The Wood Between the Worlds

A few months ago I was listening to The Magician's Nephew on audiobook as I worked on another piece, a book that I really enjoyed reading as a child. As I listened to the chapter called The Wood Between the Worlds, my head was filled with wonderful visuals of this strange place. It is described as a place where it is so quiet and peaceful you can hear the trees growing, a place where it is easy to forget who you are and where you may feel content to lay down in the grass forever. Digory and his friend Polly have been sent there by his wicked uncle using magic rings and they are to report back to him on what they find. What they find (once they remember who they are and why they are there)is the guinea pig who was the original experiment, eating the grass with one of the magic rings tied round him. They also find that nothing ever happens there, but that by jumping in the pools they can be transported to other lands. I won't give anymore away- but it is a wonderful story. I remembered why I enjoyed reading it so much as a child and why it was my favorite of the Narnia books. It also gives the origins of how things in Narnia came to be, so it helps if you have read the other books first- or at least The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Chronologically the book comes first, but it was the last of the seven Narnia books that C.S. Lewis wrote.

The image stayed in my head as I packed up my studio to move to a new location. I was so glad once it was set up again so that I could finally get my vision of this hazy and mysterious place out of my head and onto paper!