Old notebooks and a bunny trail post

According to Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings, "you either read [Lord of the Rings] with rapt, absorbed fascination - or you can hardly endure to read it at all and get bogged down in the first thirty pages."

While cleaning today I found an old ledger that I used as a Common Book for a very short amount of time. There are travel notes in it for a trip to England that once seemed like a strong possibility, there are sermon notes from four years ago, and there are excerpts from LotR that remind me of why I read it with such "rapt, absorbed fascination."

" 'The world is all grown strange. Elf and dwarf in company walk in our...fields and the Sword comes back to war that was broken...How shall a man judge what to do in such times?'
'As he has ever judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among men.' "

---
" 'Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?'
'A man may do both,' said Aragorn..."
(both from The Two Towers)
Yes, indeed...a man may do both. Thinking about *that* reminded me of some of what I read in G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy yesterday: "The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand...the mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid."
Allowing something mysterious and legendary into my life (in the Tolkiensque sense of the word) does not mean I am ignoring the "green earth in the daylight." Recognizing the mystery of God and the salvation from Christ gives clearer meaning to my walk on this green earth.