Waypoints

“We do not outgrow wonder. We grow into it,

carrying sorrow in one hand and light in the other.”

I don’t remember the first time I heard the words Once upon a time, but I remember the feeling. The air seemed to change when those words were spoken, as if a door cracked open between the ordinary world and a shimmering one where anything was possible. I was a child then, curled up under blankets, already drifting toward sleep, when fairy tales would spill into my dreams. Castles rose. Beasts spoke. Heroes faltered and triumphed. Somewhere deep inside, a map was being drawn — not of streets and landmarks, but of wonder, sorrow, and truth.

As I grew older, the fairy tales grew with me. What began as bedtime ritual — magical images leaping off the page and into the dreams of the sleeping child — became something stranger, richer. I discovered that the same stories I thought belonged to childhood were, in fact, written with adults in mind. Tolkien once said that a fairy story was “one of the highest forms of literature,” and he believed its true audience was the starving adult. I was beginning to understand what he meant. Where once I had seen only adventure, now I saw light and dark woven together: joy shadowed by grief, truth concealed in magic. These stories were not an escape from the real world, but a mirror held up to it.

Waypoint I — Tolkien

Tolkien gave me the language for what I had always felt. He called it eucatastrophe — the sudden turn, the piercing glimpse of joy that arrives in the midst of tragedy. He believed it was more than literary technique; it was a glimpse of Truth. As a child, I only felt the surge of it, the shiver of delight when the story turned. As an adult, I began to recognize it as the very pattern of life. Joy and sorrow mapped together, each one teaching me to read the other.

I remember the first time I closed The Hobbit. I was still young, still living in that space where stories felt larger than the world itself. I pressed the cover shut and sat in silence, holding the weight of Bilbo’s journey in my lap. He had left home for the wide road, returned battered but alive, and found his little door no longer fit the same way. That moment marked something in me: the realization that a story could send me back changed, unable to slip easily into the place I had been before.

Tolkien’s worlds were not only full of battles and journeys, but of elemental truths. Light and dark lived in them like twin branches of the same tree. He showed me that a single glimmer of joy could pierce the deepest shadow, and that shadow in turn made the light blaze brighter. “Joy can tell us much about sorrow, and light about dark,” he once wrote — and I began to see that my own griefs and hopes were stitched into the same pattern.

Tolkien himself once admitted that his use of light and dark was so obvious as to be almost embarrassing to mention — and yet for me, that very clarity became a compass. I began to understand that joy was not the opposite of sorrow but its companion: light tracing the outline of shadow.

When I return to Tolkien now, I see Middle-earth less as a geography than as a moral landscape — a place where rivers run with memory and mountains hold the bones of loss. His fairy stories taught me that wonder and truth are never separate. Wonder is the doorway; truth is the light that waits inside. Reading him, I felt not only entertained but transformed, as though each turn of the page was a map leading me deeper into myself.

On my map of self, Tolkien marks the point where wonder and truth converge. He taught me that fairy tales are not childish escapes but sacred mirrors, showing us that even the smallest hobbit may bear the weight of the world — and that in their courage, we may glimpse our own.

Waypoint II — Lewis

Lewis walked beside me, though his way was different from Tolkien’s. His Narnia opened with a wardrobe door, and once again I felt that crack in the world where possibility streams in. As a child, I thrilled to the magic of fur coats brushing my cheeks, snow crunching underfoot, a lamppost glowing in the hush of winter. I entered with Lucy, wide-eyed, and believed utterly that there could be another world waiting on the other side of wood and hinges.

But when I returned years later, it was not Lucy’s wonder I carried — it was Aslan’s sacrifice. I remember reading the stone table scene as an adult and feeling my throat tighten, my heart aching with a recognition that had nothing to do with fantasy. The child in me saw a lion slain; the adult in me saw the shape of redemption, the shadow of Christ written into fur and breath.

Lewis knew that fairy tales could speak truths disguised in fur and breath. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the child sees magic; the adult sees sacrifice. The child gasps at Edmund’s betrayal; the adult feels the weight of sin and grace. The child only sees the fantastic story with talking animals in a realm filled with magic. The adult weeps upon Aslan’s sacrifice.

Lewis once wrote that fairy tales allowed him to speak of faith “in a way that would not be obviously religious.” For me, that disguise was a gift. His stories did not preach; they revealed. They opened like flowers, layered and fragrant, hiding meaning beneath petals of magic. As a child, I smelled only sweetness. As an adult, I tasted the sharpness of sacrifice and the weight of grace.

If Tolkien was the cartographer of my inner world, sketching mountains of truth and valleys of shadow, then Lewis was the compass — pointing me toward redemption through allegory, myth, and symbol. His Narnia was not just a place of escape but a place of return: to wonder, to faith, to the enduring truth that love lays itself down, and rises again.

On my map, Lewis is the one who showed me that fairy tales do not only thrill the senses — they pierce the soul. They remind us that salvation can roar, and that a wardrobe door is sometimes the threshold to eternity.

Waypoint III — Wilde

Oscar Wilde led me down darker paths. His fairy tales shimmered with jewels and roses, but they were heavy with sorrow. The Happy Prince watched from his pedestal as suffering filled the streets below, and his gilded body was stripped away feather by feather until only love — and ruin — remained. The Selfish Giant gave us blossoms and laughter in a garden, but also the stark chill of sin, repentance, and death. These were not “happily ever after” tales. They were stories that a child might delight in without fully grasping, but that an adult could not read without feeling the weight of mortality pressing through the lines.

I remember sitting with Wilde’s stories much later in life, long after I had first stumbled into Tolkien’s hobbit-holes and Lewis’s wardrobes. I expected whimsy. Instead, I found myself staring into a mirror of human frailty. Wilde’s words glittered, but every gem was cut sharp. His beauty was edged with longing. His endings broke rather than healed. I realized then that fairy tales were not only about joy piercing sorrow — as Tolkien said — but also about sorrow refusing to resolve, reminding us that some wounds remain open.

The blossoms and laughter in Wilde’s gardens seem simple enough for a child, but to the adult, they open into heavier images — sin, repentance, and the shadow of death standing among the flowers. Wilde once wrote that his tales were meant “partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy.” Yet what I found in them was something deeper: the ache of adults who know the world will not always turn toward light. Wilde’s tales do not close with triumph; they close with silence. And in that silence, we are asked to carry the burden of meaning ourselves.

On my map, Wilde is a jagged landmark — a cliff edge. If Tolkien built me mountains where joy could crest, and Lewis showed me paths where redemption could blaze, Wilde gave me the drop into grief. He forced me to look into shadow and see beauty there, not in spite of pain but because of it. His tales taught me that even in failure, there can be wonder; even in loss, there can be truth. They are fairy tales for the nights when the door does not open, when the wardrobe remains only wood and hinges, when the child’s story is over, but the adult must still endure.

And yet, Wilde’s garden still blooms. His tales left me with the sense that sorrow, too, can be sacred — a reminder that the map of the self is not only drawn in joy but in the dark lines of what we mourn.

The Map Completed

Tolkien, Lewis, Wilde. Three voices, three landmarks, three constellations scattered across the sky of my imagination. Each drew a line upon the map of myself: Tolkien with his mountains of truth and valleys of shadow, Lewis with his compass pointing toward redemption, Wilde with his cliff edge carved sharp against sorrow. Together, they charted a terrain I still walk — one of wonder and ache, of beauty stitched to grief, of faith disguised in story.

As a child, I wandered through fairy tales like through secret gardens, marveling at blossoms without understanding the roots that fed them. As an adult, I began to recognize what had always been there: sacrifice, redemption, mortality, hope. Fairy tales are not for children alone; they are for the adults who have carried wounds and wonder long enough to see both woven together.

I often think of Tolkien’s phrase, the sudden happy turn, the piercing glimpse of joy that comes like a shaft of light through storm. It is true, but it is not the whole truth. Wilde reminds me that not every story turns, that sometimes the light remains hidden and the joy deferred. And Lewis stands between them, whispering that even in shadow, redemption waits, though not always in the form we expect.

Every adult can trace at least one fairy story that marked their childhood. As children, we gasped at danger and delighted in magic. As adults, we grasp the peril, the sacrifice, the shadow beneath the wonder — and we keep reading anyway.

Their voices echo in me still. They taught me that fairy tales are not relics to be shelved, but living maps of who we are and what we believe. When I write now, I hear them behind me — Tolkien urging me to stitch light to dark, Lewis urging me to cloak truth in symbol, Wilde urging me to let sorrow speak. My own words become waypoints added to theirs, another path traced upon the greater map of story.

And so the fairy tale remains not a genre of escape, but a genre of inheritance. It carries us back to the child who still lingers within us and forward into the adult who must grieve and hope in equal measure. Fairy tales remind us that we do not outgrow wonder. We grow into it.

This is my map of the self: drawn in fairy tales, lit by the shimmer of eucatastrophe, shadowed by tragedy, guided by symbols of sacrifice and grace. Tolkien, Lewis, Wilde — and now my own hand — shaping the path. In their stories, I learned to see. In my stories, I hope to help others remember.