This Green Door: A Welcome into "the Heart of Things"

"The word imagination doesn’t always mean imaginary as in not really there. That imagination is involved in clothing everything in meaning and making a synthesis of everything. It’s the discovery, and the glad discovery, that imagination is a truth-bearing faculty. It’s capable of bringing us to certain things that we could apprehend in no other way." -Malcolm Guite

This particular green door resides in Liss, England, behind the ever-enchanting manor house where the English L'Abri operates. Once you go through the door, the trees form a circular shape that seems like they are pulling you in, inviting you to something hidden.

Why this blog?

A sensory nexus to collate and connect the things I'm seeing, hearing, and learning. They often do not thematically converge, but they create a certain type of melody that keeps me hungry to grow and discover.

Really, I just needed a place to house all these words and scenes that render me in a state of wonder and curiosity.

Why the Green Door?

There are various symbols that I carry in my life with explicit meaning. But this is an image that is still unfolding, one that I'm in the process of prescribing meaning to. As soon as I saw it, I knew it would carry weight somehow. But for now, it stands as a "thin place", as Celtic tradition calls it, where the spiritual and physical realms seem to kiss. A place where a concrete material object, doused in the beauty of nature surrounding it, opens to a realm of mysticism and enchantment.

What's on the other side? An invitation. A welcome of some sort."...And welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”- C.S. Lewis

For a visceral and emotional ascent to this feeling of welcome, here's an excerpt from Phantastes by George MacDonald (C.S. Lewis's favourite author and the book that "baptised his imagination"), personified by being taken in by a mysterious yet cosy old woman. *Best when read aloud*

"The cottage rose right out of the smooth turf. It had no windows that I could see; but there was a door in the centre of the side facing me, up to which I went. I knocked, and the sweetest voice I had ever heard said, “Come in.” I entered. A bright fire was burning on a hearth in the centre of the earthern floor, and the smoke found its way out at an opening in the centre of the pyramidal roof. Over the fire hung a little pot, and over the pot bent a woman-face, the most wonderful, I thought, that I had ever beheld.

For it was older than any countenance I had ever looked upon. There was not a spot in which a wrinkle could lie, where a wrinkle lay not. And the skin was ancient and brown, like old parchment. The woman’s form was tall and spare: and when she stood up to welcome me, I saw that she was straight as an arrow. Could that voice of sweetness have issued from those lips of age? Mild as they were, could they be the portals whence flowed such melody? But the moment I saw her eyes, I no longer wondered at her voice: they were absolutely young—those of a woman of five-and-twenty, large, and of a clear gray. Wrinkles had beset them all about; the eyelids themselves were old, and heavy, and worn; but the eyes were very incarnations of soft light. She held out her hand to me, and the voice of sweetness again greeted me, with the single word, “Welcome.” She set an old wooden chair for me, near the fire, and went on with her cooking. A wondrous sense of refuge and repose came upon me."

Drinking in all the beauties and oddities around me.

Cheers,

Carolyn