Stranded vessels, locked in a dance of proportion, colour, and privilege, thrust their awakening poignancy upon me and this Ontario shore. The global glacial clamour of scraping and retreating has only recently abated, giving forceful way to manifold fossil-bearing pebbles.

Among those small stones, now, my mind's eye wanders to the local fading of red, and warping of blue plastic. What avid young hands may have guided this ship through such rocky miniature shoals as those which the aluminum hull of Princecraft might laugh at?

But it's only a toy!

A toy, yes... like those tin soldiers whose lack of sinews, bones and will would have us question their humanity. How real, was (after all) that rocking horse in the nursery? That brain-bunny of Margery Williams? Velveteen, I realised today, is merely imitation Velvet.

And here I am, not seriously sailing, but mucking around in a puddle, singing lullabies, and yearning, playfully, for age to come upon my innocence and make me real. I am a rabbit, a tin commando, a plastic rowboat, aching for authenticity.

But wasn't the answer there? Right there in the boy's enduring endearment? Did not his stitch-depleted friends manifest more than manufactured meekness? Offensive to that synthetic corporate slew is this undying eulogy "to be real, is to be loved".

Walmart stocks them now in plastic, but still the children heap on these green men abuse by means of firecrackers, celebrating not some regal birthday or triumph of grassroots social justice, but rather souls as yet unnamed, whose valour, unsung, awaits redemption, reward, re-use, reduction, recycling.

"to be real, is to be loved", we tell ourselves, and then grimace, knowing that we'll certainly be torn to shreds in the process. Our seams severed, our flesh wounds unattended, gangrenous, and putrid, our windshields smashed, our veneer crumpled, and our paint peeling, under the weight of some more powerful oppressor.

Will I in spite of all of this hold faith? Will I continue nevertheless in progidal selfless service, while grasping totally the ruin that allegiance to these tatters so utterly entails?

Or do I look with eagerness to that most anticipated of all days: the graduation from jar of clay to noble vessel? Will I shine like a third-world communion chalice: that one bit of silver in the whole village? Will I, instead of aching with synthetic sheen, leap on unlacerated limbs? Will I cheerily enter life maimed only to discover that Jake Sully does actually get his legs back?

It's not that endearment, well-worn-ness, and persistent thumbsucking, have committed any crime... but only my doubts, my ignorance, my stubborn attachment to one story, in spite (or because of) whose beligerence I continue to ask, "why?"

Why? I ask, in this world where I can be so intellectual, so cynical, Why shouldn't I remain a toy forever? What ambitions of becoming real ought I now stifle? In all this metaphor-mashing, I'm left drowning in a boat without bouyancy. A soon-to-be submarine, seaworthy only in spirit.

But then, I ask with a posthumous burst of energy, what sort of "strange thing happened", that might make mysterious flowers grow in the places where tears fall? What sort of (re)animated tin soldier might C.S. Lewis concoct, whose disciplined muscles and mind could infect his counterparts each with their own individual intent, and whose smiles would broaden on seeing Humpty Dumpty in his full reconstructed glory, once again atop the wall? What sort of ship is it that sails effortlessly on beyond encounters with icebergs?

If in all our storytelling, we have encountered a seed, sown perishable, but raised imperishable; if in living out that story together, we discover that we have all along been fully loved; if this journeying through crest and trough has not been merely to facilitate my vomit...

... then (Jesus Christ) bring on the full whimsical weight of glory!

Harold Sikkema - May, 2011