[littlemanpoet]

Heh. Not all that old, but sensing time slipping away, as if through the fingers like sand.

Oh, I'm glad Eden is in my heart, and thanks for reminding of the poem with the secret gate. That's very much a piece of my own writing - how could it not be, if Tolkien baptized my imagination, to borrow a phrase from CSL?

I used to feel like 'that place' is just over the horizon, but I always knew I was just kidding myself because flat now is too sapped of faery.

davem, I have to smile sometimes how you communicate with the rest of us on this and other threads, as if you have found the Gospel According to Tolkien and are trying with all your might to communicate the evangelium, trying to get us all to believe. On this thread you have presented a powerful principle, that belief is necessary before its object can be accepted. That has nothing to do with whether it was experienced - I think of CSL's dwarfs in The Last Battle, for example. I for one wish I could go back to the way things used to be for me, and just believe, but it's not in me to do so anymore. I'm going to have to struggle through to the next "whatever". I sense that maybe Fordim and Bêthberry may be facing the same dilemma as I? A pure guess, that.