Sometimes it feels like our years traveling in the Caribbean were just a dream. The present, with its mundane tasks, disrupted community, bad news, and “stuckness,” seems very real, while the life of adventure, beauty, and travel, far away. Therein lies the danger of nostalgia: to feel discontented in the present by glorifying the past. But I know that there were hardships, boredom, and loneliness there, too. That’s just life, the good with the bad. I woke up to a fourth day of rain, so no doubt my mood is affected by the wet, gray days.
I feel like Puddleglum in C.S. Lewis’s book, The Silver Chair, a prisoner of the Queen of Underland:
“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 a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”
I know there is More. Bigger. Brighter. I’ve seen it, I’ve been there, and I’ve communed with other travelers in the Sunlit Lands. As I work on a second revision of my memoir (which feels as if it shall never be complete), I am reliving the memories, and whether I dreamed them up or not, I will allow myself to spend some time looking at pictures and longing for the beauty of the world. The rain will no doubt pass, and sunny days come again. I stored these memories for just such a dreary moment.
Some random adventures mined from our flickr photostream…