Lyra Belacqua is a character in Philip Pullman’s two trilogies His Dark Materials and The Book Of Dust.  Her journey with us starts when she’s a baby.  I’m reading book five in the series – The Secret Commonwealth.  Lyra is 20.

I love Lyra.  And I love what she gives to the world.  She speaks the roller coaster of life that all of us feel.

Gradually as Lyra watched she found her mood lifting.  She’d hardly been aware of feeling anxious, but that was because anxiety was everywhere, built into the very molecules of the world, or so it had seemed.  But now it was disappearing, like heavy grey clouds thinning and dispersing and finding their great banks of vapour drifting into wisps that wafted away into invisibility, leaving the sky clear and open.

The street below her was saturated in Dust.  Human lives were generating it, being sustained and enriched by it.  It made everything glow as if it was touched with gold.  She could almost see it.  It brought with it a mood that she hadn’t felt for so long that it was unfamiliar, and welcomed it almost apprehensively: it was a quiet conviction, underlying every circumstance, that all was well and that the world was her true home, as if there were great secret powers that would see her safe.

(It’s a word that still defies my brain: Dust.  According to powers beyond me, it’s “a cosmic, conscious matter that acts as a physical manifestation of human consciousness, self-awareness and knowledge”.)

***

Lyra’s moments often lead to entirely different moments.  Just like you and me.

All things must pass

Even well, home and safe

Every joy, every sorrow

Every up, every down

Every life