“He was standing by the edge of a small pool – no more than ten feet from side to side – in a wood. The trees grew close together and were so leafy that he could get no glimpse of the sky. All the light was green light that came through the leaves: but there must have been a very strong sun overhead, for this green daylight was bright and warm. It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing. The pool he had just got out of was not the only pool. There were dozens of others – a pool every few yards as far as his eyes could reach. You could almost feel the trees drinking up the water with their roots. This wood was very much alive. … The strangest thing was that almost before he had looked about him, Digory had half forgotten how he had come there. … If anyone has asked him “Where did you come from?” he would probably have said, “I’ve always been here.” That was what it felt like – as if one had always been in that place and never been bored although nothing had ever happened. As he said afterward, “It’s not the sort of place things happen. The trees go on growing, that’s all.”

This, of course, is a passage from The Magician’s Nephew, by CS Lewis. He’s describing “the wood between the worlds,” a strange, lazy, dreamy green-lit place. It’s a place I think about a lot. We used to love The Chronicles of Narnia when we were little, my brother and I. Who wouldn’t like to imagine a magical world you could escape to at any time, where you could (safely) go on adventures and talk to animals? Your dog could finally tell you what she’d been thinking about all this time!

Rereading the books now can be disappointing. I’d forgotten about that whole, “Buck up, old chap, and stop your blubbering or we’ll despise you for the rest of the book” mentality. One of my favorite books was always The Horse and His Boy. I love the idea of stories that take place between the major conflicts. My idea of a good book would be a story of life when Peter was high king in which absolutely nothing happened. No drama, no evildoers to overthrow, just a tale of what day-to-day was like in this happy golden time. I love the in-between times. Well, I went back and read a bit of The Horse and His Boy. It’s the story of light-haired, light-skinned noble well-intentioned people from the North fighting against swarthy-skinned, dark-haired, backward, and mean-spirited people from the South. Beyond disappointing.

Despite all this, and because I love the in-between times and the in-between places, I’ve always been drawn to the wood between the worlds. So many times in my life I’ve felt like I’m there, I’m in this tranquil in-between place, trying to decide which pool to jump in next. Because each pool is a world, and you don’t know what you’ll find there when you jump in. Here in the green wood, you’re safe, all you have to do is sit still, and your memories are vague and dreamlike, and you can almost feel yourself growing. You don’t have to act, or interact with anyone. But you can’t stay forever. As Polly says, “This place is too quiet. It’s so – so dreamy. You’re almost asleep. If we once give in to it we shall just lie down and drowse forever and ever.” So you have to exert yourself and pick a pool (or a school, or a job, or a place to live). You have to wake up and engage with your life, and let the wood between the worlds become your dream.

At various times in your life you might find yourself back in the wood between the worlds. If you have children it can feel like an extended stay in the wood between the worlds. You can feel them growing, at the incessant imperceptible rate that people grow, but how it all happened, how they got to be the people they are now, on their way to being the people they will someday be, is a jumble of memories and expectations and anxieties, all swathed in a glowing green light – a hopeful light, a healthy growing light. Sometimes you’ll be sitting beside the pools again, wondering how you got there, listening to your children and other peoples’ children and yourself grow, getting ready to choose which pool to jump into. Some day, in the glowing green future, there’s no hurry.

If you’re going through a fallow time you might find yourself again in the wood between the worlds. If you or someone you love is sick. If you’re between jobs — if you’ve been let go or you got fed up. If you’re a painter and you can’t paint or a writer and you can’t write. You might lie here in the soft grass and think about the bright worlds you’ve inhabited in the past and the beautiful worlds you’ll find in the future. And there’s no hurry, you can’t hurry, you have to stay here and grow and dream for a while, and listen to the world around you slowly slowly changing. Eventually you’ll jump into a pool, because you have to do that, too.

And you might find yourself in a frightening world, but you don’t have to stay there long, and whatever you bring back from there will help you learn and grow. You might not find the same beautiful worlds you remember in your shifting dreams, but you will find different brighter worlds that you can stay in for a time.

Maybe you wake up in the middle of an ordinary night and the familiar slanting shadows moving across the familiar room seem suddenly strange. Or you walk into your house one day at the change in seasons and the smell through an open window — of spring rain or sunshine on dirt or a hissing radiator — makes it all seem unfamiliar and new. And you pass through your home as in a dream of the memories of yourself at another time, in another life, in the wood between the worlds. And you don’t know how you came here or where you’re going, (you believed you were sure of it, but you never stopped to think). And then you wonder if maybe this was the wood between the worlds, all along.

I like to think about Tidings of Magpies as an in-between, quietly-growing place. And every article that we share, every collection of words or images is a door into someone else’s glowing imagination, and into the worlds that they’ve discovered and created when they ventured out of their own wood between the worlds.

I am grateful.

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