The Divine MAry Poppins

a Zen story

Andrea Harding

October 16th 2023

"When I was little I didn’t want to be Barbie or She Ra, I wanted to be Mary Poppins. I thought that Mary, along with Maria in the Sound of Music (another singing nanny played by Julia Andrews), were the most magical examples of women imaginable"

That was from an article I started writing about two months ago but never finished writing. It was to be a reflection on the divine mother archetype in Mary Poppins and the Sound of Music, and my ongoing preoccupation with the word MA as a codified reference to the primordial mother.

So, today I was astonished when a friend of mine published some extracts from the original Mary Poppins book on Facebook that were omitted from the film. Apparently, Mary's cousin (a wise old snake who is Mary Poppins's first cousin once remove on her mother's side) at some point says:

"We are all made of the same stuff, remember, we of the Jungle, you of the City. The same substance composes us — the tree overhead, the stone beneath u…