: “Everything about her actions, to and for William, is about creating a feeling of safe continuity: You know me. I am here.”

Seven years later, as I watched Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s sun-lit springtime wedding, it seemed that we all were witnessing not just a break in tradition, but something so transformative it was as though being baptized in pure light and redemptive love—being initiated into the most sacred depths of oneness. “It felt like another level of everything,” Oprah Winfrey, who had an up-close seat at the wedding ceremony, shared. “It felt like more than a wedding. It felt like a shift in culture. I left more hopeful,” she concluded.

Are these two royal couples representatives of a “new marriage”—a “spiritual partnership,” as Zukav imagined? Or perhaps it’s simply a return to the original purpose of marriage where the cultivation of a deeply connected, equal partnership is a natural way of relating for couples. William and Kate nor Harry and Meghan asked for their marriage to be a template, however, royalty is one of our most reflective archetypes so it’s just in the stars for them to take on a world stage life. Not right or wrong or perfect; not forever or even “happily ever after,” and certainly not a “traditional” marriage. (Is there really any such thing?) 

Nonetheless, these two relationships act as a mirror, so we can see ourselves just a bit clearer in one of the most problematic areas of life for people. “It would be difficult to find a human relationship that embodies a greater complexity than marriage—with its blend of the civil, social, spiritual, and physical,” wrote cultural mythologist Jane L. Mickelson. Our culture is filled with the shadow side of marriage. “For every folk and fairy tale that concludes, ‘and they lived happily ever after,’” Mickelson continued, “there is another that speaks of the betrayal and bitterness, the hostility and disappointment of marriage.” William and Harry knew this all too painfully well because of their parents’ mismatched marriage as did their mother because of her parents’ damaged union. (I called these marriages representatives of the end of the illusion—“the end of the fairy-tale bride.”)

In the aftermath of Charles and Diana’s shattered marriage, a very public royal divorce, and—as though following some Jungian script—the death of the much-loved princess, Dr. Caroline Myss, mystic and best-selling author, considered the outdated “damsel and knight” fairy story could finally be laid to rest. Echoing Gary Zukav’s vision for marriage, Myss wrote that we now begin “to uncover a new archetype—one that reflects the emerging era of partnership.”

Was this to be a new mythology for marriage where couples serve the highest good for each other? “This is how spiritual partnerships work,” Zukav explained. “You begin to set aside the wants of your personality in order to accommodate the needs of your partner’s spiritual growth, and in doing that, you grow yourself.” In this relational reframing, women and men are not substituting romance for intimacy; not settling for the illusion of love instead of the real thing; not relying on the other for their own happiness and fulfillment; nor are they denying the best of themselves so they can have some false sense of security and comfort.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex may have royal titles, but it appears that their marriages—their love and relationships and deep commitment to their partners—are real and sincerely grounded, aligning with their modern, yet old soul sensibilities. Both Kate and Meghan have “brought a kind of grace under pressure to the royal family,” their husbands’ family, and I would suspect that sense of being comfortable-in-their-own-skin reinforces a closeness with their husbands.

It was Princess Diana’s tenacity and spirit that carved out a way for William to be king and have a marriage based on love and equality; and, in her demonstrative acts of unconditional love, gave Harry, younger at her death and maybe more vulnerable, the resilience to mend his broken heart and find a strong partner who matches his devotion and compassion. And Prince Charles played his part as he tenderly protected and guided his sons after Diana’s death; then, years later, boldly challenged the old monarchic code and, with William and Harry’s full-hearted support, married the woman he had long loved.

Perhaps we are drawn to these young Windsor couples because they remind us of the true nature of what “happily ever after” is to be—living a life you love, in service and in kindness to others. And perhaps our attraction to them is how their lives show us, in the words of beloved Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan, that, whether you are royal or just regular folk, “to discover the heart is the greatest initiation.” ~ 

[Excerpts from Cornelia’s The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride, available at Amazon, as well as excerpts from her book in progress, tentatively titled, A Memory of Beauty: The Spiritual Mission of a Princess.]

{Why Royal Weddings Matter} No. 9: What The Veil Reveals

Hope you've been enjoying my "Why Royal Weddings Matter" series on Confluence Daily! Latest installment reprinted below with yummy images!

What the Veil Reveals

Bridal veils made a comeback with Princess Diana in the summer of 1981 like they did in the nineteenth century with Prince Charles’ great-great-great grandmother. Although Queen Victoria’s short lace veil—a lyrical masterpiece of handmade Honiton lace—was “decorative only,” pinned to her chignon and falling softly over her shoulders, Diana’s was long, lush and sparkly and, breaking with royal tradition, covered her face for a much fussed-over “virginal” arrival into St. Paul’s cathedral on her father’s arm. Many feminists called it a “shroud.” And for some modern young women just beginning to revel in their independence and sexual freedom during this time, wearing a bridal veil did, indeed, seem a bit out-of-date, if not out-of-touch.

Not insensitive to world politics in the 1980s and ‘90s—the years I had my bridal art-to-wear shop in Atlanta—my focus, however, was helping a bride feel just as beautiful inside as she looked outside. I loved the look of the sheer illusion veil like Diana wore, it seemed to connect a woman with something deeply feminine and quietly mysterious. Worn over the face, enveloping the bride in a quiet reverie, the veil helped block out a busy, distracting world, moving her attention inward. Fashion designer Vera Wang considers “nothing quite as transformational as a bridal veil. The blend of sensuality and ritual is positively seductive.”

The bridal veil in the European-American tradition went in and out of fashion during the last two-hundred years or so. But Queen Victoria followed “royal rules” more than fashion for her wedding in 1840. “Since the earliest centuries,” explained author Maria McBride-Mellinger, “royal brides, who very often had never met their affianced, could not conceal their faces, preventing a last-minute substitution.” (And this practice for Windsor brides continued until Diana.) British historian Ann Monsarrat described the trend for the rest of us: “Wearing a veil over the face did not evolve until the 1860s and ‘70s; and the custom of arriving at the church, veil demurely down, and leaving triumphantly bare-faced, was an even later refinement.”

Most ancient civilizations have something in their heritage around maidens and bridal veils. “The most important element of a Roman bride’s dress was her veil,” reported McBride-Mellinger. “In fact, nubere, the term for veiling, was synonymous with marriage, and the day after consummation was known as the unveiling.” Modern brides, nevertheless, may choose to wear a bridal veil simply because it’s fetching and pretty, whether a “maiden” or not!

Of course, the new millennium brought the first of modern royal brides in 2011 when the lovely Kate Middleton wed Prince William. “When she came in with that veil over her face, it was almost ethereal, like she was coming through a cloud—an angel coming into the Abbey,” said one dazzled wedding guest. The sheer layer of ivory silk tulle, finger-tip length and edged with hand-embroidered flowers created by the Royal School of Needlework, was rather magical as it caught the wind and became the perfect accessory to complete Kate’s exquisitely crafted silk and lace gown.

Like Kate, Meghan Markle, the bride of Prince Harry, chose the romantic style of entering the wedding chapel wearing a sheer veil over her face, attached to a royal diamond tiara. Yet, as Kate’s father had done for her, it was Meghan’s groom who performed the intimate “unveiling” at the altar: lifting the veil covering her face, meeting his beloved’s steady gaze, and melting our hearts at the same time.

However, Meghan’s approach to her veil was unique. “The veil was a big part of the story for me,” couture designer Clare Waight Keller explained about Meghan’s bridal ensemble. She had created an unadorned, pure-white architectural prism-of-a-gown with a sweeping train for the bride, so the veil became the captivating showpiece, embracing royal connections:

Expertly stitched by artisans working hundreds of hours, there was over 16 feet of gleaming white silk tulle with distinctive botanical motifs hand-embroidered in silk and organza fluttering in three-dimensional delight along the veil’s edge. (Flora representing each of the 53 countries of the Commonwealth—orchids, water lilies and pansies; a daffodil from Wales, bunchberry from Canada, and Scottish thistle—as well as California poppies and wintersweet to honor Meghan’s old and new homes; forget-me-nots to honor the groom’s late mother; and the mythological crops of wheat symbolizing love and charity.) The countries, memories and sentiments represented in this trailing “wild garden” enchantment—carried by gleeful twin pageboys as though they were displaying the most precious and charmed work-of-art—all went on the journey up and back down the aisle with Meghan, just as the designer had envisioned.

 

Both Kate and Meghan followed Diana’s lead with their veils, bringing this spirit of beauty—femininity and stillness, sacred yet seductive—into the hearts of modern brides worldwide. And, in turn, Meghan brought a fresh modernity to the bridal veil beyond any “fairy princess myth” into something so irresistibly feminine and confident about feeling beautiful and mysterious: Cocooned in sheer silk tulle with her veil floating behind—leaving “princess blessings” in her wake—and being revealed into the eyes of her beloved. ~ 

[Parts of this article are excerpts from The End of theFairy-Tale Bride: For Better or Worse, How Princess Diana Rescued the GreatWhite Wedding, other parts are, of course, inspired by the recent royal wedding.]

{Why Royal Weddings Matter} No. 7: Royal Wedding Redux

Continuing the series for Confluence Daily, “Why Royal Weddings Matter,” we celebrate Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding with a look at a past bridal remembrance, reprinted here:

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Royal Wedding Redux

in British tradition, wedding vows are a morning affair, and if we were to catch the first glimpse of the beautiful bride, we needed to be “front and center” very early. My friends and I were a little old for a slumber party, but as we gathered in our pajamas at 4 a.m. in front of my clunky television in Atlanta, Georgia, the anticipation and giddiness was “ageless.”  It was July 29, 1981, and like millions of people around the world, we prepared to watch the royal wedding of Lady Diana Spencer and Charles, Prince of Wales. (We even had snacks to match the occasion: scones with homemade fig jam and Earl Grey tea with lemon—perhaps to not only feed our early morning hunger, but also some inherent dreams of being a princess.)

As the world welcomes a new “princess” today, we are reminded of another celebrated royal wedding almost four decades ago. It was a landmark event broadcast in 74 countries and watched around the world by over 750 million people—including me and my pajama-party friends!

The moment Diana stepped out of that fairy-tale-inspired glass coach on her wedding morning with endless yards of silk train magically materializing with her—"like seeing a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis,” her gown designers wrote later—she had us hook, line and sinker. Princess Diana did not invent our fascination with royalty, nevertheless, her wedding ushered in a whole new ballgame—and the world was never quite the same.

As the first worldwide media spectacular, and probably the defining event of the eighties—a decade in which style so often trumped substance—the glittering happening brought ceremonial weddings back in style almost overnight. It resurrected the bridal industry from the social upheavals of the previous two decades and set the pace for a new era of fancy wedding hoopla: elaborate designer gowns; staged over-the-top productions; refined Martha Stewart details; and the wedding as a “consumer rite.” (Sound familiar?)

Since the same media blitz followed Diana and Charles’ soap-opera marriage and thorny divorce, many people became wary of fairy tales and princesses. However, the endearing William and Kate, with their dignity and realness, made us fall in love all over again! And, of course, the royal buzz was on once more last fall when charming Prince Harry and lovely Meghan Markle announced their engagement. But there were and are differences.

Like her now sister-in-law Kate Middleton, Meghan is not “blue-blooded” (not even British, yet that will change after she marries the prince), but like what attracted William to Kate, Meghan has other qualities that were more important to Harry. Thanks in part to the princes’ mother cracking open the staid and out-of-touch British monarchy, revealing how “dynastic duty” has little to do with love and happiness, and, to insure they didn’t get boxed-in by the past, insisting her sons have the grounding of real-world experience. All of which helped to free William and Harry to choose to marry from their true heart’s desire. (Tweaking a quote from journalist extraordinaire Tina Brown, who has covered the weddings of Charles and Diana, William and Kate, and now Harry and Meghan: “Everything Diana had wished for her sons has come to pass. They each found the woman who would bring them the personal contentment she lacked.”)

So not only is the return to elegant wedding pageantry part of Diana’s legacy, but her most lasting legacy just may be Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle—and the more egalitarian world available to them as the two young women bring their confident, modern, compassionate and open-minded “princessdom” to a world ready for some genuine graciousness. Thank heavens for royal weddings! Tea, anyone? ~ 

[Excerpts from The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride: For Better or Worse, How Princess Diana Rescued the Great White Wedding … a book for anyone who likes their wedding pageantry tossed with a little fashion history and princess brides! Available on Amazon.]