The Root Beer Float Oracle

You come across an old-school diner at the top of a tall mountain with a golden door embellished with clouds and a polished, shining handle. You can’t explain it, but somehow you know you must open the door. What is inside is important to you right here, right now.

You pull on the handle and as you step inside, the spirit of a root beer float welcomes you, wipes down the counter, and gestures to a stool at the soda fountain.

You have found the Root Beer Float Oracle, and it has a story to share with you today.

The Root Beer Float Oracle says:

Many let the dark and bitter ingredients they’ve experienced leave a bad taste in their mouth for years, maybe even for a whole lifetime: Past hurt, disappointment, heartache, grief, regret, you name it. They let the darkness be the drink they’ve been served. They sip it with a grimace while complaining about its taste.

Not you, though. You’re here because you know a secret, the secret of the root beer float. That is, weirdly, if you add more sugar to something sweet, the result is not more sweetness. It’s a dulling of the flavor. It’s a lack of interest in the composition. It’s a toothache, later a stomach ache. But if you add a bitter flavor, a dark and complex liquid, you give the sugar purpose. Sweetness actually tastes sweeter when it’s made from a bite, a bitter bark, a medicinal herb.

And there’s something more. You have a duality of light and dark within yourself that you do not shrink from. You took an intentional and non-judgmental look at the dark ingredients within yourself and said, I can work with this. You said, no I don’t want to drink these on their own but they add nuance, they add balance. This is yin and yang type stuff right here. Let me see what drink I can make for myself out of all of the light and dark moments, all the sweet and bitter flavor profiles I know.

In embracing both the light and the dark in the same glass, you learned how to do something so few do. Or, if you haven’t quite yet, this is your call that you’re ready to do so now…

You poured sweetness on the very shadows of your life. You treated your inner demons to ice cream. You rounded up the dark spots of every version of yourself and every hard thing that has happened to you in your life and you took them out on the town. The old traumas starting from childhood got the sunny spot at the soda counter. The nostalgic moments crossed through with pain got a double scoop. The newer hurts got as many cherries on top as they wanted.

You let all of those wounds and fears and outright curses within you have their heart’s sweetest and loveliest and most whimsical desires. You laughed together as you stirred the sweet and pure vanilla ice cream into dark and complicated root beer bubbles. And as you did so, little you was laughing too. You wound back the clock while every version of yourself that ever was got their order at the soda fountain and sat around and blew straw papers at each other.

Your inner child didn’t heal despite the shadows. They healed alongside them.

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About the Oracles
Bailey Lewis - the voice behind and creator of Found Oracles - is an award-winning writer, multimedia storyteller, and owner of Bailey Sends Word Story Studio.

Visit the Bailey Sends Word Story Studio site for more stories steeped in modern mythos - work exploring intuition, mystical encounters in the everyday, and how the stories we tell ourselves create our reality.