Just Talk Amongst Yourselves...

I've begun at least three dead-end posts this morning. It's not writer's block--I could easily make-up something from the jumble of words spinning in my head, but you deserve better. I've promised God I would always give you something better. No, it's not writer's block, it's more like God block. And that's ok. I've learned to respect when He's presenting the challenge to choose His way or mine. His words or mine.

So feel free to talk amongst yourselves around the table I carried in here (above). And if you are in need of a subject, here is a tiny taste of one of the deepest, sweetest things ever written with a pen. Hopefully, you've read this before and find it tickling your brain, the part behind your right ear, at odd, dappled times of the day...

From The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams:

What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.


***

To read The Velveteen Rabbit in its entirety, click here.