Lost Years Of Merlin

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AUTHOR: T. A. Barron TITLE:

We Are What We Imagine

SOURCE: Journal of Youth Services in Libraries 12 no2 10-12 Wint '99 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. Humility is essential for survival--and kids willingly bestow us with strong doses of humility. I am reminded of the boy who sent me a note: "After hearing you speak, I now know you don't have to be very smart after all to be a writer." As much as I have yet to learn about kids, and I'm learning all the time--not just from school visits, but from the five at our home--I do know imagination is power. Nothing less than the power of creation. The first step to surviving in this world is often finding some way to imagine a new world. This is more than "just" an escape, because if you can imagine something new, you can start to create it. From a writer's standpoint, fantasy must be more real than reality. All the senses need to be engaged, yet the basic rules of the world must fit. This is not an easy task--but if it works ... a new world is born. I would like to share two recent experiences of imagination creating new worlds: The first example was a visit to a school in Brooklyn, New York with Barbara Kiefer of Columbia University. These students are tough kids in a very tough place. However, their classroom is a haven for them--and for their imaginations--which are so alive and so real. These kids, who have every excuse to be downtrodden and despairing, are wholly alive. These kids can imagine and they can create. These kids do not just get through their day--they affect the quality of their day. The second example was a visit to the Gwich'in Athabascan tribe in Alaska. I was invited to be an observer at the Solstice celebration at one of their villages above the Arctic Circle. I ate lots of smoked salmon and swatted lots of mosquitoes while camping along the Yukon River banks. The Gwich'ins are "The people of the Caribou"--and it shows in their dances, their songs, their metaphors, and even their calendar of seasons. They are regaining their unity as a people--roaming together like the caribou. These people are enduring tough times--they are no strangers to alcoholism, drug abuse, and domestic violence. Yet their stories provide them with an anchor, a connection--both with their land, their place--and with their traditions, their way of life. This brings to mind these words by Martin Luther King Jr.: "We are all connected." But to reach out to other lives, across miles and across generations, we must first imagine them. In these different places, I met kids dealing with great troubles who were helped by the power and gift of stories. Sometimes the stories that were told were ancient tales, but always told in new voices--their own voices. In a real sense--just as we are what we eat--we are what we imagine. These kids are discovering and expanding their own imaginations and this gives them the power to

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create, and recreate, the world around them. Also, by imagining, they are making choices, and seeing that their choices matter. And therefore, they themselves matter. These kids know that their struggles are real. Through imagination, though, they discover that their hopes are also real. In my books, the characters have sometimes met their struggles and challenges by changing into other people, other creatures--trees, stones, beams of light. Right now, I am dealing with a tough kid in a tough time: Merlin. In The Lost Years of Merlin (Barron 1996) epic, the opening scene creates the key metaphor: A boy washes ashore on a strange coast in Wales, knowing nothing about himself--let alone his inner magic. He must learn about love, grief, power; about human frailty as well as ideals; about dark and light, masculine and feminine. These discoveries, challenges, gains, and losses ultimately prepare him to be the legendary wizard Merlin--as he discovers that inner magic. Allow me to share two examples: From The Lost Years of Merlin (Barron 1996): Merlin climbs a tree to escape danger. While he is experiencing the feeling of freedom in this tree, a violent storm erupts. Soon Merlin feels he is part of the tree--a creature of the land yet more a part of the wind itself. When at last the storm subsides, the entire world seems newly reborn--as does Merlin himself. He understands, for the first time in his life, that the Earth is always being remade, that life is always being renewed. From the recently published book three of the epic, The Fires of Merlin (Barron 1998): Merlin believes that he has lost all his power. To survive, he must become a deer--a hard transformation. But it is only possible if he can truly imagine it. And he must imagine it with exquisite detail: right down to hearing not with his ears but with his hooves, as he bounds across the plains. "Tree and leaf," as Tolkien put it. Here is what happens to Merlin as his senses expand, taking him to places he has never known before: Bounding through the grasses, tinted by the onset of autumn, I realized that my sight was good. Very good. No longer relying on my second sight, which in daytime had never measured up to true eyesight, I relished the details, the edges, the textures. Sometimes I even slowed my running just to look more closely. Dewdrops clinging to a spiderweb, tufts of grass bending as gracefully as a rainbow, airborne seed drifting on the wind. Whether my eyes were still coal black, or brown like my companions', I could not tell. Yet that mattered not at all, for they were, at last, open windows to the world. As good as my eyesight had become, my sense of smell had grown even better. Intimate aromas came to me from all around. I smelled, with relief, the diminishing traces of smoke. And I drank in, unrestrainedly, the subtle aromas of this bright autumn day. Yet the newest of all my senses, it seemed, was my hearing. Sounds that I had never known existed washed over me in a constant stream. I heard not only the continual pounding of my own hooves, and the distinctive weight and timing of the hooves of the two deer ahead of me but also our echoing reverberations through the soil. Even as I ran, I caught whispers of a dragonfly's wings humming and a field mouse's legs scurrying.

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As the sun drew closer to the western hills, I realized that my ability to hear went even beyond having sensitive ears. Somehow, in a mysterious way, I was listening not just to sounds, but to the land itself. I could hear, not with my ears but with my bones, the tensing and flexing of the earth under my hooves, the changing flow of the wind, the secret connections among all the creatures who shared these meadows--whether they crawled, slithered, flew, or ran. Not only did I hear them; I celebrated them, for we were bound together as securely as a blade of grass is bound to the soil (Barron 1998, 119-20). And so Merlin has become a deer, as well as something more important. He has become a creator of his world, a person with the ability to shape his own surroundings. In my own life, I first discovered this power while growing up on my parents' ranch in Colorado. There was a steep-walled creek that passed through the ranch. On one of its banks stood an ancient ponderosa pine tree. Many times on my way home after school, I would get off the school bus, cut across a pasture, and sit with my back against its trunk, looking up into its twisted branches, wondering whether they had, long before, swayed to the chanting of the Utes. The tree's gnarled roots, undercut by the creek, had already started to pull free of the soil. Yet, as I leaned against the trunk, I felt somehow stronger and larger than before. I felt connected to something I could not understand, although I sensed that it was even more precious than the crystalline air in my lungs. Sometimes I even dared to wonder what it might be like to actually be a tree--to shed all my assorted human longings and sink my roots deeply in one place, to stay anchored in the same soil, season after season, year after year. Almost thirty years later, the magic of that tree inspired the climax of one of my novels, The Ancient One (Barron 1992). The heroine of this tale, an intrepid but vulnerable teenage girl named Kate Gordon, finds herself trapped in the distant past, with a tribe of Native Americans who lived in the Pacific Northwest hundreds of years ago. Her only hope of ever returning home, to her own time, is to do the most difficult thing she has ever done. She must merge her own life with the life of the only living thing old enough to reach across the centuries to her own time: a great redwood known as the Ancient One. In other words, she must become a tree. Ducking her head, Kate entered the cavern in the trunk of the great redwood, gouged out by fire centuries before. Slowly, very slowly, she discerned a sound vibrating in the hollow of the tree. It was a rushing, coursing sound, like the surging of several rivers. She realized with a start that it must be the sound of resins moving through the trunk and limbs of the tree. And, strangely, through her own self as well. Then she heard something more. With all her concentration, she listened to a distant gurgling sound. It came from far below her, rising from the deepest roots of the tree. They were drinking, drawing sustenance from the soil. Another sound joined with the rest, completing the pattern. Like an intricate fugue, it ran from the tips of the remotest needles all the way down the massive column of heartwood. Back and forth, in and out, always changing, always the same. This was the sound, Kate realized at last, of the tree itself breathing. The sound of life being exchanged for life, breath for breath. "Great tree," she said in wonder. "I feel so young, and you are so very, very old." A full, resonant laughter filled the air, stirring even the sturdiest branches. "I am not so young as you, perhaps, but old I surely am not. The mountains, they are old. The oceans, they are old. The sun is older still, as are the stars. And how old is the cloud, whose body is made from the vapors of an earlier cloud that once watered the soil, then flowed to the

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river, then rose again into the sky? I am part of the very first seed, planted in the light of the earliest dawn. And so are you. So perhaps we are neither older nor younger, but truly the same age." As she listened to the rhythmic breathing of the tree, Kate felt herself beginning to breathe in unison. A sense of her body was slowly returning, a body that bent and swayed with the fragrant wind. Every element of her being stretched upward and downward, pulling taller and straighter without end. Her arms became supple, sinewy limbs; her feet drove deeply into the soil and anchored there. A sweep of time swirled past, seconds into hours, days into seasons, years into centuries. Spring: azaleas blossoming and pink sorrel flowering. Summer: bright light scattering through the morning mist, scents of wild ginger and licorice fern. Autumn: harsh winds shaking branches, gentle winds bearing geese. Winter: ceaseless rains, frosty gales, more rains brewing. Again and again, again and again. Seasons without end, years beyond count (Barron 1992, 349-350). Like Kate in this story, the ability to imagine has made a crucial difference in my life. That applies, I should add, just as much in my adulthood as it did in my youth. I am entirely convinced that if a young person can learn trust in his or her imagination, literally anything is possible. So may each and every one of you continue to press on in your work. For in encouraging the power of imagination in young people, you are truly inspiring the power of creation. ADDED MATERIAL T. A. Barron is the author of several children's and YA books. His most recent publication is The Fires of Merlin, the continuation of a series beginning with The Lost Years of Merlin (Putnam 1996). This article was adapted by the author from a presentation he gave at the program "Tough Times, Tough Kids" at the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.

WORKS CITED Barron, T. A. 1992. The Ancient One. New York: Philomel Books. Barron, T. A. 1996. The Lost Years of Merlin. New York: Philomel Books. Barron, T. A. 1998. The Fires of Merlin. New York: Philomel Books.

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