Tuesday Muse: Real Life Fantasy Worlds in the American West

This week's Tuesday Muse (and the reason I was M.I.A. last week) is Zion National Park in Utah.

I've spent much of my life possessed, like many habitual readers, by a soul-deep desire to find something more in this world. It's not just the hope that one day the back of the wardrobe will reveal a forest or that a letter from Hogwarts will come in the post, but rather a cognitive dissonance that arises between your perception of the world, largely gleaned through books, and the image that the world presents. It's a sense that there must be another world that's richer, somehow, than our own. A sense that we're owed an adventure or two there.

But, visiting Zion National Park last week, I realized I might never have needed to feel that way if I'd known exactly what the park held. It's a fantasy world all in its own right. So here's to discovering uninhabited places and unconquered wildernesses. They've reminded me of the magic of this life: not the same as the magic of fantasy worlds, but entirely comparable in its own way.