Why the weird title?

I think the first post I do really needs to explain my slightly ethereal, pretty out-there blog title (find a huge mug of tea and a really comfy chair, this could be a long one). I sat down one Wednesday afternoon (I'm trying to better use the often wasted time which is a Wednesday afternoon!) to create my blog, and my first job was to think of a name; I googled, brainstormed, procrastinated and scribbled until 2 hours and 3 pages later I had managed to get down every idea I could think of for my name. I read back over them and ruthlessly (you will discover if you continue to stick with this blog that I can be quite a ruthless person!) scrapped the worst ones, and started to notice a theme emerging. I looked back over my notebook with all my musings to date in it, and saw the same theme there.

I have always been convinced that there is more to life than we are aware of on a daily basis, and that these little pockets of wonder point to a place other than the one we live in. I feel like there is something in each one of us which longs for somewhere else; a longing that is most apparent when we glimpse beauty. Not superficial beauty, but real beauty, whatever that is for you; music, books, family and friends, art, nature, food, love, poetry…something that makes you think ‘these things don’t fit with this world I live in, there must be something else’. My blog is all about this something else.

I wish I had known C S Lewis, as I think he is something of a kindred spirit of mine. He put it like this:

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world”

Lewis is most famous for giving us The Chronicles of Narnia (which just happen to be my favourite books ever…and I like books), and in The Last Battle the characters and Aslan see the old Narnia pass away, and they enter the new Narnia. This is how he describes this new country;

"It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it if you think of it like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a looking-glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking-glass. And the scene in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real one: yet at the same time they were somehow different - deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can't describe it any better than that: if you ever get there you will know what I mean.

It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed and then cried:

'I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come farther up, come farther in!' "

I believe that what I think of as the 'something else' and what Lewis is describing with the 'new Narnia' is also what Jesus talks about in John 14 v 4 when he says,

"You know the way to the place where I am going"

We are so mesmerised by beauty and beautiful things because they are examples of Heaven seeping through to Earth, and they remind us of our homeland, the place we were created for. In this blog I will write about the things of life which inspire me, and point me towards God, Heaven and this 'deeper wonderment', and seek to put words to the things I see and the emotions they invoke. I hope they help you in whatever small way to figure these things out for yourself, and that you read them and think the same thing I do when I read other blogs, 'THAT'S what I wanted to say!'