The Frog Pond

Pond in the meadow
Mother West Wind "How" Stories

 I became aware of the Other World through story time when my father read books to me at bedtime. There were many wonderful books, but the one that most engaged me was a series by Thornton W. Burgess about all the creatures that lived around and about the forest and meadow with its pond. It was during the reading of one of these books that I interrupted my father to ask him how he was doing this, how when he held this book these stories appeared (his style was to dramatize all the different voices, to express the personality of each creature). He showed me the page, the letters all neatly aligned across the pages, page after page, and explained that these were words that we speak every day and he was reading them, with the promise someday soon I would he able to read them also. Later I came to understand that this Other World makes tangible the human imagination, and it is a prodigious archive of How stories, instructing us how to live and be, about our possibilities, our responsibilities. The implicit lesson is "answerability," as the Philsopher said, that the point is not just to admire the Other World, or to escape to it, but to realize it addresses us and demands that we incarnate these possibilities for ourselves in our own life.