"He (Bilbo) used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: it's springs were at every doorstep and every path was it's tributary. "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door," he used to say. "You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to."--Frodo Baggins in The Fellowship Of The Ring.

And so I have stepped onto the one Road. The one about which Bilbo told Frodo. The one that leads in front of all of our front doors. It is a road that rarely for me leads to exotic places but often to Kroger for adventures of a decidedly non-heroic sort. But today that same road led to the Chic-Fil-A (okay not so dangerous or adventurous) and then to the Lexington airport.

I was reminded that it is a more risky road than usual when they made me remove my shoes in an almost religious ritual before I could enter the holy of holies. Whether my stocking feet were to remind me of the danger of terror in a modern world or to reinforce the holy awe of the journey ahead, I can not say.

The familiar road so often traveled is now leading me to a place I have never gone before. Who knows what dangerous business it is sweeping me towards. But I am going to try to keep my feet even as it sweeps me across the sky to an ancient and mystery filled island. An old place that is new for me, the fertile land of so many great stories. Perhaps the key to its powerful stories is in the air, the loam, the winds and fog, or the people that the place produces. Who knows?

All I can say is that the simple concrete pad of a driveway at Raes Creek Court has launched me on a journey, with its risks and dangers, adventures and treasures. And I know that it is the same road that will finally bring me home.

In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.

Or . . .

Once upon a time there lived a lovely little Princess named Snow White.

Or . . .

From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that--a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that the dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

In 1937, these first lines shattered the silence of the blank page. The first is from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. It locates the story to follow in a particular place outside of time. Walt Disney's Snow White book begins in an undefined time and place. Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner creates immediately both the time and place of the work.

How to begin? It is a challenging and difficult question.

Like Tolkien? By a hole in the ground there lived a Fox.

Like Disney? One summer, pastor Bob Fox had an amazing journey into magic.

Like Faulkner? On May 31, the weary hands of the clock pointed at two and three in the terminal filled with stale air and crowded with molded seats and weary and expectant travelers, my journey East began and would continue through London, Paris, Orlando and California all in search of the elusive thread that ties together great stories and their tellers, the role of place and space, and maybe even the question of good and evil--a journey to the source of imagination, the power of the tale, and the way stories bring together human beings of all times and places to work together and dream a future.

It begins . . .