Symbolia - A Book Review

Sylvia Anderson has been telling this story for years, first to her own children and their friends, and now to her grandchildren. When my daughter was a young girl, she spent many long evenings listening to Sylvia’s stories, and now she tells those stories to her little girl. Symbolia is a collection of these stories, combined as one, and made into a lovingly crafted book, published by Authorhouse, 2008.

My overly critical editor’s eye turned slightly jaundiced over the simplicity of Sylvia Anderson’s book. For a few moments, I mourned the fact that it has already been published, and I could not change it.

However, I soon realized that this is a wise-woman’s story. A grandmother’s tale, meant to be told when sitting around a fire on a cold winter’s evening. It is story telling culled directly from the finest oral traditions, and much like Grandma Moses’ primitive paintings, it may take one a few moments to realize the artistry that went into composing this book. It is written in the lilting style reminiscent of Elizabeth Winthrop, who wrote The Castle in the Attic, and Battle for the Castle.

In Sylvia Anderson’s story, a brother and sister set off on a hike into the hill country near their grandmother’s home. It is the first time they have been permitted to explore the mountain meadows on their own. They have their picnic lunch with them, and they decide to follow a stream that runs nearby up to its source. The stream leads them to a waterfall, and behind the waterfall is a cave, which of course they have to crawl into to find out what it’s about. In the back of the cave is a tunnel, and beyond the tunnel lies an enchanted land—a land that mirrors the real world in the ways that some of the best children’s stories do.

When the children first step foot in this land, they are told that the only way they will be able to find their way home again is to follow the sacred path that winds all the way through this land. The children begin their journey, down from Mt. Vision, through the Jungle of the Woom, the Mother Lung Rainforest, and Dogmapolis. They cross the River of Lyf into the Deep Depression, and from there through the Shadows Underground Maze, helping each other along and discovering their strengths as they go. This is a tale that children of all ages will enjoy.

The story is among those deceptively simple allegories that slowly display layers of meaning, much like a many petaled lily, the further into the story you go. This editor will definitely add Symbolia to her grand children’s Christmas stockings this year.
Sylvia Anderson is a student of consciousness. After a powerful spiritual experience in the mid 1960s, she spent the next four decades following her ideals through various spiritual and social experiments as the single mother of two beautiful children. Wherever she lived, she found time to spend with all the children who were there, feeding them, teaching them, playing with them and reading to them.