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When I was a boy, I often had the sneaking suspicion that the mountains were actually taller than they usually appeared. This only occurred when the storm clouds came down and obscured the mountaintops. At those times, the usual, everyday peaks vanished behind the grey. I would look at them and think, “Perhaps the real heights of the mountains are now revealed within the clouds, even though I can’t see them. Maybe they reach higher and higher, up into the stratosphere and into some strange realm.”

I never climbed the mountains in a storm (or any other time, for that matter, as they’re private property), but that would’ve been the time to climb them. Doubtlessly, the path would’ve gone higher than the regular humdrum mountaintop.

YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM…

Now that I’m an aged adult, one would assume I’d put such childish ways behind me. But, looking out my office window today at the rain clouds lowering down over the mountain range, the same thought enters my mind. I suppose I’m just a very aged boy.

There’s a similar idea in Lewis’ The Last Battle, toward the end of the book. The children and their various companions have finally entered the real Narnia. The heart of it is further on and higher up. The real truth behind mountains (and stairways, ladders, steps and apple trees) is further on and higher up. You can certainly climb a ladder down here on Earth, whether it is a corporate ladder at the XZY Widget Company or the ladder to fix the chimney, but the ladder that is even more real than your ladder goes on quite a bit higher. Pro tip: exercise your lungs so you can breathe easily at higher altitudes.

It’s an interesting thought to muddle on, and I suppose I’ll have to write about it in a book or perhaps just a song (almost have a whole new album done with the band I belong to–Inflatable Hippies–watch this space for announcement). In the meantime, I’ll leave you with wishes for a peaceful and merry Christmas, regardless of the doom and grumpy gloom seeping out of the White House like curdled milk spilling from a over-stuffed garbage bag (will they never learn?). Please enjoy a great deal of good food, good conversation, good music and good cheer. And may Heaven keep the beast from slouching to Bethlehem to be reborn. At least for a while yet.

Here’s a photo of our cat enjoying Christmas in the best way cats can.

A friend of mine, C. J. Brightley, is publishing two new noblebright books. The first, a Christmas novella, is called Twelve Days of (Faerie) Christmas, and will be released on February 27, which happens to be tomorrow. The second book, Fell Beasts and Fair, is an anthology that she edited.

Please take a moment and check both of them out. If you don’t know, noblebright is a new movement within the fantasy world of stories that are generally hopeful in tone, shot through with a certain amount of redemption and staffed with a main character that, while sometimes flawed (aren’t we all?), has the courage to eventually make brave and true choices.

This isn’t to say that noblebright stories are all sweetness and light and sparkly unicorns. Eeyargh, as the poet so succinctly said (back in the Neanderthal Era). Noblebright can be quite dark. Darkness is never the issue because, after all, even a little light shines brightly in the darkness.