'THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE THE ADVENTURE BEGINS'

when they got back, 

they spent the rest of the summer in that room?

Staring at the carved wooden doors

daring each other to try again?

the window open,

robinsong floating through that just

didn’t sound right?

Do you think Lucy ever crept down,

in the middle of the night,

the big house lit by nothing 

but a pale and unfeeling moon,

her footsteps following muscle memory 

to the edge of the wardrobe

crawling in and curling up 

at that cursed wooden back wall,

falling asleep surrounded by fur coats

hand pressed up against the one thing

preventing her from going back?

Do you think Edmund every joined her,

sneaking down in shame and secrecy 

only to find his sister 

already there?

Do you think Eustace spent hours over Christmas break in the room with the painting,

staring at it,

willing it,

begging it

to move?

Susan and Peter, stealing away to the train station, 

with no plan but to sit

on the same bench they always did,

hoping against hope,

against knowledge,

to hear the call again?

Do you think Jill was ever late to class,

missing the bell, the call of her peers,

the force of her wanting overpowering them

as she faced the hole in the wall,

the moore beyond,

the bright, real truth that it had happened,

trying to find the right combination of words

to make it happen again?

How many times did they sit,

backs pressed against locked doors, wrought benches, stone walls,

waiting to hear the key in the lock,

waiting to hear the rushing of wind,

waiting to hear that beloved voice

I’m reading the book “Braiding Sweetgrass” and in this one chapter the author is talking about how in her cultural language, Potawatomi, there are more verbs than in English, and they are, to Western ears, very odd verb constructions. “To be a bay” or “to be a hill.” But she points out that this kind of language acknowledges a “being” to the various aspects of the natural world we tend to see more as objects.

Now, I know she’s comparing Indigenous American and Western/European worldviews, but I can’t help noticing a harmony between her description of the world as a “democracy of species” and Lewis and Tolkien’s conception of nature. We all know how much Tolkien was concerned with the natural world, how much personhood he saw in trees and water and mountains. But the quote that jumped to my mind reading this chapter is in one of the Narnia books when Eustace gives the scientific definition of a star (a ball of flaming gas) and is met with the reply, “…that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”

I realize he’s still using “it” but since the person correcting Eustace is an actual star, I think we can let this one slide.

I don’t know where this thought wants to land, but something something about people who are really spiritually in tune arriving, from different cultures and traditions, at the same sorts of conclusions about beauty, life, and our responsibility to our world.