Tag: lives

A Thousand Lives (a poem)

Here’s a poem to compliment my previous post, A Treasure Chest for Thoughts

I have often wandered in
The Hundred Acre Wood
If you’ve never been to Neverland
I’ll tell you that you could
But mind yourself—
There’s pirates there
And don’t trust Long John Silver
You need a bear like ol’ Baloo,
The jungle-wisdom giver
I’ve been in boats with Rat and Mole
And Huckleberry Finn
And for a time the Pevensies
Were pretty much my kin
I cried when Old Dan died and I
Rejoiced when Gandalf was revived
And I have lived a thousand lives
While sitting by the bookshelf

Three Castle Head

On a sunny day in the Spring, we pulled the car into a gravel parking area at the end of a remote peninsula in Ireland. The sea shimmered in the light beyond the deep green fields lined and dotted with grey rock walls and white sheep. We opened the gate and crossed a field, and then another, and another, carefully following the faint paths worn by the feet of those who had come here before us. Sometimes we had to make a choice—it seems not all of our predecessors had gone the same way. Or did hooves make one trail, and feet another? Eventually the grassy fields gave way to rocky hills, and we scrambled up one side and down the other where the grass and mud and boulders and the sound of the sea all blend together into a kind of otherworldly magic and I had to remind myself that I wasn’t looking at an illustration of the Wild Lands of Narnia—I was in the real, tangible, wild of the actual world.

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