There is terror, it is, when I look into my heart.

So many poets were wrong. But at least one was right:  Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied; and vice sometimes by action dignified.

A soul searching for light does not evade darkness. True, light illuminates it - and there it is, the soul - the heart - not dissipating in the light, but solid, casting shadows. That’s me.

Though my heart isn’t hard - it toils and bubbles like a witch’s brew, moving about in a cauldron (my body) waiting for the enchantment which will give it shape - it is still dark.

How I’ve learned that being embraced by light isn’t the same as being consumed! Nevertheless, that is the start. That is where we begin.

Years ago, I went through a period in my life of monetary generosity - going without eating for days in order to feed a child in Africa I’d never seen before - a starving child that could not offend me with his hunger - a child I could not judge to be anything but impoverished. While my body agonized for want of bread, trying to feed those I did not know, my tongue robbed those around me of things they might never get back - a sense of worth and value - a belief that their company was desired. I was a hypocrite. While my mind practiced cold logic, my heart was starved for love. Need-love. Give-love. I was a pauper bragging about his rags.

In a blessed instant, that part of me was overthrown - like a ship, blasted out of the water by cannon fire. My rudder was broken - my sails came winnowing down - I found myself being tossed about like a chicken on Sunday, after it was fried.

I did not talk to God for two whole years. After all, I had said enough to damn a lifetime and, for the first time, I felt thrilled to finally shut up.

By the way, I highly recommend it. Shutting up. Particularly if it doesn’t come naturally to one. (admission: I can still talk far too much if you are unlucky enough to discover it).

On the other side of two years, I finally saw that there were other people on the planet. Actual, real, blood-pumping folks that the universe included, besides me and my glory, in its day to day churnings. It was quite a revelation. The posters with the belly-swollen bodies and pink neon mottos had come down - not that I stopped caring about them. But my mission had changed. To live with my eyes wide open to people right next to me.

I admit, I’m still working on that. Always will be. There’s this person that frequently gets in the way. Me. And since I can’t exactly tell myself to bug off, there I am.

I understand that there is no life that is completely absent from itself. That’s, well, impossible. But I do believe self-sight can be inclusive of other people. That we can love others, at the least, as much as we love ourselves. Somewhere in that loving, I think, while self remains, darkness can finally dissipate. In that sort of love, I could stop blocking light and casting shadows, and allow it to penetrate "me" and touch someone standing next to me.

The irony is, that in stretching toward light, my logistic generosity has changed. I have digressed from feeding bodies and denying souls, to loving souls and denying bodies.

I feel like I’ve been in some sort of wilderness that I entered like a beggar who’d dragged a hot find of clothes from a Greenwich village garbage can, and exited like a millionaire who hadn’t been shopping for clothes for five decades.

So now, I’m on a mission to regain that part of me that gave physically. Why oh why did I stop?? There is no great harm, after all, in feeding someone without loving them compared to not feeding them at all.

People are strange. At least, I am. I seem to continually exchange darkness for darkness. I change shape, toiling, bubbling - but I never seem to rise out of that genetic infamy that is our sad inheritance.

But I have hope now - and, such a desire to give greatly again. I’m taking small steps towards my goal - trying to replace bad habits with good ones - always wary of the intrinsic tendency to call good works evidence of a good heart. How well I know that one can exist without the other. Good works. Good heart.

That’s what I want.

The inner cesspool has spoken.

You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you, Peter Pan. That's where I'll be waiting.~ Tinkerbell

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 til 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 don’t remember 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 in my daughter’s mind this weekend.

We were watching a very cheesy 80's flick about a group of kids that accidentally get launched into space - yeah, very cheesy - and have to utilize what they’ve learned in a few short weeks in order to make it home safely. The film is pretty much a turkey, but it’s a teaching turkey - like the really bad films you watch in school about the dark ages and all the peasants are wearing gold watches. It was a Razzy at best - but still full of enough of the basics of space travel - and incidentally, some great space cinematography - to be just down a kid’s introductory alley to the space program.

My daughter 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 gwow up, I’m going to be a superhero and fly a space ship." There you go. She found a world with real robots and superheros, with cars that drive on the moon, and little boys who could fly.

And there it was, the magic. All over again. Like the first time, even though I’d forgotten it.

I stood in Houston’s space center in January of this year and saw it through the faded, world-weary eyes of an adult. So I got a little excited when we got to the Rock lab full of spicy looking dust from different worlds, and I took down more than a few notes on the names of knobs and flashing buttons so I’d have good references for that science fiction piece I’m going to finish one day - but in the midst of that glory, I was a skeptic. I saw the cracks in the asphalt under our tram - the weeds that were creeping through the parking lot here or there - the rust on the giant doors which had gotten their last new coat of paint during some movie that starred a couple of has beens. It wasn’t unlike reading Peter Pan as a grown up and, at last, being creeped out by his strange, pearly teeth, and androgynous voice. This went into space? This shoddy, rusted lump of metal and screws? Ha! We landed on the moon? You expect me to believe that? And for what? To pick up rocks? I found myself asking.

But when I looked into her eyes this weekend, I believed all over again. I understood the power of Neverland. Neverland itself isn’t magic. It has pirates and indians and devilish mermaids enough - all creatures who would kill us more quickly than our boring little rowhouse on twenty-second street. No, the magic is getting there (with a little faith and trust, and a sprinkling of pixie dust) - and once there, the magic of Neverland is that it makes us, at last, brave enough to grow up.

We know, we humans, intrinsically, that even when we are signing that mortgage check, or making that Monday morning pot of coffee after a half-slept night, while the boss is mumbling again about working overtime on Tuesday - we know that somewhere out there, Peter Pan is crowing. While we fight the temptation to wallow in self-pity, he is fighting pirates. While we feel the gravity of our ergonomic office chairs, real men and women fly. They touch stars. They feel and see more of the earth in a single morning than most of us see in a lifetime.

There is a power in knowing that magic is true. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking of the kind of knowing in which there is nothing left to know. That is not finding out that magic is true, that is finding out that magic isn’t magic. I’m talking about finding out that magic is true enough that we can chart our courses by it, just like Michael, John, and Wendy. Magic means life is still unbounded, mysterious, lurking, calling. Neverland is true, but it is still Neverland. Narnia exists, but it still just happens - when we least expect it. We live our lives knowing it is there - we believe - and we cast ever watchful eyes on the stars, on portraits, on wardrobe doors, just in case....

You see, I think that while human nature thirsts for knowledge, deeper down, in the middle of what we really are, our thirst for mystery is even greater. Because if we ever know everything - if we ever open our eyes and see all that there is to be seen - I suppose we would feel naked - I suppose we would feel vulnerable. While we press on to catalogue the last leaf in the last corner of the Garden, at the same time we fear it, just as I won’t read that last Jane Austen, or read too quickly the final untouched volumes of C.S. Lewis - because I know they are the last. They are the end. I would not yet know them, because I need a part of them to still be unknown.

And like Neverland, there is another star - a Celestial Body, I believe, that draws us to know - to explore - to name - to find - a star that we follow with an almost obsessive furor because we know, we know, we know, we will never reach its end. We do not fear the last page, because we know there isn’t one. And if we do fear, then we don’t really know Him at all.

The voyage of men into space is insurance of the simplest kind - insurance that the mind of man will not run out of mysteries any time soon. That there are still a thousand years at least of knowing nothing about something. We know when we glimpse the stars that this world will not cease its magic any time soon, but instead draw us onward, upward, beyond its own horizons - towards the second star to the right, and straight on til Morning.

Magic is medicine. It heals the sadness of knowledge and the sorrow of wisdom. It brings us back to the place where we can, if but for a moment, be children again. With magic, all things are made new - especially us. And God knows how much we need it. He knows that Neverland, and Narnia, and Middle-Earth, and their magic are essential to our nature - because while our bodies live trapped in a place that isn’t true, but real, the true places can, by exploration, by seeking, become not just the places that live inside of us - but the very life inside of us.

As we lay upon her bed last night, watching the planets which dangled from her miniature solar system, and chose, because it is blue, Neptune, as the first planet my three year old would fly to, I didn’t tell her how far away it was, or how small she was, or how high fuel prices were, and how much fuel a space ship would spend, or how much peanut butter she’d have to pack. Like her, I just admired its shade of blue, and subtle outlines of something green, and marveled at everything I didn’t know about it.