In this Disposable Camera Diary, Josie George, author of Letters From Wonderland, takes us on a journey to find the way to Wonderland.
I didn’t find my way into another world whilst exploring an idyllic spot. It happened in an urban, grubby and litter-strewn Midlands housing estate.
Think of broken windows, wheelie bins, a dandelion in every crack, a car against every curb. Think of a squashed terraced house in the middle of all that, a pale face at the window. Within her lonely heart, a secret and a wish.
Letters From Wonderland tells the story of all this, a mystery unfurled through letters, stories, games and tasks. It’s an adventure that you get to live too. I was that lonely heart at the window and, with this book, I finally get to do the thing I’ve always wanted to do: I get to show you the way into Wonderland.
Wonderland is a place – a place right where you are too – but also, more importantly, it’s a way of seeing and a way of thinking. I can show you how to find it, how to see it, how to slip into a new way of moving through the world.
It all starts with finding things that are Wonderlandish. Don’t worry, you’ll soon get the hang of it. I’ve been looking around my neighbourhood to find things like this to show you.
There’s an old railway that runs through my housing estate that’s been paved over to make a footpath.
Like an arrow, it pushes through the industrial estates and houses, tunnelling under the main roads, to make a wild, green corridor. It’s a place of spiky brambles and sticky weeds hiding fly-tipped mattresses, creeping ivy, wild flowers, scrawling graffiti, and almost every British tree you could ever hope to meet. It is dirty and it is glorious.
Moving in and out the tunnels, can you begin to feel it? Dark to light, light to dark, shadows dancing, leaves whispering.
There is something special here.
This person, whoever they are, they know it.
It’s mostly paved yards here — not many folk get their own green space — and yet we feel the pull to something, we can feel what we need, and so people have jerry-rigged their own ways in. Make-shift gates or gaps in fences open into secret dens that people have claimed for themselves. Who wrestled this old patio chair through and positioned it to catch the sun? Who knew that sitting with your eyes closed, with the blackbirds and the robins, begins to shift something inside you? That it begins a conversation?
The world is talking, you see, and what it has to tell you changes everything.
Marks of rebellion are everywhere.
It’s in the graffiti on the walls and the great arching barriers of brambles. There are so many ways that life tries to say: ‘here I am, will you listen’? So many ways in which it tries to take up space and fight against invisibility and death, to draw lines of territory and freedom and protection.
Graffiti artists and brambles have far more in common than anyone gives them credit for. What might happen if they started talking to each other?
Water is a good place to seek out.
Stare into it for long enough and you’ll feel a spell begin to work its magic on you.
We talk a lot about magic in Wonderland. Not the pretend kind, or even the kind you hear talked about in esoteric circles, but something more ordinary and earthy. Lots of things cast a kind of enchantment over us: our thoughts, the things we do or don’t do, our environments, the words we speak and the words we hear spoken to us.
Knowing this, we can begin to make new spells: spells that enchant us in a different way. Spells that change us. Spells that change the world.
We don’t have to go far.
Here we are in my tiny, paved garden that has no grass and no room to run around in or lie down. But, look — I filled an old recycling bucket with water and plants that love to sink their roots down into the wet and the slime. Now damselflies come down to kiss the surface and little black beetles row back and forth.
Part of our journey is learning how we can come to life even in places that don’t feel like they’re made for us, and, boy, don’t we brighten up the world when we do.
We’re not alone in Wonderland.
We share our space with countless beings and creatures, things that might feel familiar or strange, alive or frozen, straightforward or baffling. People, animals, plants, even rocks and clouds and puddles.
When we live in our heads, life can feel very small and restricted, but once we start to get to know all these other things around us, life never feels quite the same again. We are surrounded by mysteries to unravel, messages being spoken, and things inviting us to be delighted.
Go watch the pigeons in the park for a while — just sit and watch them. You’ll see.
In Wonderland, we admire and learn from things that are tenacious and resilient and that aren’t afraid to take up space.
Look at this moss. It’s a type called pillow moss that grows in cracks making amazing glyphic-type shapes. It looks like an alien language has grown right through the wall, and it’s on the ramp by Lidl of all places.
Admiring resilience doesn’t mean we have to be green or lush all the time. Sometimes this moss goes brown and quiet and shrinks back down, but it doesn’t ever give up. When the rain comes back, it glows again, and gets right back on with doing its important work.
In order to feel rooted-in and safe, we need guides as we work out what it means to see things in a new way.
Luckily, in our environment, we’re watched over by a whole host of champions, like this gnarly old tree on the railway path.
It knows how to survive, how to be strong and hold on, and how to hold its head high. I know how to do these things too.
In my letters to you, I act as your guide. That way, adventures into Wonderland never need to feel lonely.
There are all kinds of interesting paths and textures and surfaces in this urban kingdom of mine.
We could make a whole adventure just exploring them – seeing where they lead, what grows through them and beside them, what moves along them with us. Having a path helps when we don’t know where or how to begin, and so in my letters, I lay out a kind of path too.
If you’ve ever wondered what to do in the world, how to be useful in a way that feels good, by the end of this book, you might just have the answer.
We end right where we began, back in our ordinary, imperfect places and our ordinary and imperfect lives.
But of course, we know now: they aren’t ordinary at all and neither are we.
What if this ordinary, imperfect place needed you? What if you were the perfect person to offer something only you could give?
I tell you, the world is FULL of hope and adventure and, whoever you are, whatever you can do or can’t do, it needs you exactly as you are.
Letters From Wonderland is out now in hardback.
Buy the Book
See the world with new eyes and discover the confidence to forge your own path with Letters from Wonderland – part mystery, part guide, and part manifesto for hope.