narnia raze i'm going to make myself sound like a hopeless romantic here, but i don't care. it weighed on me when the pevensie children went home at the end of "the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe". i wanted them to stay in a kingdom where the impossible was commonplace. to watch them stalk the white stag. to be privy to their deepest desires. i think, more than anything, i wanted to be one of them. we surrender so much when we step into adulthood. one of the first things we're told we need to let go of is our imagination. we're forced to forget what we know to be true: there's a crack in the shear wall of this world, and if we pull its plywood ribs apart we'll find the heart imprisoned in the mind, waiting to be recognized. see that squirming sinew past the place where memories are made? that's me. that's everything i'll ever be. 260612 ... ovenbird I was seven years old when I first encountered The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. My second grade teacher read it to the class. It was such a powerful experience that I can still feel the particular scratch of the carpet we all sat on, cross-legged, and hear the squeak of my teacher’s rocking chair mixed with the crisp turning of pages, and sense the heat of all those other small bodies around me, some fidgeting but some, like me, with eyes wide open and lost in a world of literary wonder. Raze, you’re not alone in wanting to step into that story. I wanted to be Lucy. I wanted to feel the soft fingers of fur coats turn to the sharp kiss of pine needles. I wanted to have tea with Mr. Tumnus and lunch with the beavers. I imagined that my strangeness would be less obvious in Narnia. In a place full of fauns and naiads and birds that act as guides I believed a child like me could find belonging. So I was also broken when the children came back through the wardrobe into the world of stuffy old rooms and rules and grumpy housekeepers. There was such loss in the door to Narnia being closed. I have read the book many times since then, and it’s the very last lines, spoken by the professor, that sparks a sense of hope inside of me. He says: “Of course you'll get back to Narnia again some day. Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don't go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don't try to get there at all. It'll happen when you're not looking for it. And don't talk too much about it even among yourselves. And don't mention it to anyone else unless you find that they've had adventures of the same sort themselves. What's that? How will you know? Oh, you'll know all right. Odd things, they say—even their looks—will let the secret out. Keep your eyes open.” I take it seriously, the instruction to “keep your eyes open.” I suspect that you do too. Which means there’s always a chance of stumbling into something wondrous, something that allows access to the imaginal realms of childhood. “Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia,” and so it is for those of us who refuse to forget that this world is permeable, and there’s always a chance that we’ll slip through into something that re-writes our hearts. 260613 what's it to you? who go blather from