top of page
Search

Excerpted Inspirations #180

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • Jun 2
  • 0 min read

She did occasionally talk to Pooh-Bah, as well as to flowers and herself, because he and she were of exactly the same age, five and three-quarter years old, and this gave them a certain sympathy with each other. No one year is ever quite the same as any other year, and the souls whom it cradles through their first months on earth are of a particular vintage and know each other when they meet. Caroline and Pooh-Bah, both being so young, could both of them still just remember a place where they had lived before they were born upon this earth, and sometimes they talked about it together in whispers, generally towards evening when the blackbird was singing in the ilex tree. For Pooh-Bah and Caroline knew quite well that it is at times and places of transition, at that moment of the sunset or the dawn when it is neither night nor day but both, or out in the marshes where there is neither sea nor land but a mingling of the two, that the veil slips a little between one world and another and for one brief moment one belongs nowhere, neither to day nor night, to land or sea, in this world or the other. […] One part of her mind was telling her that her dream was just a mix-up of the dawn and the flowers in the garden and the singing blackbird, but another part of it was saying that one world interpenetrates another; we live in them both, but of the greater we now know only that which the lesser tells us of it; and the language of the lesser is the language of dreams and birdsong, sunshine and the kindliness of man. Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree (1940), pp. 30, 59

 
 
 

Comments

  • Black YouTube Icon
  • Black Facebook Icon

The views expressed on this website are the opinions of their authors, and may not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other author, agency, or organization, including Deborah's Tree.


©2020 by DEBORAH'S TREE. Proudly created with Wix.com

bottom of page