My f
avorite book when I was a kid was The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett. The only thing is, all of my adult life, I haven’t been able to remember why. So I picked it up about a year ago when I was going through one of my fickle writer phases, thinking I’d take a turn at a children’s story.
Well, The Secret Garden is certainly a good one, the main plot being that of “the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen” discovering a secret garden that changes her outlook on life, and that of the people around her. But not until page 174 did it hit me how dramatically this book — the one I have always called my favorite — must have influenced my life all these years.
The Secret Garden is about how your thoughts and your feelings create your reality.
Mary Lennox is the young girl who moves to her uncle’s estate. He is an unhappy man whose wife died in childbirth. The child, his son Colin, has been sickly since that day and destined for death himself … or so he has always been told. Mary befriends her cousin Colin and together with their friend Dickon they embark on a journey of physical and spiritual self-discovery.
“I am going to die,” Colin tells Mary.
“How do you know?” she asks.
“Oh, I’ve heard it ever since I can remember.”
As Dr. Craven always reminded him, Colin “must not talk too much; he must not forget that he was ill; he must not forget that he was very easily tired. Mary thought that there seemed to be a number of uncomfortable things he was not to forget.”
And all his life, Colin had remembered, staying bedridden indoors and waiting for death.
Mary would have none of that. She didn’t believe Colin was really sick and told him so herself, at which point Colin insisted she feel the lumps on his back that kept him from running, walking, even sitting up on his own in bed.
“There’s not a single lump there!” she told him, “except backbone lumps, and you can only feel them because you’re thin.” At which point Colin’s nurse chimes in, “I didn’t know he thought he had a lump on his spine. His back is weak because he won’t try to sit up. I could have told him there was no lump there.”
Now to page 174 — chapter 23 entitled “Magic” after Colin has been to the secret garden where all of the planting, sunshine, laughter and fun with his friends made him forget something very important.
Colin forgot he was sick and he stood up for the first time in his life.
“Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen,” Colin tells Mary. “Every morning and evening and as often in the daytime as I can remember I am going to say, ‘Magic is in me! Magic is making me well!”
“If you keep calling it to come to you and help you, it will get to be part of you and it will stay and do things. It’ll work same as th’ seeds do when th’ sun shines on ‘em. It’ll work for sure.”
I wish I could say I’d been living this “magic” intentionally all my life, but like a seed I suppose it’s been dormant, only germinating since I discovered this concept of the Law of Attraction — that your thoughts and feelings have the power to attract anything you want into your life, be it physical health, a personal relationship or professional success.
What the Bleep Do We Know was my first exposure to the Law of Attraction (which I just ordered from Netflix and will be watching and blogging about soon).
I also watched The Secret movie when it came out but only last week did I read the book, thankfully coinciding with the development of a social media blog I have had in mind for a couple of months now. Though only halfway through the book did I make the correlation between the Law of Attraction and social media, tapping into a niche, if you will, that is essentially unexplored.
With gratitude,
Meredith Simonds, Social Media Reviewer, Blogger and Consultant
