Madeliene L’Engle, “A Wind In the Door”

Young wife, you are returned at last from roaming the earth with your husband. Your body is weaker than it was, thanks to the grueling days of travel and fever and not-eating with which you said goodbye to the quiet wilderness of Iceland. But your heart is strengthened by the Love who carried your backpack and stroked your hair and in the end brought you safely home. (And who the next day worked a full day and bought you juice and grapes and cooked you tacos while you slept on the couch.)

And your imagination, so long snuggled deep in the contented nest of this love, begins to ruffle its feathers and stretch its wings and peer about at the great world which you have glimpsed. Do you wonder, as it opens its bright eyes, where its purpose lies? Why anyone would encourage it to fly, and then scribble down its wandering paths? Why retell these stories, why tempt the imaginations of children to peep out of their nests and stretch their wings to fly, too?

The call of the “real” world is strong, and rightly so. You live in a material world that is real, and you know, young wife, that practicality is a precious art to be loved and embraced. But this very real world that we see and breathe is metaphor and a veil for another world, equally real but unseen and unseeable…except through faith.

Young wife, you have seen incredible things in this beautiful, material world. You have seen a dying sun and a coral moon balanced low in a blue sky like a pair of cosmic scales. You have seen glaciers flowing painfully into valleys, like some arthritic monster advancing his territory with agonizingly slow steps. You have seen desolation trying its best to keep its grip on lava fields long ago cooled, and being overcome by living moss like grace.

Young wife, you have also seen incredible things in the beautiful and immaterial world in which you also live. You have seen that the monsters who hide in the valleys of your soul are real, and that the grace of God overwhelms all that is desolate. You have seen the reality that is beyond the reality. Only in glimpses, perhaps. . . but, young wife, the secret to those glimpses lie in the bright eyes of your imagination. Not because all that you imagine is real, but because all that is real cannot be known or seen–and imagination teaches you to look beyond that which is seen. Imagination teaches you how to pull up the corner of the curtain and peep behind it.

Do you remember that this is why you love to write? Do you remember that you love the words with which you can, for a moment, cross between the worlds of seen and unseen? Do you remember what it is like to look on a tossing sea or a child reaching for her father and see the swirling metaphor and poetry and color that lies beneath that moment? Your imagination stirs and wakens. . . let it scramble to the edge of the nest and become the flurry of words and wings, singing of true things, real things, the things that lie behind the curtain of mere water and rock. Trace the flightpaths and re-sketch them in paper and ink so that others may follow. This is why you imagine; this is why you write. Remember these things, and stretch your paper wings once more.

Above our little house, above the foothills we nestle against, there is an iron forest ranged along the crest of the mountains. On clear and warm days like today, it looks like nothing more than a cluster of radio towers. At night, when it is shrouded in darkness, it becomes a bit more magical, because it glows with red stars. But it only shows itself for what it really is when there is a fresh snowfall, when it and the mountain it stands on fuse together in whiteness and become an ice-castle for a mysterious princess.

I keep meaning to write about it, the princess locked inside of the ice-castle. On quiet afternoons like this one, I sit down at my kitchen table in front of an open window, coffee in hand, ready to dream out a new story on paper. And when the coffee is gone and I look at what is written, I find that I have not written a story of an ice-princess, nor of a never-ending beach, nor of the whale that lives in the clouds of the painting we have thought of purchasing. All I have written is a love letter from an girl with an empty coffee cup to her best friend, who kisses her in the doorway when he gets home in the afternoon and who carries her whole heart with him when he leaves her in the morning.

I once thought that our love would inspire my words, my scribbled tales, my figments of thought. I was right. I just didn’t realize, then, that it would be so powerful as to make it nearly impossible to write any story other than that of our love. I realize it now. And the truth is that I really don’t mind in the slightest. I love this story, love the living and the telling and the writing of it, the way that it does not grow old, only worn in beautiful patinaed patterns like the gold band on an old man’s hand.

I love the beauty of this story of ours, this love we share. And I have come to a decision. I will no longer try not to write love letters–that has shown itself to be impossible. So, I will bow to this fact and write them, as eloquently and richly as I can. And I will try, if I can, to clothe these letters afresh–to wrap them with ice castles and beaches and the night-riders who live in our mountains. But the letters themselves, they shall stay there, tucked safely into the heart of the story, like the glowing golden heart of a daisy. Because without them, the stories are empty words, floating petals. There is a kind of beauty in flower petals, though they fade and brown quickly. But the story God has graciously given me to tell is one of much fuller and more lasting beauty than petals alone. Only the heart of the daisy, or the whole daisy will do. Our love letters are the heart. I mean to deck it with petals if I can…but if I cannot, then I will go on writing the heart. Because I must.

‘Pens and paint, a good voice production, and grease paint and things aren’t the only means of expression. Some people express loveliness just by loving. It’s the better way…’

‘…That’s at the root of all giving, don’t you think? At the root of all art. You can’t hoard the beauty you’ve drawn into you; you’ve got to pour it out again for the hungry, however feebly, however stupidly. You’ve just got to.’

(quotations taken from ‘Pilgrim’s Inn’ by Elizabeth Goudge)

It is a little-known fact that foxes lay eggs. Most science books will tell you that foxes give birth to live young. For most of our lives, Robert and I were under this delusion ourselves. This is the story of how we were convinced otherwise…and of how our relationship developed along the way.

According to Winnie-the-Pooh, ‘it all comes, I suppose…of liking honey so much.’ In my case, it all comes of liking children’s books and the color orange so much. Knowing this about me, Robert spent a lot of care and thought in picking out the perfect birthday present for me last year. He sent me an orange felt case for my laptop, shaped like a fox. It looked like it had come straight from the pages of a beautifully-illustrated children’s book. Such a special present deserved an equally special thank-you note, so I designed a card with an orange paper fox on the front, and wrote my thanks inside it. I included a wax paper packet of chocolate-covered espresso beans in the bottom of the package, put the card on the top, and mailed it.

A few days later, Robert sent a text, thanking me for the ‘fox eggs.’  ‘Fox eggs? What are you talking about? Foxes don’t lay eggs,’ I replied. But obviously, they had…or why else would Robert have received a paper nest full of chocolate eggs, with a mama fox sitting on top? At first I was incredulous, because all my science books said that foxes gave birth to live young. But then I remembered that foxes are very good at keeping secrets…and eggs with tiny baby foxes inside are certainly special secrets. I realized that probably even most scientists didn’t know about fox eggs. This realization did cause me some worry, however…because, if what I thought were chocolate-covered coffee beans were actually fox eggs, perhaps Robert was eating a baby fox every time he ate one of the egg-shaped treats I had sent him.

However, I remembered a conversation I had just a few days before with my 3-year-old cousin, Moriah, in which she told me about the habits of turtles. Turtles, it seems, lay eggs also. If the mama turtle has eaten lemondrops for breakfast, the eggs will turn into baby turtles. If the mama has eaten broccoli or spinach for breakfast, the eggs won’t turn into baby turtles. It only made sense that the same would be true for foxes, I reasoned…and I was pretty certain that the paper fox had eaten only broccoli for breakfast.

That summer, Robert came home to visit and brought with him a stack of books he thought I would enjoy. Among them was a book that proved instrumental in helping us to focus and grow our relationship. He even made a special cover for the book, complete with a hand-drawn picture of a mama fox sitting on a nest full of eggs. That book was my companion for quite some time over the summer.

So, when my mom and I were at a garage sale some time later, and I found a set of three little orange eggs (most people would call them glass eggs, but I knew that they had baby foxes inside), I bought them. I made a little nest for them and gave them to Robert the next time that he was at home. These eggs lived on his desk for quite some time. Enough time, in fact, to make us a little bit concerned, because none of them seemed inclined to hatch. Perhaps the mama fox had not eaten any lemondrops.

But one day, when Robert’s mom was visiting him in Ohio, he walked into his room and noticed not three, but two eggs sitting in their little nest…and next to the nest, there was a newly-hatched wooden fox!  (Some people are inclined to believe that this incident was in some way connected with a couple of visits I had paid earlier in the week: first to a toy store that sold wooden animals, and then to Mrs. Raynor’s house. However, the timing of these visits was purely coincidental and entirely unconnected to the hatched egg).

A month or so later, Robert came back for a visit. I suggested that he should probably bring along the eggs that had still not hatched. After all, if one of them hatched while he was gone, the baby fox might need his care. Sure enough, while he was at my house, he looked into his backpack, where he had put the nest for safe-keeping, and discovered a newly-hatched fox inside. (Once more, this was not in any way related to a visit I had paid the week before to a different toy store that sold wooden animals…)

The last egg took quite some time to hatch…or so we thought. Robert thought that it might hatch while I was paying a visit to him last October, but no new foxes appeared. It wasn’t until Robert came back home for Christmas that the last fox found its way into his backpack. It turned out, it had hatched while I was visiting Robert in Ohio, but it had accidentally fallen into one of my bags. That fox stayed with me for a while, and I was inclined to keep it…but I thought it would be happier on Robert’s desk with the other foxes.

Well…January came around again, and once more, Robert picked out the perfect birthday gift for me. What is more, he made it himself: a blog theme designed to look like his desk, complete with his notebook and pencil, and, of course…a fox, and the fox eggs that lived on his desk. Because he built the theme using actual pictures of his desk and different items from it, it took some time to get it up and running…enough time, in fact, for him to give me the most wonderful present of all. In June, my best friend gave me a ring and his promise to be my husband. Which means that, before it becomes our blog, the theme Robert created for my birthday gets to first serve us as a website for our wedding…and the inspiration for many of the wedding details.

Foxes and eggs have been a playful element in our relationship for quite a while. Besides being a fun inside joke, it has also provided Robert and me with a tangible way of looking back over our relationship and remembering where we were at different points along the way. We are both so thankful for the way that God has worked to bring us together over the past two years. It has not been easy. In many ways, it has been the most difficult thing either of us has ever done. But by His grace, we have grown and learned so much, and it amazes us to look back on where we were at the beginning of our story and how far we have come since then. We are looking forward to growing even closer to each other and to our Savior in the years that we have ahead of us, and we covet your prayers that our marriage would bring glory to the One who brought it about.

run

…and all the emptiness that has left you numb gathers itself together within you. like a beast caught in a cage it screams to be let out and you know that if you pace this floor for another sleepless night, the wild things will tear your heart to pieces.

so you take the cage into your hands and you run.

you run over the frozen river and beneath the fading frozen moon. you run beyond all imagining and all ability of thought. you run until you come to a place where there are no stars and your breath is torn from you in raging cold gasps, and when at last you collapse in the darkness on the edge of the world, you know that you have found the place where your strength is ended. there you set the wild things free to join their howling voices with the great and howling emptiness all around. 

you kneel where you have fallen and the gravel grinds into your flesh. you do not know how much blood you have lost because at the world’s end all is dark and the color of blood seems to mean nothing. and here in this absolute void of all things, here at the end of yourself, you cry out in a prayer that is made not of words but of pain and searching and fathomless heartbreak.

where

where

where

where

(over the rim of the world, a light begins to spread–or, if not light itself, a shade of black that is  lighter than the infinite void that was before)

where

where….

here.

the light grows, still too dim to be seen as light, only enough to show the color of the blood that is not yours. black ice. red blood. white snow. though the darkness howls in cold and savage billows, your breathing slows and slows and slows…

at last, here on the ice, you slumber.

when you wake, the darkness has been folded up and laid aside and light has spilled over its boundaries.

but then for one of my classes (writing for children and adolescents, byu) i was assigned the written portion of a picture book.  i looked in my brain — my fluffy, wiped-out brain — for ideas…and the only one i found was rather tiny and tattered, an idea which had already tried and failed to become a fairy tale about a princess who wasn’t.

so, with little hope in my heart, i sat down at my laptop to write.  i typed “once upon a time”…and stopped.  this felt too familiar.  *backspace.*

the cursor blinked.

*blink.*

“rose was not a princess.”

=)