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Writer's pictureLinda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
Oct 140 min read

Excerpted Inspirations #149


[Mary Lindsay ponders the surprising return of her faith in God and the afterlife.] Sitting at her desk one morning she remembered the day she had come here, and the sense of penetration she had had, reminding her of the Indian boxes one within the other and the small gold one at the center. And she remembered being in this room as a child and trying to make herself small enough to get inside Queen Mab’s coach; and then being in this room at evening, waiting to read the diary, and feeling herself at the heart. The golden box was so deeply within that it was hard to find, yet it contained an entire country and was, she supposed, the only luggage one could take with one if there was anywhere to go beyond death. For so much of her life she had believed there wasn’t, yet in this place she had had so many intuitions of a door. The lime trees in the avenue, guarding the abbey gateway that could no longer be seen but was still there. The door in her own garden wall that had seemed to her as a child to be the entrance into the inner world of a picture. And often in dreams she had opened a familiar door and found beyond not what she was expecting but something so beyond description that it could not be accurately remembered upon waking, though it held one all the following day like light. Dreams were all nonsense, people said, but she had come to believe there was sometimes a true thread woven through the muddle. Have I come to believe there is a door? she asked. Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water (1963), pp. 260-261

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