In 2019, I experienced a lot of creative setbacks. I got to the end of the year feeling like I needed to reconnect with why it is I write, and what I want to give to the world, both through writing and through the ways I choose to live.
So for my 2020 word of the year, I chose “inward.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER, WEYMOUTH
Look, I have gone inward in 2020. I have plumbed the depths of my own creative despair, been in buildings other than my house a grand total of 6 times, homeschooled my children, and had nearly zero contact with extended family and friends. I could not be more inward-facing at this point. I am VERY VERY ready for my year of turning inward to end.
The thing is, I chose “inward” for 2020 because I started the year feeling pretty much at capacity. I’d started to wonder if my words and being had actual worth; been pushed to what I thought was the edge of myself time management-wise; and I knew (or thought I knew) that 2020 would bring me a long awaited turning point. In the fall, both my kids would be in school for full days, and, for the first time since my oldest was born, I’d be able to routinely write during daylight hours.
The plan (in my folly, I love making plans) was to turn inward for the first half of the year–to weather the remainder of a busy half-day-preschool-and-full-day-first-grade schedule. And then in autumn, when school started again, I would burst out of the inward sanctum of my creative chrysalis, renewed, reinvented, reborn. I’d turn outward again. I’d expand my writing to categories beyond YA. I’d volunteer at the kids’ school, and build more community where I live, and…
Yeah.
Instead, this year was a struggle at every turn. And I know we’re all struggling, so for the most part on social media, I try to put peace into the world. I try to focus on and capture the moments of serenity. But it was hard. At every turn, it has been exhausting, and while I’ve turned inward through necessity, it was not the rejuvenating inward turn I envisioned. It has been about survival, not renewal.
In the midst of that, though, I recognize the accomplishments I made, the victories I won. I sold two YA novels, getting myself back on the publishing a book a year schedule I’ve always aimed for. I kept my kids happy and healthy and academically on track, in a much more stable way than they’d have experienced if I’d sent them to school (which isn’t to say that the decision to send kids to school this year is a flawed one–it simply would not have been best for my kids, who thrive on routine and don’t do well with distance learning). I have, finally, towards the end of this year, begun to be kind to myself once more, and to rest when I need rest, to stop when I need a pause.
It has all been hard. Every minute has been hard. I’ve experienced some adversity in life, and while there were moments of explosive crisis or great difficulty, I can’t recall a year that was as relentlessly draining and demoralizing as this one. There were those who suffered so much more, but I’ve never been a fan of scales of suffering. If you felt this year to be grueling and demanding, if you felt like you’ve left pieces of yourself behind, you deserve to sit with and process those emotions. Your experience is valid, even if there’s no definitive moment of overwhelming trauma to point to.
So. This year was for surviving, and I am far too cautious a person to claim next year for thriving, in any sense of the word. But I was in bed last night, in that half-awake place where moments of startling lucidity sometimes strike, and thinking about my children.
I thought about how, when they wake up, they come to me. It’s not because they need anything, necessarily, or because I can give them things they couldn’t get from around the house on their own. It’s because right now, at this age and stage, I’m their touchstone. It is not vanity but simple fact, to say that I am the small axis their world turns on, the defining feature of it.
Touchstone:
1: a fundamental or quintessential part or feature 2: a test or criterion for determining the quality or genuineness of a thing 3: a black siliceous stone related to flint and formerly used to test the purity of gold and silver by the streak left on the stone when rubbed by the metal
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
And then I thought of other touchstones–of the books or films or poems or places or experiences or people that have become defining parts of me, that prove or remind me of my own worth and quality and genuineness, and spur me on in the pursuit of personal betterment. Those things I return to, over and over again, because they serve as a litmus test for the presence of goodness and endurance and hope. I would, it is no exaggeration to say, be lost without such people, such words, such places and experiences.
That is what I want to ponder and explore in 2021. Touchstone people, touchstone moments, touchstone things. The little axes my universe turns on. What it means to live in such a way that you yourself can function as a touchstone for others, when necessary.
To me it is a word about guiding and illuminating, remembering and looking forward. And I am, albeit with some reservations after the difficulties of 2020, interested to see where this touchstone year leads.
If you have poked around the blog here at all, you’ll undoubtedly have noticed that I’ve got a bit of a theme going as we head towards winter solstice and Advent. Light and darkness, darkness and light, the physical and literal, the spiritual and metaphorical meanings of the two, keep running around and together in my mind. It’s something I find myself contemplating every year at this time, but am especially preoccupied with in the midst of our current notable historical moment.
So I thought I’d write about books that served as light in darkness to me when I was a child, and about how they continue to shed light, in spite of their flaws. (If you want an unpacking of those flaws, this is not where it’s going to happen–I want to be up front about understanding my favorites have shortcomings, but if you’re looking for more than that at the moment, you’ll have to utilize your Google skills.)
Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about wardrobes and witches and lions and faith.
illustration by Pauline Baynes
I don’t remember the first time I read the Narnia series. With other books, I have a definitive Moment of Discovery, but Narnia was always there, part of the background of my childhood. Likely, my mother read them to me before I could read myself. Presumably, I went on to read them on my own in first or second grade, as I did with all my favorite read alouds. But as far as memory serves, Aslan and the Pevensies and Eustace and Jill, Diggory and Polly and the many wonderful people of Narnia, were always there.
I do remember what struck me most strongly about the books, though, both as a child and a young person and an adult. It was, and is, the fierceness of the characters’ faith. Growing up in the Christian church, I learned by heart (at yet another dim, unremembered point) that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” And the faith of the people of Narnia, and of Narnia’s friends from our world, shone bright as the sun.
Lucy Pevensie, the darling of the series, is a goodhearted and compassionate and unimpeachably truthful girl. She’s also the first to demonstrate the series’ hallmark virtue. After visiting Narnia through the iconic wardrobe, she’s immediately (and understandably) misbelieved by her siblings. It would be easy for any of us, under those circumstances, to doubt. To question our own experiences, or recant for the sake of convenience and peace.
Lucy, however, does none of those things. Instead, she stays faithful regardless of the cost.
For the next few days she was very miserable. She could have made it up with the others quite easily at any moment if she could have brought herself to say that the whole thing was only a story made up for fun. But Lucy was a very truthful girl and she knew that she was really in the right; and she could not bring herself to say this. The others who thought she was telling a lie, and a silly lie too, made her very unhappy.
~The Lion, The Witch and the wardrobe
illustration by Pauline Baynes
Later on in the same story, we see faith exhibited by the beleaguered people of Narnia. Subjugated by a White Witch and cursed to endure the well known “always winter but never Christmas” (a sort of eternal January through March doldrums) the residents of Narnia have passed on, for a century, memories of their world before. Of “summer when the woods were green and old Silenus on his fat donkey would come to visit them, and sometimes Bacchus himself; and then the streams would run with wine instead of water and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.”
It is not only memories of the old times the Narnians have passed down either–throughout the Witch’s reign, they remain steadfastly faithful that an end will come to her tyranny. That
Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight, At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more, When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death, And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.
~The Lion, the witch, and the wardrobe
As we know, the faith of the Narnians is well-rewarded.
But the vital moments of Lucy’s discovery of Narnia and Aslan’s salvation of his kingdom are not the only instances of Narnian faith. It characterizes them throughout the series–Shasta believes in the talking horse, Bree’s, assurance that their journey across a desert will lead to greater happiness. Caspian believes that the crew of his ship, the Dawn Treader, will find not just the seven missing lords of his father’s court, but also high adventure and lands beyond the known bounds of the world. Reepicheep, most valiant of all Narnians, sails past the world’s very ending, unshakeable in his belief that such an act of daring will lead not to his destruction, but to the discovery of Aslan’s Country.
illustration by Pauline Baynes
The most stirring exhibit of faith in the Chronicles of Narnia, though, occurs in The Silver Chair, one of the odder installments of the series. In it, Eustace Scrubb and Jill, children from our world, along with two companions–doleful Puddleglum and the ensorcelled Prince Rilian–are imprisoned in the underground domain of yet another Witch. There, the Witch lays a spell of music and fire upon them, designed to make them forget the world above entirely. But the faith of Narnians–even the humblest and most ordinary among them–is a hard thing to contend with.
“There never was such a world,” said the Witch.
“No,” said Jill and Scrubb, “never was such a world.”
“There never was any world but mine,” said the Witch.
“There never was any world but yours,” said they.
Puddleglum was still fighting hard. “I don’t rightly know what you all mean by a world,” he said, talking like a man who hasn’t enough air. “But you can play that fiddle till your fingers drop off, and still you won’t make me forget Narnia; and the whole Overworld too. We’ll never see it again, I shouldn’t wonder. You may have blotted it out and turned it dark like this, for all I know. Nothing more likely. But I know I was there once. I’ve seen the sky full of stars. I’ve seen the sun coming up out of the sea of a morning and sinking behind the mountains at night. And I’ve seen him up in the midday sky when I couldn’t look at him for brightness.”
…”Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story.”
“Yes, I see now,” said Jill in a heavy, hopeless tone. “It must be so.” And while she said this, it seemed to her to be very good sense.
Slowly and gravely the Witch repeated, “There is no sun.” And they all said nothing. She repeated, in a softer and deeper voice. “There is no sun.” After a pause, and after a struggle in their minds, all four of them said together, “You are right. There is no sun.” It was such a relief to give in and say it.
…”Come, all of you,” (said the Witch.) “Put away these childish tricks. I have work for you all in the real world. There is no Narnia, no Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan. And now, to bed all. And let us begin a wiser life tomorrow…”
The Prince and the two children were standing with their heads hung down, their cheeks flushed, their eyes half closed; the strength had all gone from them; the enchantment almost complete. But Puddleglum, desperately gathering all his strength, walked over to the fire. Then he did a very brave thing. He knew it wouldn’t hurt him quite as much as it would hurt a human; for his feet (which were bare) were webbed and hard and cold-blooded like a duck’s. But he knew it would hurt him badly enough; and so it did. With his bare foot he stamped on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth…
…The sweet, heavy smell grew very much less. For though the whole fire had not been put out, a good bit of it had, and what remained smelled very largely of burnt Marsh-wiggle, which is not at all an enchanting smell. This instantly made everyone’s brain far clearer. The Prince and the children held up their heads again and opened their eyes…
“One word, Ma’am,” he (Puddleglum) said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”
~The Silver Chair
illustration by Pauline Baynes
Puddleglum’s demonstration of faith and determination is an extraordinary one, made all the more so by his temperament, which tends to melancholy and pessimism. But at his core, there is a staunch belief in the good and bright realm he’s come from, and a refusal to settle for less. He will accept no pale and hollow imitation of the real world, so long as even the idea of another and better reality remains. It is his relentless faith that overcomes the Witch’s insidious spell.
So what about us? Most of us have done our share of knocking on the backs of wardrobes, wishing for another world. Some of us have, despite the disappointing emptiness of cupboards and closets, retained faith in the existence of another world, someday, somehow. Some of us have lost that faith. But we all believe in something, and it’s not solely a religious concept, faith.
During high school, I had the privilege of taking a philosophy class taught by my school’s cleverest and most demanding teacher. He introduced us to Descartes’ cogito ergo sum–I think, therefore I am, the one and only premise that philosophy has ever been able to definitively prove. Because I think, I know I must exist somewhere, in some form. Everything else, my philosophy teacher informed the classroom of alternately bored or riveted students, is a matter of basic belief.
Of faith.
Philosophically, the very world we treat as undeniable, and the input of our senses, are all basic beliefs. All matters of faith. We have faith that what we perceive is real. We have faith that the world will continue to turn just as it has always done, and, on an even more basic level, that our world exists at all.
Faith underpins everything we do, whether we recognize it or not.
illustration by Pauline Baynes
I see, all around me, a pale and hollow world, shot through with threads of glory. It is Narnia in winter–at once the memory of something better and the potential for greater things. Perhaps my vision is skewed. Perhaps my faith is misplaced. Perhaps we are little better than animals, and my beliefs that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” and that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” will ultimately be proved foolish.
The truth is, I don’t much care. I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. And I plan to spend my life not just looking for Overland–for a better and brighter and more just world. However I can, whenever it lies within my power, I will work to begin bringing that brighter world about.
Because true faith is not just a matter of nebulous belief. True faith acts, like Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle. True faith carries on, like Caspian and Reepicheep. True faith persists in the face of doubt, like Lucy Pevensie. And true faith–in our capacity to do better and be better, and in a brighter world–well. That sort of faith builds. With words or paint or laws or lessons taught or kindness given, assistance offered. That faith cannot stay idle; it is the occupation of a lifetime.
I hope to spend my life working faithfully. I hope to do so alongside you.
Sending you all love and light as the days grow darker, Laura
I am trying to rekindle a friendship with the night. (Part One of this series is available here)
I watched my children, earlier this week, outside at sundown on October’s last warm afternoon. They played by the edge of the forest, mere feet from the base of the trees. The sun sank behind the forest. Things grew cool and grey. Dark began to creep about, closing in around them.
They neither noticed nor cared.
Watching them from the kitchen, enveloped by warm, artificial light, I found it telling. That the dark seemed a friend to them because they’d sat without fighting it and welcomed it in.
It’s getting dark, I told them anyway. You need to come inside.
Five more minutes, they said, happy as they were.
I’m the one who thinks the night is something to hide from. My children beg to look at stars, to build fires, to catch lightning bugs. They play, lightless, at the edge of the forest as night wraps around them like a friend.
It makes sense. How can you be comfortable, after all, with a thing you fight or hide from? Of course the dark and I are at odds–I go out into it carrying light, bent on driving it off during its own appointed time. I make myself large and bright and threatening, and behave as if the small night-bound creatures who might emerge from the woods–the foxes and the raccoons and the owls–are far fiercer than I, when the truth is, I am the most dangerous thing in the dark.
I think I must grow small and careless, if I’m really to learn this element. I will have to stop fighting. You can’t befriend a thing unless you strive to know and be known by it. You can’t know and be known without a little vulnerability.
You can’t embrace what you insist on keeping at arm’s length.
I’m used to a world of boundaries and order, where I can see and plan for what comes next. Night is the antithesis of that. A time for sightlessness, and mystery, and perhaps a touch of chaos. It has no corners and no horizon and no edges, and I will have to give all mine up to let it in. It is a daunting prospect, and yet I want this. Increasingly, I want this–the soft borderlessness of night, the gentle dim, the cold and the hush and the fear of it all. I want to learn what the poets know.
I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better. ~Mary Oliver
I want the vanishing and the rebirth. I want to shed my old self in darkness and emerge as something better.
Every year, the autumn equinox arrives, and I begin to think almost constantly about light and darkness. It’s how I cope with the shortening days, I suppose–by turning inward, by meditating on the waning light and the gathering dark. It’s become an annual ritual and a touchstone of mine to spend the evening of winter solstice, the longest night of the year, by candlelight, reading the opening chapter of the gospel of John. That’s another touchstone of mine–those transcendently beautiful words about peace and joy, light and life, coming among us.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:5
I thought, given that the darkness feels especially close and especially deep this year, that I’d spend the weeks leading up to winter solstice in exploring a few other touchstones–in reflecting on books that got me through childhood and youth, and that exemplify, to me, some of the loveliest qualities displayed by human beings–the virtues of faith, hope and charity. The books I plan to explore may not be your particular touchstones–indeed, as an adult reader I recognize flaws in them that I didn’t during my younger years, but they’re still stories I come back to, because they remind me of goodness, and of how we can all function as light in the darkness to others.
I hope you’ll join me–my plan is to update this series more or less every other week (unless life, as it tends to, gets in the way) and to cover the following.
Faith in the Journey: on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Hope Between Worlds: on Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia The Comfort of Charity: on L’Engle’s Austin Family Chronicles The Witchery of Living: Virtue in the Poetic Works of Mary Oliver
I hope to see you back, and wish you happiness and health <3
I am trying to rekindle a friendship with the night.
I was a friend of the night as a teen–as a young person, it was my favorite time. I’d slip out of the house unseen, equipped with a book of matches and a kerosene lantern, and walk the few blocks to our local conservation area. There, with nothing but a small puddle of lantern light to guide me, I’d ghost through the pathless woods, as close to fey as I’d ever come. Even when I’d grown older, night was when I ran, when I walked along the moon-glittering shores of Lake Ontario, when I took riverside drives to try and sort out my thoughts on life, the universe, and everything.
But then I grew older, and wiser, and afraid. I’m no longer a friend of the night, but a votary of the day. The sun is an ally and a familiar face. The moon and the stars have become strange mystics, bound to a time that no longer feels like home.
I’m trying to change that. To stop hurrying anxiously along the short path between car and house, house and chicken coop, casting fearful glances at the woods as if some monstrous creature will emerge at any moment to gobble me up. To pause and stand with my fear, and learn it is baseless, and that the night is beautiful just as I remember her.
Once I loved the way the trees look, their stark bones silhouetted against the sky. Even in the deepest night, they seem darker still, obsidian or cobalt against mere black. As if space–the void–can muster only a semblance of darkness, but it takes matter and mattering to be darkness. To become and embody it.
Once I loved the sly and changeable moon, that governs tides and wears a different face nightly, that hugs the Earth so close with its orbit that oceans move with its pull. I loved, most of all, the stars–those swaths of impossibly distant suns, glimmering in the sky like gems, entirely unknown and unknowable. They sing, a book I once read told me. The morning stars sing together for joy. They make the music of the spheres.
Once I loved the little Earthbound sounds of night–the hush of the wind, the sigh of waves, the snap of twigs as small things pass by, sounding so much larger. The bark of the fox, the howl of the coyote, the huff of a wandering deer. I was not afraid. I saw and heard and felt, and the night was a mystery and a wonder.
We fell out, the night and I, because of the fear I learned. But I’m trying to unlearn it now, and mend fences, and once more revel in the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of it all.
I love the light, and love it well. On the way to this midwinter, I wish to do the same for the dark.
