"If you look the right way, you can see the whole world is a garden."

The other day when Alisha and I were at Hastings, I found a copy of The Secret Garden. It had been AGES since I'd seen it--I'm in my early twenties and the only time I was able to watch it was when we'd go visit my grandparents in Omaha because we never got around to getting a copy for ourselves...and the last time I watched it, I was probably 7 or 8. I figured it would be worth it for nostalgia's sake, and so I bought it, unaware of what it would do to me. 

I put it in that night and finished the following day (it had been very late when I started it). I remembered only bits and pieces and I was not expecting to become so enveloped in it...yet the entire time I was caught up in its simplicity and beauty. The walls of the manor were covered in tapestries, the wardrobe Victorian (as is Colin's preoccupation with death). The look of the film itself had the quality and feeling as old photographs do, an air of the antique, of times long forgotten and secrets within. The garden, I think, was what really got me. Vines making their way up the wall, as thick and present as the tapestries in the house, ruins of a building (a church, perhaps?) on one end, and within the expanse, roaming flowers, bushes, animals. And that gorgeous, grand swing...

At the end of the movie, after I'd calmed down from getting unexpectedly emotional while watching Colin running around, his father in tow, showing him every nook and cranny of his mother's garden, I found myself thinking about what had drawn me to it in the first place. There was a sense of magic, of curiosity and mystery that surrounded the story; present in Mary's discovery of an ornate key in the room at the other end of a secret passageway, present in the moment Colin walks for the first time back and forth between Mary and Dickon, present in Mary's dream of her mother in the garden. 

And then I thought about the other films I'd loved as a child: among many others, A Little Princess and Labyrinth. Each of these films has a sense of magic to them. Sara never loses her sense of imagination and belief that every girl is a princess despite her father's apparent death (though her faith is tested when she is forced into servitude immediately after she is told the news). The other girls are enchanted by her storytelling; Miss Minchin's practical viewpoints are challenged with everything that Sara brings to the school. And the film is beautiful...the scene that still enchants me today is the one in which Sara stands on the balcony of her attic prison, and the snow is falling, and she begins to spin around and around......

And then, of course, there is Labyrinth, which is still one of my favorite films ever. The Sarah in this story has one desire only: to find her brother and fix the wrong she caused. She struggles with her love for fantasy and the pressure to be more mature, to act her age. Everything that she encounters works against her; little creatures that live underneath the cobblestone change the direction of her marks, she is always being given the wrong directions, and Jareth controls the conditions of their agreement. But yet she continues on, determined to accomplish what she said she would. And by the end? She discovers that she can overcome anything, telling Jareth, "You have no power over me." Though she attains a sense of maturity by the time her parents arrive home, she also recognizes that her imagination, her fantasy, will always be a part of her and should therefore not be completely shut out.

I fell for these movies long before Nancy Drew, Harry Potter, and American Girl, before I realized that reading was something I loved, that storytelling meant more to me than almost everything else. And though I never read Frances Hodgson Burnett's two classic stories as a kid (something I mean to rectify this summer, if everything goes as planned), the stories themselves stuck with me as I read more and more, soaking up the mystery and the magic. Perhaps these influences left me with with a slightly warped sense of human nature--I tend to underestimate what people can do sometimes--but these were some of the first things that also lead me to think beyond what everyday life presents to us. The human imagination can be a terrible thing, but it is also beautiful, transcending the ordinary ebb and flow of real life, allowing us to grow and understand better who we are. With The Secret Garden, I discovered that there is beauty within mystery and that it is these mysteries that engage the mind and ignite the imagination. Perhaps this child-like curiosity and fascination with storytelling will be with me for the rest of my life. I don't mind, though. It keeps things interesting.