‘How lucky,’ says Connie, ‘that the other children live so close to the Enchanted Wood.’ Yes, how lucky. How I wish I could live there! – Enid Blyton, The Magic Faraway Tree.
How good is that jubilant, triumphant feeling of clicking your assent on the out-of-office automatic response in Outlook.
The knowledge that for the next three weeks, responsibilities are somewhat suspended until your return to this complete madhouse of a job. The excitement at the opportunities to eat well, sleep undisturbed by ruminations of patient outcomes, walk in eucalypt-scented trails encumbered only by a day pack (only mandarins, snacks, water bottle and a book no one intends to read today). The sound of birdsong from the magical Australian bush and not even a singultus from Teams.
The holiday stretches out in one glorious day after another, woken up by a body’s want rather than the squawking need of an alarm, no alarms to turn off then on again after a long day of listening to angry families.
Days spent stretching all the various numbed parts of the mind, some new, some old with some hesitation. Evenings filling up cups of steaming tea as the poison of living the lives of other people drains from your soul and is discarded into the bin, because for once it feels necessary and therefore easy to do.
Night falls and in the first week sleep comes in fits and sweats as the various choleric, jaundiced substances work themselves painfully out of you in your most vulnerable state.
The silence of midnight, usually preserved for writing and working through documents, matched with the silence from the sleeping, overworked characters that power healthcare now observes an almost overwhelming silence. Silence through which the only and loudest noise can be heard, the silent sound of a scream held in for too long.
Waking in the night, in the mornings after dreams spent running, running with knees knocking, knocking, getting in your own way even then. You only really see how bruised you are once you stop in your tracks and make the decision to stop racing along. To what end?
We all run along so well, so prettily coiffed and dressed. Someone else holds the gun but the end of the line is always beyond the horizon, undefined. And so even in the first week of holidays, doggedness chases you, the decisions to not look at e-mails feeling that bit almost over-deliberate.
In the second week, the bruises have started dissolving. You remember what your mother used to say when you had just the one bruise from tripping over tree roots. Then, you would run through woods enchanted by life.
“Rub it away, like so. The pain just means it’s going away soon.”
Now you walk the woods in isolation, quiet meditation to tempt magic back into the fragrant eucalypts. These trees were magic in their own right when you first saw them so many years ago, so different from the humid abundance of your birth home.
Back then in your hopeless solitude you would people the trees with fairies, ghosts, dryads and pretend there were whole worlds in the canopy to run to. In your child’s mind, you whisper secrets, fears, dreams all jumbled up in perceived facts such as children see to these all-knowing sprites.
Where the language of children is much too complex for grown-ups to understand, the wisdom of wood spirits conjured by one’s own mind would always find simple solutions. As you age you will learn to not speak of entities in the forests, and to still your imagination.
Trees are to be climbed and the clouds crowned with wondrous worlds are simply goals to climb, knee to chest, knee to chest towards.
And yet with every chance you get, when poison drains and yellowed bruise lightens, you choose to return still to these enchanted woods. Every year in your allocated reprieve, you return to the quiet, and with fragrant steps seek out the magic tree with all the fairy folk in it who will reflect all your truths back to you.
The forest is so quiet now, and the outside world works so hard to invade, like so many tendrils of darksome mists. Only one of the magic folk seems to have survived, a naiad in a pool who speaks in riddles and can never seem to say what she means.
She’s aged now from when you were a child. You are learning every time you talk to one another that perhaps she might know what she’s talking about.
Days, seasons and years spent walking the quiet woods just to end up next to a familiar pool, talking to a familiar at the base of a tree that is stalwartly magic.
The sun will go down soon and you will have to lose yourself if you stay here alone next to a languid mirror. You see the approach of the mists, both noisome and dark. The intrusion feels strange in this place which was just a moment ago so rejuvenating.
But you’ve spent this time learning and loving the enchanted wood again, and you wave them away. You could make your way home blindfolded, knees spared.
A night spent in the cold wintry woods, no matter how magical is after all a rather unpleasant thing. A life spent in the exposure of an inner world with just the company of a singular naiad no matter her wit can quickly turn into the stuff of nightmares.
So, in your third week, you would be compelled to return to the real world in all its tiresome glory. Blindfolded, and you could make your way back to the big smoke, following the cacophony of familiar noises and scents of your mundane everyday.
This time, with the intoxicating magic of the enchanted wood, and the bracing words of your inner naiad leading you, you see the truth of your life in a gentler, sun-dappled light. You finally begin to understand as the years go on, after each visit into the whispering eucalypt groves, why your life outside became louder as the woods softened.
There is already a dream of a man with a face beaming like the full moon at home, cutting up cheeses and bread. There is already an ambitious, wise fairy with a booming voice who always smells of fresh laundry and tells you when to dodge unwelcome bilge water in your life.
There is a chuckling pixie who has walked your long road with you for years and plans to do so forever. And any amount of loving, riotous folk banging saucepans about in so many years of dinners both planned and emergent.
These magical beings, already wise with the lore of your magic tree and enchanted woods, who have dared to peer into the naiad’s pool and listened to her over years and years of slumber parties, drunken nights, and under the stars with the still warm rock on your backs.
They who have had the privilege of listening to your most-whispered dreams, and the glorious worlds you imagined in place of this oftentimes stale or horrid one. They who mean to pull you up each branch to get you to where you will make it be more than imagined.
You see the real world as it is afresh from your time away, and you cannot wait to share the secrets of the forest with your secret folk.
All these long years, working through one dream to the next, daring to go from little ones to grand ideas, the magic folk you have drawn into your life have dared them with you. Cheeky little musings and hopes falling from pyjamaed lips at firelight, dreams on clouds to be writ into stone.
Some walked together, some cheered on, and you will do the same for them in their turn, and see them when the night closes and they too are lost in turn in the woods.
And so once again you choose to make your way home to one another. The door closes for now behind you, safe in the knowledge that the magic of the woods lives in the everyday if you remember it.
