What is it about Books?

I have moved, and I am moving.  Two years ago I began the process by saying "yes" to a call to serve a congregation just north of Houston, Texas.  At that time I knew I would be living temporarily in a small apartment while my husband completed his work and was able to move with me, and so I took a few of the things I thought I were the most important -- including books.

Books.  What is it about books?

Now we are completing the process, two years later, and we are packing and sorting the rest of our things, deciding what is most important and necessary and what is not.  We are taking things to thrift stores (God help us) and throwing things away and packing and labeling.  We are trying to figure out what is most important, and it's not always easy.  Especially about the books.

Books.  What is it about books?

I find the number of books I own sort of alarming, and I find that I truly do want to downsize.  i want to live a lighter life, and books are one of the heavy things.  I want to be more portable, to travel and to be available to go.  I don't want to feel weighed down with things.  And all of this is theoretical when I look at each individual book.

I won't lie.  Some of them are easy, and it's a relief.  Some of them I hadn't seen in a long time, and I had forgotten that I even had them.  Some I rescued, and put in a stack "to keep", for one reason or another.  And not all of the reasons are logical.  I have saved most of the children's books, even though I do not have children.  They are beautiful.  There are some old books I have put in the 'save' pile simply because they have beautifully designed covers.  I have decided to donate or sell books that I have loved, reasoning to myself that I will learn to love again the public library.  I have tried with some success to read some more on Kindle or Nook.  I am reading H is for Hawk on a Reading Device right now, and I love it, but when I saw some used copies in a bookstore I still had to stop and stare.

Books.  What is it about books?

It's about relationships, I tell myself.  I want to value people more than things.  I don't want to spend more time on things than I do on people.  But then I consider how I want to buy many copies of a certain book of creative prayer, and give them to all of my friends.

There is something for me about the whole book, the entire experience, that is not the same reading electronically.  There is something about the marriage of the words and the pages and the weight of it in my hands, how the whole thing is put together.  A book is a work of art.

I took a couple of book-making classes where we cut the pages and sewed the bindings and learned a little of the terminology of the making of books.

When I was a child, I  could lose myself in a book, and forget where I was for awhile.  I could lose my sense of hearing while I reading about Alice or Lucy, abut Laura or Betsy.  People would call me and I was somewhere else, because I was reading.

So books and reading are sort of a spiritual experience for me.  Not just the Bible and the prayer books, but those too.  I have caught glimpses of God, and the more acquainted I am with the Book, the more I catch sight of God in books.  (And in other places too.)

Books.  What is it about books?

The other day we were in a used bookstore, selling some books.  And while we were there waiting for the verdict, I wandered the aisles and stared at the books.  I saw a new book for young adults, a historical novel set during the Revolutionary War, told from the point of view of two young slaves, yearning for freedom.  I saw a prayer book for soldiers written during World War II.  I saw a locally published book of stories written by the students at one of our middle schools.

I know it is not this way for everyone.  Some people struggle with reading, and do not love books.  There are many paths to knowledge, and transformation.  Relationships are more important than things.

And yet:  Books.  What is it about books?

The Gospel In Seven Words

Because so many others have put it simply, I tried my hand at this:

In Christ, God is joined to us.

(And we are joined to God.  Irrevocably.  Inexplicably.  And God wouldn't have it any other way.  We tried everything to stop him.)

Making it Up As I Go...

A little over a week ago, I signed up and attended a writing workshop called "No Experience Necessary." It was billed for very beginning writers, advertised as getting a very very brief look a a lot of genres, including short fiction and essays. I thought for a moment whether this was the right class for me: after all, I've been writing, in one form or another, ever since I started reading. I started out with my own Dick and Jane stories, except I thought my children had more interesting names than "Dick and Jane."

Should I instead have taken a more advanced and specialized class instead, one that focused on essays or on syndicating your own column, or on spiritual writing?

I decided to go for the beginner's workshop after all, because I wanted to recapture something, I think. I wrote my last short story when I was about 23 years old. I haven't written any fiction since. I think I'm better at the craft of writing, shaping sentences, putting metaphors out on paper than I used to be. But for some reason I've become timid about "making it up."

Our workshop for beginners included some "prime the pump" writing exercises, including one where we wrote about a painful episode from our past for about twenty minutes. Write straight prose, he told us. Do not talk about how you felt. Just describe, as accurately as you can remember it. (He also cautioned us not to use a memory which is too painful to share with the class.) He read a few of our memories out loud; I was really impressed with what he found in our rough ideas -- even mine. Perhaps I'll post it later.

But that wasn't the best part of the morning. The best part of the morning was the story we wrote, as a class. We started out with two characters, and two names: and voted on every aspect of the story as it went along. Would the first character by male or female? Female, most of us voted. We voted on their names and on their ages (Liv and Marty, 63 and 45). We voted on the era they inhabited and the setting of the story (a cemetery? a bus stop? a ship crossing the Atlantic ocean?) We voted on their relationship (neighbors?, mother and son? doctor and patient?). I caught myself, for the first time in a long time, getting caught up in possibilities as I have not in a long time. I was on the edge of my seat, leaning forward, as Marty and Liv meet at a cemetery, both grieving losses, at least one of them harboring a secret. (Is anyone else interested in this story now?)

Every once in awhile our teacher would interject a comment about doing these workshops with children. When asked to brainstorm character's ages, for example, they would often shout out possibilities that we adults would never think of: 20,000!, someone would say -- or minus -12. They would imagine robots and babies and monsters as possible characters for their stories. I remembered those days when I imagined more possibilities, real and fictional, for my life, when I did not judge my own ideas so harshly that I stopped having them.

I miss those times. I think that last Saturday, I saw those possibilities again, for the first time.

While we're up north this week, up in the Lake Country with Scout, I think I will try some creative writing. Only, maybe I won't try to be so serious. Maybe I'll try to write poetry and little stories about small things, funny things, and make it up as I go.

Would anyone like to come along?