the other world

Last night I read Grimbold's Other World by Nicholas Stuart Gray. I should more rightly say "reread," but it had been so long since I last read it that I really didn't remember it at all, which surprised me: I seem to have an infinite capacity to remember fiction, but the details of this story were lost to me, and all that I remembered was that I loved it when I first read it, some 30-plus years ago. It was awesome. I shall have to do my best to get DS1 to read it. Unfortunately it is out of print now, but I imagine it is still floating around as good books never truly die. This is a perfect book for any young person who is a good reader who is intrigued by the idea that there is more to the world than what we see, as I was when I was a girl.

There is an odd grouping of trees right at the edge of the woods behind my mom's house. Four scrub oaks, growing at the corners of a perfect square. When I was a girl, I fervently wished that fairies and brownies and the possibility of those other worlds were real, and those trees interested me greatly. It just seemed too unlikely, that they could grow like that, so precisely placed at the corners, and growing each straight and true at the same rate, so that they are all perfectly matched in height and in thickness. I used to think that if you stood in that square at exactly the right time, you could move into the other world. The thought was thrilling and scary, but I never tried to decipher what that time could be: the full moon? the new moon? the first light of day, with the mists still heavy upon us, rolling up from the marsh?

Or perhaps it wasn't some external event that would open the door that I could so obviously see. Perhaps there was something I had to do, to prove myself worthy to pass into the magic realm. Like Muffler, the protaganist of Gray's novel, I was always thinking up rhymes and stories, even as quite a little girl. Maybe I could rhyme myself through?

Gray describes the other world as one where our perceptions of self are outwardly manifested, and so cats become as large and regal as lions, as sleek as panthers, while dogs shrink down into tiny shivering pets, too concerned about their master's wishes, and easily tucked inside a jacket for safe-keeping. All of nature sparkles in jewel tones, and everything that is alive has an articulate consciousness. It's enchanting.

Oh, how I wanted to believe in that world, to see it for myself. But I lacked both courage and faith, then.

It occurred to me last night, though, for the first time now, I lack neither, and I have had my glimpses of the "other world." It hasn't happened often, and with alarming less frequency as my days become more stressed with surgery and other mundane details, but I know now that it's there, and I know I can get back to it:

The other world is not "other", it is this world, made more real and beautiful by recognizing the Presence of God. A moment of true prayer can do it. Sometimes I catch it out of the corner of my eye: my children engaged in something so charming, it can only be seen as a blessing. Sometimes I see something full on and immediately recognize it for what it is. It is frustrating sometimes because I know that God is Present all the time, I'm just not capable of experiencing it! However and whenever I get there, though, when I am solidly in God's Presence, it is as Gray describes: everything sparkles. I can see the rightness of everything. How strange and wonderful that the little girl inside this middle-aged woman should find that her heart's desire could finally come true.

Like Muffler, I have always felt as if I am a bit "off", different from everyone else, like I didn't belong. Standing in the Presence of God, I find my place in His Creation.