The World is Wide

http://youtu.be/KtapRafZANs


The world is wide, the fields shine white like a bride in the warm sun.
My feet stride with joy like the adventurous young boy... that I never was...
so much life to make up for days I've spent in books, so here we go.

The world is wide, the grass is alive with the wind from the river where you bathe your feet.
The birds sing a song, melodious and long, just to talk, just to comment on the heat.
I sometimes wish that we could be that way, singing just to communicate.
I think I know what I'd say.
I'd say

"Home, home! Someday we'll be home! We're going home!
Home, home! Someday we'll see home! We're going home!
And you were not made for this."

The world is wide, but far too narrow to be mine, where I'm trapped inside this skin.
I become what I detest, and I can't save myself from this ruin within.
So I long to be free... I long to be home-free.
I long to be home.

And you were not made for this. It's why you feel so restless.
No, you were not made for this. You were made for home.

Someday, you'll see, we're going home.











There are two main points to this song, that the world is beautiful and that the world is unfulfilling. But even less fulfilling is the fantasy where I've always lived. Growing up I guess I used to think that it's only in books that the hills really roll green with grass and the mountains stand crisp with snow and fog settles into the crevices, only in books that strangers say kind things and offer companionship. Tolkien loved those marvelous landscapes, so he created a world full of them, and I desired to live there not knowing that all those things were really a shadow of what this world has to offer, and I neglected to notice the beautiful things that I was already surrounded with. My mom's garden, it might well be a Hobbiton garden. And when I began to take myself for walks along the side of the Columbia River, I noticed that some houses looked positively Hobbit-like. But it wasn't until I read a book called "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" that I began to truly realize that all those beautiful things Tolkien wrote about really exist in full on this earth. Ironic, that a book would show me how to look outside.

The band Switchfoot wrote a song called "This is Home" for the Prince Caspian movie. So at least I'm not the only one that views these far-off shores as the true reality. Jon Foreman must have been captivated by Narnia just as I was by Middle-Earth. The song is also a thinly-veiled praise of our ultimate destination, (the word heaven doesn't do it justice, I will call it Zion), and obviously this song also carries that theme. The images I wrote of are definitely from the Columbia River, as I walked through Leslie Groves Park to Howard Amon. Most people don't like the wind, as it gets very strong in the Tri-Cities, but I've always loved it. It's another one of those things, I guess that connect me to Tolkien's world.

So why do I feel such a longing to see another world? Even if I made the most of the world I'm in, I know I would long for the unfelt breezes around the broken watchtower at Weathertop, and the howls of the wolves in the distance? The sparkling Grey Havens, the forest of Ithilien, the strange Withywindle. Why do I feel so restless? Why has this world, in all its glory, left me unfulfilled?
And even if I cut away all my anchors and lived to the fullest, going broke for the sake of adventure, I somehow know that it would never give me the kind of permanent satisfaction I'm after, the kind that only an unreachable world has to offer. It's only because I was not made for this.
And if you, too, feel restless, know that you were not made for this. We will reach the other side and find it to be more spectacular than any book could speak of. Perhaps the only one to come close is at the end of C.S. Lewis', The Final Battle. He says that the colors became more vivid, everything become more real, and the Pevensies were finally home.