Down the Rabbit Hole

It’s GREAT to have the kids piling in to help on the house and offer a shot in the arm (a few cc’s of encouragement). And yet part of me also feels like flying the coop – escaping, going off on a lark while the work gets done, and returning to the voila-newness without being part of the process.

Hmmmm. I could pack the quart-sized thermos with freshly made Green Lemonade, grab a big bunch of the crunchiest and coldest black grapes (and maybe a snack-sized Ziploc bag of almonds) and head out on a real-for-sure field trip! I mean why is it that youngsters always get to take field trips to cool places while senior adults just seem to fossilize?

Oh. And just so you know, it’s okay that you’re making that disgusted-looking face. You don’t have to drink Green Lemonade. In fact, you don’t have to come at all.

BECAUSE, you see, like Alice in Wonderland, the rabbit hole could (just maybe) swallow me whole, lead me beyond this dimension, show me something I’ve missed up until now. It could take me to some deeply interior spot…oh my goodness…and you probably wouldn’t want to end up THERE.

But think about it: The Perfect Field Trip. Surrounded by unlimited possibility as a dependent of El Shaddai, I might discover a clearer view of life-lived-to-the-fullest, or a sharper perception of dying-and-death, or an inspired glimpse of rebirth-to-newness…or all three…and all in kaleidoscopic color. Whoa.

I’m especially in the mood to whittle long-standing-but-still-emerging attitudes to a fine tip – those about the impossible becoming possible, which is, of course, one of the core messages of Christianity.

However, reality is calling my name via ye old clanging wrought-iron dinner bell. It’s time to cook (again), and then it will be time to wash the dishes (again), straighten up messiness (again), and fold the laundry (again) – and in the midst of all that, there are plenty of interactive opportunities with the house full of people, just like old times. The rabbit hole - that personalized one waiting just for me - will have to wait just a little bit longer.

And yet just a second ago, I stuck my nose in Lewis Carroll’s book, and vicariously joined Alice on her wild-ride-of-a-field-trip into another world for just a minute. Once again I ended up believing and knowing (like Alice, who observes “so many out-of-the-way things happening recently”) that impossibility is a state of mind; that hope is the greater truth, and impossible things truly ARE possible, if only by redefinition of my expectation and faith in El Shaddai.

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The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well…

Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end! `I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?' she said aloud. `I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth…

Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. `Dinah'll miss me very much to-night, I should think!' (Dinah was the cat.) `I hope they'll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time…

She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah…when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over…

Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head though the doorway; `and even if my head would go through,' thought poor Alice, `it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only know how to begin.' For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible…

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