
Do you remember being a kid and learning for the first time that flying was really possible? That a cow could jump over the moon and that you really could follow the second star to the right, straight on until morning, that there was a place in which you could see a day without a night and a night without a day, hover over entire worlds made of pink seas, and know the full power of a promise, to throw a memory as far as the east is from the west? I had forgotten that sensation. It happened too long ago. I’ve lived with it all my life and taken it for granted, but I got to watch it come to life again in the mind of a six year-old autistic girl. She watched wide-eyed as a tiny boy floated in a sea of stars and said, for the first time, what she was going to do when she grew up. “When I grow up, I’m going to be a fairy and fly!” She had found a world with real fairies and little boys who never grow up and lost boys who could fly. And there it was-the magic, all over again. Like the first time, even though I had forgotten it. I looked into her eyes and believed again, and I believed in the magic that she had found. I understood the power of Neverland. Neverland itself is not magic. It has pirates, indians, devilish mermaids and all sorts of creatures. No, the magic is getting there, “with a little faith and trust and a little sprinkling of pixie dust” (Peter Pan), and, once there, the magic of Neverland is that it makes me, at last, brave enough to grow up.
I know that even while I am paying off those school bills, or making that Monday morning stop to Starbucks after a half-slept night, somewhere out there, Peter Pan is crowing. While I fight the temptation to wallow in self-pity, He is fighting pirates. While I feel the gravity of life and its ups and downs, real men and women fly. They touch stars. They feel and see more of life in a single morning than most of us see in a lifetime. This moment was and is still so significant and powerful to me-remembering that magic is true. I am talking about finding out that magic is true enough that I can chart my courses by it, just like Michael, John and Wendy. To me magic is finding out that life is unbounded, mysterious, lurking and calling. Neverland is true, but it is still Neverland. Narnia exists, but it still just happens-when you least expect it. Ever since that day I try to live my life knowing it is there. I believe, and I cast my ever-watchful eyes on the stars, on portraits, on wardrobe doors-just in case.
I think that while my nature thirsts for knowledge, deeper down, in the middle of who I really am, my thirst for mystery is even greater. If I know everything, if I ever open my eyes and see all that there is to be seen I think I would feel naked and vulnerable. Isn’t that what happened to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? At the same time they sought after the forbidden fruit they also feared it just as I will not read too quickly the final books of C.S. Lewis, or I refuse to give away the last of my childhood Barbie collection, all because I know they are the last. They are the end. I need a part of them to remain childlike. The day the little girl’s belief in magic reminded me what it is to believe, I also found that aside from Neverland, there is another star. It draws me to know, to explore, and to seek, to name, to find-a star that I follow with almost obsessive thirst because I know I will never reach its end. I do not fear the last page because I know there is not one, and if I do fear then I don’t really know Him at all.
I honestly believe that magic is medicine. It heals my sadness of a broken heart and the sorrows of broken promises. It brings me back to the place where I can, if only for a few moments be a child again. With this magic, all things are made new, especially me. God knows how much I need it. He knows that Neverland, and Narnia’s magic is essential to my believing, because, while my body lives trapped in a place that is not true, but real, the true places can by seeking, become not just the places that live inside of me but the very life inside all of us. As I lay upon this little girl’s bed after tucking her in that night, we watched the planets which dangled from her homemade solar system, and chose, because it is blue, Neptune as the first planet this tiny six year old would fly to. I did not tell her how far away it is, how small she was, or how having wings made of pink pixie dust only exists in stories. Like her, I just admired its shade of blue, dreamt of fluttering there with my pink wings made of pixie dust, and marveled at everything I did not know about this beautiful blue foam ball.
“So come with me, where dreams are born, and time is never planned. Just think of happy things, and your heart will fly on wings, forever, in Never Neverland.”(Peter Pan)