Tolkien and Transcendent Beauty - A Theologian’s Perspective

Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and creatives and in this we look at all the subjects that are interest to people, particularly those who love Tolkien. And today I'm joined by Lisa Kultras, who is the writer of a book called Tolkien's Theology of Beauty, Majesty Sclender and Transcendence in Middle-earth. Lisa is a Theologian and it's the first time, yes is she showing it there to us, it's the first time we've had a Theologian on this podcast and so we're going to be looking at the theological ideas underlying Tolkien's writing. So thank you so much Lisa for making time to come and talk to us on MythMakers. So let's start. Thank you. Let's start at the beginning. We all of us come to Tolkien probably way before we have our academic ideas in mind. What was your first experience or exposure to Tolkien? Was it the books or did the films? Which way rounded you approach? Well for me it was actually partly family and partly the films. So I knew about Tolkien because my mom and my brother read it, loved it, talked about hobbits. I didn't have any understanding of what they were talking about and then when the films came out of course I went and saw them and I was teenager at the time, fell in love with them, saw the first film of course and then I read all three of the books or the volumes I should say of the book. And that was my first exposure and I started writing some fiction. I haven't really published any of it but you know that's what I fell in love with literature really was was talking. I think that's so brilliant that Tolkien, like just for me, that's exactly the same. My writing career was inspired by reading Tolkien and then wanting to do the same thing. You don't end I haven't as a writer ended up doing the same thing but it was that impetus to try and open the same doors and create these big worlds that actually started. And I think lots of people, I'm sure most people listening to this have had that same impetus which is you know it's just a testament to this fascination of his world and its inspiration. But you then went on clearly to sort of follow an academic training in theology but in that you circle back to looking at Tolkien as a theologian. So how did that come about and where does it fit in your studies? Is it something you went in knowing you're going to do or did you then sort of find it just bubbling up to the surface almost by accident? Well it did evolve over time so I ended up studying in my undergraduate. I studied philosophy and biblical studies and so and writing. So I did those three things kind of a three-pronged approach and with studying philosophy fell in love with this like analytical approach to you know meta-narrative you know these larger concepts and so on and then when I went and did my master of theology my approach was narrative theology. Well how does narrative speak to these you know Christian ideas or these Christian philosophies because when I would re-Christian fiction I didn't like it. I thought it was lame and I know there's good fiction out there I just you know I felt like it was very shallow or trite or they would be trying so hard to tell an idea rather than just telling a an excellent narrative and so my thought was well how can narrative best communicate these theological ideas in a way that isn't pushy or obnoxious or just preaching to the choir and then when I went into my doctoral studies I wanted to study specific authors who had done this well how did they portray their Christian philosophy in a way that was not obnoxious or pushy or obvious and I had a couple people in mind but it was actually I believe was Michael Ward with the CS Lewis author he he was my inspiration in many ways he instructed me to just do Tolkien you know there's enough there and there's actually you know not a lot of theological writing about him so focus on him he's brilliant he's the best one you should go do him and obviously he you know he was doing CS Lewis and so he's like go do Tolkien and and so I had this you know inspired by an article by Stephen Lawhead who talked about you know the good the true and the beautiful and how this was portrayed in Tolkien and how he wanted to portray that in his novels I was just captured by this idea of the good the true and the beautiful because I had never actually encountered that because you know I wasn't Catholic you know it came from a very you know Protestant Christian background and we hadn't really talked about the good the true and the beautiful as a concept so I was just in love with this idea and so Michael Ward said well go to Balthazar go read him he's going to talk about this and so that's how I brought in the Theologian Balthazar or Vaughn Balthazar and used him as a parallel to Tolkien to interpret him and it just developed from there and then Alex Demograph he was a Theologian as CS Lewis scholar took me under his wing as his advisor for the thesis and so it just developed from there and became what it is as the book so so a lot of people listening to this were not have thought about Tolkien as a sort of theological or a religious writer at all so perhaps it might be worth having a little basic chat about how Tolkien sat in this way his background faith background and how he saw Lord of the Rings for example Tolkien was a Catholic wasn't he yeah very devout Roman Catholic loved his faith he loved though you know liturgy in the Eucharist and that was the center of his life and when he wrote Lord of the Rings he did not have it in mind at all when he was writing it but then when he went went through and revised it he saw it everywhere as just permeating everything that he had written in middle earth and and when he saw it he did everything he could to remove any reference to it because he felt like if it's done right it should be absorbed into the narrative and that it should be captured in the stories that are told and the symbolism that is there and he had no problem with symbolism but he did not want it to be an allegory of life you know it was not an allegory of the war it was not allegory of that bomb it was just a beautiful story that he wrote to the best of his ability that would absorb his ideas and his beliefs about the world and then portray them through narrative and event and character I think that's a really important point to make because there's a fear that if if I think for many people who are reading this without a Christian faith or having their own faith background or no faith background they wouldn't want to see him hived off as a Christian author and I don't think talking would either would he because as you were saying he he disliked he said he disliked allegory but he liked applicability so you can apply what you see in his works to your understanding of faith or life or beauty or these things but he says the power of that is in the reader's hands whereas in allegory the power of the allegory is in the writer's hands and it sort of takes you down one channel so that it's kind of everybody is welcome in the world of middle earth but he does want there to be that sense of his fundamental values which is well he's writing from okay so let's go more to your work now um you have a particular view or a particular interest in this idea of transcendental beauty would you like to unpack that in sort of more simple terms as to well we probably all understand what beauty is but what about this transcend transcendental part of it what are you getting out there? um yeah the for talking you know all of creation I mean this of course comes from you know the ancient theological philosophy of you know Catholic theologians that all of all of creation is made up of the good the true and the beautiful that is you know ontologically part of everything it is the the essence of all and anything that is evil or deficient is just something that has kind of chipped away at that and and detracted from it um and we all have this idea of you know what goodness is you know in a religious context you know goodness is you know morality and uh and you know truth is you know doctrine but this idea of the beautiful is so often neglected because it is it is so much more it's the imagination it is glory it is grace it is something that is so much more permeates everything um but the good and the true are really not fully themselves without something that is beautiful without having this property of beauty so you can be as moral and have all this moralism that you want but it it falls flat on its face if if it isn't beautiful if it doesn't enrapture your heart in enrapture your spirit in your imagination and so in this uh in this christian worldview where god is the creator of all it all comes from him um his character and his essence is uh reflected in all that he has made and so if god himself is beauty um you know not in the sense of uh you know he's a thing but more that beauty itself is what it is because of god and and you know he is the ultimate beauty and the ultimate glory so glory is the the radiance something that is greater than what we understand of as beauty in this world and so um you know glory would be god's beauty or it would be his beauty reflected in creation so you're looking out at this beautiful mountain range and you're just your breath is taken away and you're you're just infractured by it well what Tolkien's theology would say is that is a reflection of the glory of god because he's the creator who made it and so anything that is beautiful about it is it comes from his being it comes from who he is and so in Tolkien's narrative and you know anything that is transcendent or enrapturing of the imagination or moving that would be derived from something more than than just the material he would say there is a spiritual world and in this spiritual world um you know it the spiritual world is part of the physical world like they are together they have to be integrated and so anything that is um glorious about the material world is deriving it from the spiritual world and then you know it goes from there um you know this is creation but god is the creator and it derives from him so it's a very long roundabout explanation now but he he does he sets it up in the Silmarillion doesn't he with the song at the beginning of well the creation song which is in a way a summary of everything that's going to happen with the darker themes woven in by Melkor the sort of the satanic power within it but it's all held in that the entirety of the symphony that Louvert are or the the god is creating so you get a sort of taste of that that's the that's the music playing underneath middle earth and you need all the contrast to produce the beauty it's not just playing one note right so we actually really interesting to look at examples of in the text you know examples of beauty because where is in the Silmarillion you've got the gods um the sort of demi the the step down from eluvert are the sort of pantheon gods who are very much present in the first stage and and referred to and in the second age by the third age which is the time in which Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit is set there is hardly any mention of the gods is there they they are completely pushed back out of out of sight what do you think and there is no sign of anybody worshipping in any sense in in middle earth at that stage what do you think is Tolkien's place within the world the more familiar to most read as world what's the place for god and those concepts in Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit well I think what he would say is you know the Silmarillion is elf centered you know is from the perspective of the elves and then Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit or Hobbit centered and so while they encounter you know elves and humans they very much see it from their own perspective of as hobbits that they you know there's no special revelation as Tolkien would say there's no you know that there's no understanding yet of of of a god of a coming savior like all of that is is on the peripheral and so in this world of natural theology as he puts it where you get a sense of truth through creation that would be the world of of Lord of the Rings but then you see you know Galadriel making reference to Elbureth and you see in Elbureth of course is sorry to be what's her name you know it's it's the the female god of of the of Valinor and and yet what Tolkien would say is well they're not gods that's just what humans see them as because they see this power this great power and humans are prone to worship them that is what he that what he would say and that's probably what he did say I think in his letters is that when humans encountered these they no doubt thought they were gods and worship them the elves saw them as these angelic guardians yeah who they had a relationship with and who I mean they could even intermarry with and so these were greater powers who were essentially spirit who could take on physical form whereas the elves were essentially physical form who of course had the integration of spirit so I think in Middle Earth the reason you don't see a lot of that stuff and you probably took it out if there was any of it in there to start with it's because it's you know elf or sorry it's Hobbit centered it's human centered and of course there's like a knowledge of the one that the noble men have so like Eric Warren would have knowledge of the one and Faramir would have knowledge of the one and of course there's that moment where Faramir and all his men have that moment of silence and look toward the west so there's thought of like is this a moment of prayer but they are the noble men who are educated in that sense so they have knowledge of it from the elves um ultimately historically so that that's what I would say and of course there's that that moment where Frodo um he calls out to Elbereth uh what he's in Sheila's layer so there is there are these like small moments where Tolkien weaves it in there very subtly where it's not obvious that he is in a sense praying to Elbereth in the sense that you know Catholics would pray to the saints for help and they would say you know please pray for me please help me please go to God and and and request his assistance and so that I think is more the perspective of like what the elves would do or like this incantation that um that Frodo you know Frodo has this moment of uh of calling out so it's it's much more subtle and I think that's very much on purpose and I think there's also a sense that Gandalf says there's a and the Ladriel too there a sense of providence working in the activities um so there's that message that you know Bilbo was meant to find the ring and you were meant to be the ones take it you know it's the idea that there is some sort of plan that means that they the right people in the right place um which sort of has this sense of behind the scenes there is some greater good that that is working for the Hobbits for their success yeah also perhaps we could also unpack a little the idea of beauty itself because yes and there is a lot of discussion about how beautiful Galadriel is and how beautiful are in is in terms of classic feminine beauty though in a sort of extreme form because they're these lovely elves but I think it's not just that is it because there's another bit where um they refer they refer to Frodo after his uh when he's in the houses of healing in Elrons in Elrons uh sick bay he seems to spend a lot of time unfortunately in the equivalent hospital um but he's sort of gone partly there's a sense of light coming from it inside him uh and I think and Sam also looks at him later on says that he's sort of beautiful you the sense of a beautiful soul and we we do know that Frodo isn't classically beautiful he's a 50-year-old sometimes slightly overweight Hobbit nobody says gosh he's a real stunner yeah but something else that's being referred to here which is beauty that is I think picking up your phrase um the radiance of God's glory the sense and I'm sure that I mean there must be other characters what other characters do you see that are beautiful in in that way yeah I mean the the beauty of the soul is certainly um the driving force of physical beauty in Tolkien's world um I believe it was I want to say Glorfindel was the one that in the movies it's Arwen who comes in rescue you know rescue Frodo from the dark drivers but in the books I believe it was Glorfindel and Frodo sees him as he himself is passing into the spirit realm because he you know he's been stabbed by the the uh was it the morgue blade and and so he is passing into the spirit world as a race and and as he's passing into the spirit world he sees the spiritual version of Glorfindel he sees him as he truly is he's shining um you know with light and what Gandalf says I think it's Gandalf says later is that um what what Frodo sees is that these high elves from the west live at once in both worlds that in this they live in the spiritual world they can see spiritual beings but they also live in the physical world as a physical being and so they are um in a sense infused with this transcendental light from the you know the the trees of Valinor back in the day before they were destroyed and uh and that light permeates their spirits and they are the most beautiful of all the elves and the most high nogal of all the elves um in Frodo's case as he is um in a sense being wasted away by the ring the the beauty of his soul is starting to shine through because he is sacrificing himself he is showing mercy to golem he is showing these virtues that are in a sense uh eating away at him because you know in a Christian world view you you are dying to yourself you are dying to these um uh you know passions or these desires that you know work against your soul or you know your selfishness um and in denying himself of these things and showing mercy and giving up his life it is um you know he is dying to himself but his spirit is coming alive and it is shining through his physical form even as he's wasting away toward the spirit world and and then someone like R. when someone like a ladreal it is their spirit that brings true beauty because beauty by itself in a material sense is and can be very deceptive so we see that when the ladreal is tempted by the ring she is terrible and worshipful and you're beautiful beyond compare but that beauty is accepted beauty because it is not good and and yet when she passes the test you know she is you know that just a simple maiden who is you know still beautiful um and i i think is the true beauty as they are you know dying to themselves and they're giving of the giving up of themselves for the good of middle earth for the good of their companions yeah so that links to the sort of evil beauty which which um it's very prevalent in the hobbit because the lure of gold the lure of gems the lure of the arcan stone and of course the lure of the ring itself which goes over into the of the rings this is all of deeply bitter fruit everyone is dissent mad or it's their undoing as a person if they succumb to this desire for something beautiful which is not at heart good and of course connects back to um sour on when he was pretending to be um the friend in numino and he was a beautiful he's outwardly beautiful at that stage when he's in in bodily form but he's you know rotten inside yeah and that's and that that sinks the whole island so it's pretty bad news um so i think there's a very interesting place on what is because if you think a number of beautiful artifacts they all are pretty disastrous aren't they in in Tolkien's world yeah yeah for sure but not not so places because i've we so we've talked about human beauty and the beauty of artifacts but i think of something as a reader that you come away from in Lord of the Rings in particular is really overpowering sense of the beauty of place and how does this fit in with the sense of the transcendent beauty i'm thinking i hear obviously of riven del and lorian in particular yeah and then what also comes to my mind is uh you know in the somarillion all the things that are described there and it makes your heart ache a little bit because you want it to be real you're like why isn't this world real and you feel the same way about middle earth that there's all these beautiful things that um are so like certain places in our world and yet are more and uh and i believe it's peter creeped that says it's not that his world is like ours is that our world is like his that he is tapping into some sort of platonic ideal that is um so much more than what we encounter here um that he is trying to reflect something that is higher and greater um and it makes your heart ache because you want it to be real so um yeah and i think you know all of for talking all of creation is connected and all of creation is infused with the glory of the creator and yet it keeps you know falling just a little bit over time you know as it wastes away and even even at the beginning it wasn't what it could be because it kept getting poisoned by melcore and and so on it keeps going from there um yeah and uh and just the different kinds of of beauty that you see you know in fangirl and forest uh it's a different kind of beauty than than the shire and even lorian is a different kind of beauty than riven del and uh and even even even when the elves leave lorian just fades away and passes away it says and so um yeah it just leaves your heart aching a little bit i think yeah i it was interesting thinking of following this thought of the transcendent beauty and thinking about what the other inklings do with the same idea of course they're all sharing ideas and it brought to mind two things one is um the last battle for seas Lewis with the idea that you go through the stable door to a sort of even more real world and Tolkien has a um i think it might be on fairy stories where he talks about myth makers make green really green and you know tree really really triish and it's the intensity of the language that you're looking for in when you start doing it as a myth and that's what seas Lewis attempts to do in that um it's a bit of a problematic book isn't it but it's fascinating idea of sort of going further back into a more of a to a paradise that's sort of even more narnia than the narnia you read about in the earlier books uh and the the other writer in the inkling circle who played with these ideas um and first i think his Charles Williams in his novel um a place of the lion which is a extraordinary fantasy work in cover because that date is about 1936 it's quite early on um but in that the problem is that the platonic ideals are breaking in to ordinary life it's like there's a rift very doctor who wishes a rift in time with all these platonic ideals are leaking through so you get a lion coming into the world which sucks in all those things of lionish qualities and then butterflies all the butterflies are being sucked in like hoovered up that's probably downplaying his very powerful writing there but it's sort of threatening the lesser copies um and the you so the the job of the heroes in that is to close the gaps close the rifts so it's interesting they're all searching all these writers are searching for that the the the ungraspable the even more beautiful which our imagination can reach for but we can't actually find right so we're all a bit homeless aren't we yeah that's why we all go back to read the book again that's right that's right and i think what we're talking in Lewis would say is um you know the there's a sense of wonder and desire that is stirred in us that we don't know where where it came from or where what it's pointing to and uh you know like Lewis would say it's a memory of a memory that when you're enraptured by this great beauty or this great moment it makes your heart hurt because you remember something but you can't quite remember what you're remembering and and and looking and Tolkien does that a lot in middle earth where it's so beautiful so moving that it makes your heart ache because you want it to be real and it and he would probably say well it's reminding you of something more you know the world that once was or will yet be yeah so it's not just nostalgia is it so so one reading of Tolkien is that places like the shyer are longing for a world he saw being dug up for the motorways and the factories which i think is partly it's there too as well but there is a sense of it's never existed either um the idyllic landscape this perfect world of the shyer um i live near villages that are pretty like that um but i'm sure they never had a moment in time where they were always in that sort of bucolic dream you only have to read tomatardi to see how hard it could be out in the countryside yeah um so it is uh i that's a different sort of beauty it's a community centered smaller deliberately smaller beauty and the same goes for the heroic values of arrogant so you've got ideals of kingship or through stories like Arthurian legends and but you can't locate those in any particular king or time in history it's yeah you're never actually able to find them though you see reflections of them in some codes of behavior or the occasional hero it's like it's extracted and distilled from different characters we've seen in history or in different people we've seen in history different legends we've heard and it's like it's all being all the good things are being extracted and then distilled into a fictional character and yeah that's interesting so Lisa i mean one of the reasons i really wanted to talk to you is that i think that this sense of beauty is absolutely key to the success of Lord of the Rings and the reason why it really gets its hooks into our souls as people is because it is offering this ideal of a place that we can feel is we all just want mixing mixing my metaphors now but we always we all want to walk through the wardrobe just to be there and that's why we go back to read it again but when i look at other sort of more recent fantasy series i don't see people writing with the same sense of that there is this that these ideals are aggraspable or in in in their work so i i was wondering if that's because we're all too cynical now and we go for more of a Game of Thrones flood bath approach or i know Star Wars has a sense of purity in in the the force of course but it's always sort of tippling over to the dark side which i suppose you get that in talking too it's just really interesting to know whether whether anyone else can do this can anybody else capture this real sense of the transcendental beauty you were saying to me before we started talking that you're not so well versed in contemporary fantasy but has anything caught your eye any any attempts in this direction well what what comes to mind is well i kind of gave up on modern fiction because i would like i would go to the bestseller rack and i'd pick up a book and you know read it and just be like why is this a bestseller this is written terribly and and i just started going back to the classics because it seemed like the classics you know count of Monte Cristo you've got Jane Austen you have you know just those sorts of classics that they're just written to really encapsulate human life in in one small aspect of time and they the ones that are successful are successful because they were excellence and they were true to reality and i think what a lot of what's missing in in you know the current days is yes there's a cynicism and yes there's a loss of beauty in everyday life that you know we're all very focused on technology and our technical toys and that's you know something talking said one of the letters that you know we're so focused on on all of that that we have forgotten about you know beauty and the the true things about human life and i think the successful authors are the ones that really try to capture you know the the reality of human life but also try to nourish the imagination with certain goodnesses that are in life and it doesn't even have to be you know for my respect it doesn't even have to be Christian you know it can be something that encapsulates the truth you know encapsulates the truths of human life in a way that encourages the spirit and lifts the spirit and i think what we lose is this desire for excellence and i think with the ability to you know publish online so easily on blogs and you know it is harder to publish in an actual publisher like you have to have an agent nowadays but it's so much easier to get your stuff out there that i think the market is so flooded in one sense that you can't actually find the ones that are truly excellent if they're out there but there's just so much out there that's in the way or things that are so well done in a let's say a game of thrones way where it's it's very well written it's very well shot it's very well acted but it's it's so carnal you know there's there's such a like a lust for blood there's such a you know a relational lust you know it's all very carnal in that human sense even though it's crafted beautifully so we need to somehow make a beautiful craft with the beauties of human experience and that the contrast i mean there there's always going to be darkness there's always going to be evil but what about the goodness and the beauty and Tolkien's approach of beauty is he's able to extract the goodness and the truth from creation and human experience and communicate it but he communicates it through beauty the beauty of a face the beauty of story the beauty of a relationship the beauty of an event and we you know we see at the end of Frodo's story he's broken you know he he loses everything basically um he's he calls him a drug addict at the end because he's so addicted to the ring that he could never give it up if he wanted to and he has a very real sense of PTSD from this whole experience but because of his mercy the world is saved but he himself is sacrificed and Tolkien draws that out in a way that is moving and he still offers hope and consolation because he felt like there was hope and consolation to be found and so he doesn't give him quite the the perfect ending one would see in a Disney movie perhaps but he gives him the realistic hope that is offered i believe to human beings and says you know there is consolation even for this great wound that might not be healed and i think that that's how he brings excellence and so modern writers can capture that but it has to be an excellence of craft combined with seeing the world clearly in a way that nourishes the imagination i think that's how it can be done and probably is done i just haven't read those books yet well as as a writer um i've not ever achieved you know it's what i would aspire to achieve but i'm still learning i'm still trying to work out how to do that in a way that doesn't come across as either pastiche or cheesy or un-earned and i think the thing in Lord of the Rings is that the beauty is earned it's very dark and the darkness is very very dark and obviously Tolkien's own experience of the wars were very very dark which makes the beauty shine out all the more strongly um and so that's that's something to aspire to so that's that's that's the that's the that's the mission that's the challenge so at the end of our podcast uh Lisa we always have a little section where we decide where is the best in whatever fantasy well we want to choose to go for something so in the past we've done things like where's the best um tavern to go to or the best um where to go into space we did recently so in honor of your theme i'd like to ask you where you think is the best place to go to see an experienced transcendent transcendent beauty where would you pick if you were walking through into a book world where do you want to end up wow honestly in the books that i've had a lot of westerns when i was a kid and and i have to say i was so enraptured by you know places like you know the the mountains and you know the grand canyon you know places that are just so wilderness oriented that there's such a raw beauty in in that kind of world and it makes you long for it even if you haven't been married yourself and i i have not read enough fantasy i've only read a handful of fantasy books and i i did not find that transcendental beauty in those books um but i think for those that have really tapped into that beauty you can find it you know whether it's in these you know classic books you know even in Jane Austen you see this very you know country life that you know it feels very quintessential it's something like you know from beauty in the beast where you just want to go out into this you know this almost as wilderness or this countryside and just get that that raw natural beauty but then there's also things like you doctor who where you've got you know was it stingrays like flying through the air and it just there's something beautiful about other worlds those alien worlds that are really captured you know through CGI and uh and of course avatar um that was all about the beauty of that world that was under threat um and you know really they used the three the three g the three d sorry the three d it's a great effect there didn't they right about it i'm about i'm going to allow you talking though so in talking to world which which of his very beautiful places would you pick to go and be a tourist i think riven del i just have such a love for the mountains and in the way that all these structures are built into the natural world you know you imagine riven del as you know just this beautiful craftsmanship just in harmony with nature and then these you know cascading mountains i would just love to live there that is probably the place i want to live and then of course there's valinar where it just feels so mysterious because it's it's somewhere you could never go and somewhere a human can never set foot i would just love to see the you know those streets were gems just cast all over you know that the shore and i don't know i just it's just mind bogglingly beautiful in my mind so i think i've always wanted to go to lorian or not lorian because that's the place that captured me as a child i mean i did i think riven del too but i felt that particularly the fellowship with the ring builds to lorian really it comes at such a moment of reprieve after so much darkness that it felt um i mean i'm also i love trees so i think that's part of it too. lorian was very moving and so yeah i can i could certainly agree with that that there was some a a sense of you know it was moving it was awe inspiring and then it also gave a sense of rest which is so often neglected i think and you know it whether it's in you know conversation or theology or whatever you know it novels just this idea of rest talking always puts a space of rest in order to prepare for the next part of the journey i think that is so important to the nourishment of the soul and i just it also just came to me that the other place um that i've always associated with this is the the sea at the end of the dawn treader work with the sea turned sweet and um Lucy's looking over the side of the ship and she sees the mergill below and the whole sort of parallel universe of the the mer people having their own worlds that they don't they just sail over they never encounter but he's got a sense of more and i remember going to zanzibar in i don't know if you've ever been to zanzibar it's uh on the west coast of no east coast of africa um and the seas there are turquoise and i thought my goodness this is exactly like uh except then so it's not sweet don't try drinking it so sometimes you get there's little glimpses of like a coral reef off zanzibar and you think yes this is i remember reading as a child that book and they open that door into your transcendent beauty and um that sense of awe about the amazing creation that we have been entrusted and not doing a very good job of looking after um yeah it's a stewardship of of beauty and and then even imagination like we've as a culture we've let our imagination run i think okay well let's try and turn it around so anyone listening to this let's let's let's all of us try and turn it around let's be better stewards of creation and also better writers when it comes to this aspect thank you so much Lisa um for spending time with us it's been a real joy to meet you and thank you for also exploring this idea in your work it's um great to see that element which i think we all sense but it's really good that someone actually just pushes it forward and says look this is how it works this is the the the power behind something we're also affected by so thank you so much yes thank you so much for having me this is wonderful thanks for listening to myth makers podcast brought to you by the 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