Little Records Everywhere

One of my favorite places in any book I’ve ever read is the Wood between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew. In fact, it’s somewhat difficult to think of a location or setting in literary fiction that’s had a bigger effect on me over the course of my life, even though I haven’t read any of the Narnia books since I was 12 or 13. I’m sure I’ll think of plenty more places down the line, but for now that sentence feels true. The gist is this: the Wood between the Worlds operates as a connecting point between all the worlds that exist, including Earth. Think of it as an airport, almost, except you have to wear certain rings to go to and from it and the gate to each world rests somewhere on the forest floor in the form of a little, unlabeled pond. It was beautiful in both a literal and a figurative sense, functioning in both my young and adult mind as something of a rising sun with more features. And ever since then, interdimensional puddle-jumping has been my almost-literal wet dream.

This scene also (apparently) ended up forming part of the fundamental framework for how I think about the world and my place in it. I’ll explain. During a therapy session a few years ago, my therapist asked me what I thought my purpose in life was, and I told her lighting little fires everywhere, meaning places for people to gather and find warmth. I hadn’t read Celeste’s Ng book (it’s been stuck in the limbo of my reading list for years now next to finishing The Brothers Karamazov) but the title grabbed me instantly and formed itself into the best elevator pitch of myself to myself that I had found up to that point. And then, this week sometime, I remembered the Wood between the Worlds, and wondered if I had subconsciously mapped the imagined visual of Ng’s title onto the one provided by Lewis of the woods all those years ago. Which is to say, I wondered if the loop of going to explore and returning to rest that these images completed together had been guiding me more directly than I ever had thought. I felt like I had proven, maybe for the 6th or 7th thousand time, Carl Jung’s knuckle of a proverb that until we make the subconscious conscious, everything will feel like Fate. Or I had spent too much time alone in my office that day. My guess is both were a little bit true.

One of my favorite things is stumbling across people who seem to feel the same way that I do, and then sitting down and being present with the things that they’ve made to help themselves or others scratch the same specific eternal itch I seem to have. That’s happened now twice in the last week, which is rare I think, but today I wanted to focus on one of them and save the other for later.

Meet MyAnalogJournal. I haven’t met or spoken with the folks who do this directly, and I want to leave you plenty of room to explore this in your own and see if you enjoy it as much as I have. So here are the brute facts: MAJ drops regular videos featuring Zag Erlat and guests (sorry to any of the folks who are also doing this full time and I mistook for guests) mixing more obscure vinyl live. This, to me, is a perfect format for having more interesting music on in the background while you work, and also an amazing jumping off point for exploring the different artists or songs you hear along the way when you want to. Almost everything I love is structured the same way the Wood between the Worlds is, and MAJ is no exception: You can make the journey from the comfort of your own home, and feast on the sort of low-stakes exploration and experiences of art or artist that act is the real fuel for our day to day joy. I’m excited to get further into the weeds of these mixes in the coming weeks and maybe look up one of their live sets the next time I’m overseas, and I hope you enjoy your visit to their little nook of a world too.