Counting heartbeats.

Sometimes I am sitting reading an article or a book, and I am sitting so still that I can see my hair vibrate from my heartbeat. So I slowly move one hand to check my pulse, and sure enough - the vibrations are from my heartbeat. So I sit even stiller and try to notice other vibrations. Maybe my scarf will shake, maybe I can feel the pulse in my hands or legs or hear it in my ears. I become aware of my breathing. I think "I need to exercise more."

I like being aware of my heart as it just keeps pumping pumping pumping. It's steady and faithful. My fingertips are pink and my toes aren't cold. When we studied the circulatory system in biology I would imagine my arteries breaking off into smaller and smaller vessels, ending in tiny capillaries so small that only one red blood cell could pass through at a time. I would close my eyes and feel my heart beat and think about being alive and how my body takes care of me; my heart pumping without me ever asking it to; my lungs working with air pressure to move oxygen in and out of my body.

So sometimes I get really distracted when I'm reading articles or books for class. It's more fun to count my heartbeats.

Calvin and Hobbes

One year for Christmas my siblings and I decided to get a Calvin & Hobbes book for my father. But instead of wrapping it and putting it under the tree we secretly read it in bed - throwing it under the pillow when he came in to say goodnight. When he finally received it, it was already well-worn and chuckled over, having made the rounds among his loving children.

Another year for Christmas my dad put a big, heavy present on my lap. I opened it up and didn't know what to say; I was astonished at seeing the "Complete Calvin & Hobbes" sitting there. My dream had come true! What had I done to merit such a wonderful gift? And how can I take care of this with so many siblings - oh wait? It's a family gift? For all of us? ahhh. well I am sure that we will all truly enjoy it...

Today I received my own Calvin & Hobbes book - "It's a Magical World" - which contains the latter years of the strip. And it's my own, my very own. Given to me by Natasha for no other reason than that she loves me.

March

I grew up in North Dakota, where the month of March is still tightly gripped in Winter. And yet it's not the same as January or February; the days are getting longer and there's a certain quality on the wind. It's almost like a kiss. A soft, gentle, kiss from Spring even as Winter continues to rule over the northern plains.

I took the kiss on the wind as a promise, that something was about to change, and I began to love March.

So all through high school, which others around me continued as in the midst of winter, I had a secret friendship with the wind and the air and the sun in March. I would read favorite authors and re-read favorite books. I would take long walks in the growing evenings. I liked celebrating the little holidays of the First Day of Spring and St. Patrick's Day. March became my favorite month.

In college, I began to celebrate Lent, and as Ash Wednesday almost always falls in February, and Easter almost always in April, March was almost always caught completely in Lent. And I was caught up in legalistically denying myself. I also missed the so-slow, ever-so-slow turning over of winter to spring. The change was quicker, somehow, in Chicago, and tulips were sometimes already peaking the beginnings of their green leaves through by the end of March.

Now I've moved to Mexico, where there is no early spring and where March is completely buried under Lenten rituals in this Catholic country.

So I find that for the last few years, I miss early Spring. I miss the awakening joy. I miss home.

Re-enchanting the world.

While I do not consider myself to be a literary critic or snob or anything of the sort, I must admit that I rarely find a book that truly delights me. I read a lot of books that I find "interesting" or "thought-provoking" but little that stirs something inside of me. However, today I did finish one that quite delighted me.

I took a class my senior year at Wheaton called Modern Mythology with Alan Jacobs. We read The Lord of the Rings and The Princess and Curdie and a crazy book by Charles Williams called All Hallow's Eve. One book we didn't read, but which was recommended to us, was Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Dr. Jacobs said that this book was a cross between Jane Austen and Harry Potter. I'm not a Harry Potter fan (and I found that if most of your HP knowledge comes from Wikipedia, don't mention this to a room full of people discussing the end of the seventh book.) but I do enjoy Jane Austen to a high degree. I probably would have forgotten about the book had I not found a used copy for $1. Hence I bought it and brought it along with me to Mexico.

I can't remember when I started reading the book - probably in November, but I finished it this morning. The paperback is a 1006 pages of closely set type and several pages have digressive footnotes that can take up half the room on the page. The story, which wasn't at all dull to begin with, began to pick up steam halfway through as numerous different story threads started to weave together. I thought it was quite addictive and read the last 500 pages or so just this week. At the end I wished it continued, to keep me in the world.

The basic plot is of two English magicians, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. The story begins in the early part of the 19th century and covers a time of about 10 years. It interweaves true British history with an additional, magical past. An extremely powerful English Magician, known mainly as the Raven King, ruled a kingdom in Northern England for 300 years but in the past half millennium English magic had slowly fallen asleep. Norrell and Strange wish to wake it up.

Clarke creates a host of characters, Englishmen, Fairies, day-to-day and enchanted, and the story darts back and forth among them. Plotting her novel in the midst of one winter after another (skipping summers) gives the magic a cold feeling, and the tone is quite matter-of-fact, tongue-in-cheek at some points. this, I think, succeeds in keeping the novel from being a little over the top.

One of the things that fantasy novels do for us is re-enchant the world. When I was a young girl I played Fairies with my sister every season - like the Fantasia fairies that brown the leaves and skate frost upon pond. We had a huge, tree-covered yard and when I went to college I realize how enchanting my childhood had been. Overgrown woods full of unexplored haunts and mystical vistas. Scope for the imagination and room to believe that the world is more than scientifically-explainable processes. I think many of us lose this as we grow, but fantasy brings it back. It reminds us that the world is a big, beautiful, hard place and returns a sense of wonder to us.

Jonathan Strange has brought a sense of that wonder back - visions of stones speaking to water and trees greeting a returning king. A world in which much is possible and mundane things may in fact have an incredibly important significance.

Actually, I missed some stuff because it seemed so mundane at the time. However, because the book was so large I had trouble going back and finding it so that I could read it again. I do not know if the book will end up being a long-time favorite, but, whether it was the story or the world or the ideas that drew me, I can truly say that I have not enjoyed a book like this in quite a long time.

My own personal time-machine.

Driving home from Illinois is like going back in time. Well, actually, maybe it's more like pressing the rewind button on a video tape. The leaves on the trees move backward, getting smaller, disappearing back into the branches. The tulips pull their petals in and scoot back toward the earth. Going north in the spring time is friendly, not menacing, because it means I get to experience the blossoming of spring all over again. Going north in the fall, however, is sad and lonely. It's pressing the fast forward button. The leaves have fallen already and you lose the experience.

I drove home yesterday and today, and while noticing the changes in the trees, I spent a solid three and half hours of the time listening to a dramatization of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I didn't leave early enough to drive the dawn, plus I was going north and west, not east, but it was still a voyage nonetheless. Eustace makes me laugh, and at times I slapped my knee (yes, I will acknowledge this. I laugh aloud to myself when I'm driving alone.) I can't get over how ridiculous he is. He is on such an amazing adventure and he can't see it! He just wants to find a British Consulate, as if you could find one of those in Narnia. The transformation he undergoes, though, metamorphizing into a dragon, is rather potent. When I heard the lonely dragon cry of Eustace when he realizes what has happened to him, I felt sad with him. Later, when Aslan tells him that he needs help undressing his dragon skin, I heard the growl of the lion as he sunk his teeth deep into the scales and skin enclosing Eustace. I could imagine the terror and the hope Eustace felt, for though the teeth of a lion hurt, he could not rid himself of the dragon skin he so desperately desired gone, and needed someone stronger.

Here at the end of all things

I'm celebrating a fake holiday today.
It's March 25, and the Ring has been destroyed.

What a great day! An emblem and embodiment of evil and power and control has been done away with, due to the tremendous efforts and sacrifice.

I'd rather we celebrate our New Year on a day like this, when the seasons are actually changing, and the March wind blows a change, than a cold, bitter day in the midst of winter. This day has meaning.

"...the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach." (The Return of the King pg. 199)

"They stood now; and Sam still holding his master's hand caressed it. He sighed. 'What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven't we?' he said. ...But even as he spoke so, to keep fear away until the very last, his eyes still strayed north, north into the eye of the wind, to where the sky far off was clear, as the cold blast, rising to a gale, drove back the darkness and the ruin of the clouds." (Ibid, 229).