Finding Wonder

First, I had to break the spell of CNN with its glar­ing videos and stri­dent news­casts that made me twitchy and fear­ful. Where else could I check in each day? I tripped over Ter­ry Windling’s blog, “Myth and Moor,” which became my wood­land nest. My eyes rest­ed on vin­tage fairy tale art and pho­tos of stone-root­ed, mossy Dart­moor. I freely roamed the gen­er­ous archives, unaware I’d ven­tured on the right path. Gen­tle dis­cus­sions of fairy tales and folk tra­di­tions, of books and art, of writ­ing and life, silenced the blar­ing world.

A recent blog post quot­ed Kather­ine Rundell’s Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. In that gem of a book, Run­dell men­tions Eva Ibbotson’s mid­dle-grade nov­el Jour­ney to the Riv­er Sea as hav­ing “a kind of won­der that oth­er kinds of fic­tion might be too self-con­scious to allow themselves.”

How did these peo­ple acquire so much won­der? Was there any left for me?

Rundell’s lit­tle book is mag­i­cal­ly packed with out­size wis­dom, at least to this lost soul:

When you read children’s books [as an adult], you are giv­en the space to read again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new dis­cov­er­ies came dai­ly and when the world was colos­sal, before your imag­i­na­tion was trimmed and neat­ened, as if it were an option­al extra.

Inside me tight­ness began to unfurl, like a fid­dle­head fern reach­ing toward sunlight.

Next, I stum­bled on a British children’s lit­er­a­ture site geared for teach­ers and stu­dents called Authorfy. Authors and illus­tra­tors con­duct “Mas­ter­class­es,” short videos on top­ics such as “How Much ‘Imag­in­ing’ Do You Leave to the Read­er?” Two-minute videos suit­ed my scat­tered mind. Author read­ings in chip­py accents prompt­ed me to seek the work of Run­dell, Ibbot­son, A.F. Har­rold, and Abi Elphin­stone. Lau­ren Wolk’s Echo Moun­tain smelled like leaf lit­ter and pine nee­dles. The woods became friendlier.