Jeff and Kallie

I just got finished reading The Secret Garden, and WOW. I didn't realize what great insights it teaches. I HIGHLY recommend it, especially during springtime after the hard winter we had. It would also be refreshing to read after a winter of life, at times of new beginnings and new discoveries. Here are just a couple of quotes:

In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out than in any century before. In this new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light. At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done – then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts – just mere thoughts – are as powerful as electric batteries – as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live.

-Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)

From 10-year-old Colin, who is just discovering that maybe he's not crippled and maybe he won't die young, like people had told him his whole life:

“When Mary found this garden it looked quite dead. Then something began pushing things up out of the soil and making things out of nothing. One day things weren’t there and another day they were. I had never watched things before and it made me feel very curious.

Scientific people are always curious, and I and I am going to be scientific. I keep saying to myself, ‘What is it? What is it? It’s something. It can’t be nothing! I don’t know its name so I call it Magic.

I have never seen the sun rise, but Mary and Dickon have and from what they tell me I am sure that is Magic too. Something pushes it up and draws it. Sometimes since I’ve been in the garden I’ve looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something were pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast.

Magic is always pushing and drawing to make things out of nothing. Everything is made out of Magic – leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden – in all the places. The Magic in this garden has made me stand up and know I am going to live to be a man.

I am going to make the scientific experiment of trying to get some and put it in myself and make it push and draw me and make me strong. I don’t know how to do it, but I think that if you keep thinking about it and calling it perhaps it will come.

Perhaps that is the first baby way to get it. When I was going to try to stand that first time Mary kept saying to herself as fast as she could, ‘You can do it! You can do it!’ and I did. I had to try myself at the same time, of course, but her Magic helped me – and so did Dickon’s. Every morning and evening and as often in the daytime as I can remember I am going to say, ‘Magic is in me! Magic is making me well! I am going to be as strong as Dickon, as strong as Dickon!’ And you must all do it too….”