Ship of Dreams

I used to spend hours writing stories. Now I spend days, weeks, and months, writing about stories (and poems and plays). I'm not complaining---I love my job, and I believe that if I ever have the opportunity to write imaginative literature, what I have learned will give me more resources than many writers ever have.

But for now, there isn't much time for the imagination. Instead I try to make time for a few minutes outside each day at the mailbox, and an hour at the gym, and a date with my sisters. The three brothers who were my favorite playmates now have households of their own; one sister is in college; the baby of our family enters college (God willing) this fall. I want every moment I can have with them, because the moments are increasingly few. Time to dream and write "my stuff" is, by comparison, of little importance.

Ah, but April is an enchanted month, most difficult to ignore. On nights like this one, with the memory of late afternoon sun still on my skin (I spent a few hours doing my research outside---a rare but wonderful treat), I remember how often I used to catch hold of a silver rope and swing aboard my ship of dreams. Then there was no harbor-sitting! Then it was "Hoist sail!" and "Yonder the horizon, my good ship! Bring me that sun!"

Recently I took out my stories and looked them over. Most of the best ones were begun just after I was saved, in my mid-teens. There is a story called Outremer, about the Crusades. What a project I mean to make of that, someday! I have another, Mountains of Spice, about culture clash, Christianity, and roleplaying fantasy games. One of my favorites is Lebannen. It is the story of a girl who dances with ogres and sincerely believes that she is her own goddess.

There are others. The House in Sorrow Glen is about twelve generations of cursed lovers, and about the nature of true and false love. Kallipolis, named for Plato's Republic, is about an ideal society that isn't really ideal. Luceaferul deals with the matter of a Romanian poem by the same name, about a star who falls in love with a human princess, except that he cannot love, because he has no heart. That story is about learning to trust God.

We Six, the first of a projected series on our family, chronicles the two most idyllic years of my childhood, which were spent in a hundred-year-old farmhouse overlooking the Shenendoah Valley. The Logical Conclusion, a scribble really, is about euthanasia and other problems of our modern society.

And then of course there is Prodesse and Delecta, the most sweeping project I have ever planned for myself, which addresses nothing less than everything human and divine, in the form of an allegorical story about a boy who cares only for the mind and soul, and a girl who loves nothing but the pleasures of heart and body---at first.

Sometimes I take these out, and look them over. While putting them away, I smile a little. "Not yet," I say to myself. If even a third of them were ever fully realized as I imagine they could be, then truly Someone would have given me the sun, and my ship might sit in harbor... except that, of course, it wouldn't. For I shall always be dreaming.

But there are dreams and dreams, my dear. Some dreams are fretful, complaining, full of "if only" and "I wish." That sort of dream can kill your soul. Yet there is also the dream that says "and when" instead of "if only"; it says "I know" or "I expect" instead of "I wish." Those dreams put heart back into you, and it is those that I love best to chase in my yacht, the Daydream.

So, if I never write a single one of those books, or even achieve my present task of building a solid literary studies program, I shall only have lost the sun that I like to chase sometimes. A sun, after all---what is that? Are there not a million others to catch, as when one hunts in a forest that is well stocked with deer? I earnestly seek suns, because they are good to have, but I know and expect to leave their forests of the night, in which they glide and twinkle, and at last turn my prow homeward towards an endless day---but a day unlit by suns.

Where sky and water meet, and where the waves grow sweet... the utter east. Doubt not to find there all you seek. For there, gentle reader, is the "I know," the proper end of all my dreams. There are white shores, and---I believe---green valleys. There is uncreated Light.

Someday my ship of dreams will be done indeed with harbor-sitting. But don't bring me the horizon. Don't bring me a sun.

Bring me home.