Sometimes I wonder if I read too much. As if there was a curse of written words embedded in my skin. But it's more than that...
They call to me books, they whisper their secrets when I enter a library or bookstore. Their whispers are coarse like the roughness of their pages. Yet soft and willowy like the words from which they are given life.
From a very young age, I have constantly surrounded myself with books. They have been my friends always. They have never scolded or condemned, boasted or envied. Their blessings have always soothed my wounded soul. I have kept my vigil with them, their steadiness, their truth. Always returning to the pages for rest, peace, and knowledge.
I have those who find it queer that I feast on books the way one might a succulent ham. Yet the flavors they have offered, these books I have tasted have been more life giving, more sustaining than any food I have ever eaten. The greatest book of all the Bible has the tastiest words of all-
" I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." John 6:51
This is true meat, the bread of life totally sustaining.
As a girl I would clasp my books to breast, staring out my bedroom window with dreams alight in my eyes. everything I have ever sown in this world has come from the dreams that I have spun from the imaginations of my favorite authors. Heroines, strong willed female characters, with balls made of brass, making a life vivid with dreams, colors bursting with fantasy.
I gleaned knowledge from the fantasies I read and interwove then with the reality of my life. Believe me that with out the fantastical nature of the things I read, reality would not be a place I would have happily dwell ed. Even then I had to struggle with reality suffusing it with my captured fantasies, so I could survive.
I know my solace in books has often overwhelmed my life. However I stand grateful because at those moments the realities of my life were too unbearable. I stress, how grateful I am to my passion for the written word. It has kept me sane in a too REAL reality.
Now with my life so discombobulated I read to stay my frusterpation at the world. The world has changed and it's surroundings wound me with all of it that I can not change.
So I say let me be obsessed with my fervent need for the weight of paper, bound by words, dressed in imaginative covers. The smell of the old words and new together in the library or bookstore. Let me be intoxicated on the siphoned dreams of a writers genius. I may be constantly drunk but it's on knowledge wrapped in fantastical sanity.
It is a place I most long to be. When the world becomes too much, it is here that I go. A book is joyous to be loved by more than the author. it is loved by the one who is pleasured by it's text. Blessed by it's birth and calmed in it's pages.
They call to me books, they whisper their secrets when I enter a library or bookstore. Their whispers are coarse like the roughness of their pages. Yet soft and willowy like the words from which they are given life.
From a very young age, I have constantly surrounded myself with books. They have been my friends always. They have never scolded or condemned, boasted or envied. Their blessings have always soothed my wounded soul. I have kept my vigil with them, their steadiness, their truth. Always returning to the pages for rest, peace, and knowledge.
I have those who find it queer that I feast on books the way one might a succulent ham. Yet the flavors they have offered, these books I have tasted have been more life giving, more sustaining than any food I have ever eaten. The greatest book of all the Bible has the tastiest words of all-
" I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." John 6:51
This is true meat, the bread of life totally sustaining.
As a girl I would clasp my books to breast, staring out my bedroom window with dreams alight in my eyes. everything I have ever sown in this world has come from the dreams that I have spun from the imaginations of my favorite authors. Heroines, strong willed female characters, with balls made of brass, making a life vivid with dreams, colors bursting with fantasy.
I gleaned knowledge from the fantasies I read and interwove then with the reality of my life. Believe me that with out the fantastical nature of the things I read, reality would not be a place I would have happily dwell ed. Even then I had to struggle with reality suffusing it with my captured fantasies, so I could survive.
I know my solace in books has often overwhelmed my life. However I stand grateful because at those moments the realities of my life were too unbearable. I stress, how grateful I am to my passion for the written word. It has kept me sane in a too REAL reality.
Now with my life so discombobulated I read to stay my frusterpation at the world. The world has changed and it's surroundings wound me with all of it that I can not change.
So I say let me be obsessed with my fervent need for the weight of paper, bound by words, dressed in imaginative covers. The smell of the old words and new together in the library or bookstore. Let me be intoxicated on the siphoned dreams of a writers genius. I may be constantly drunk but it's on knowledge wrapped in fantastical sanity.
It is a place I most long to be. When the world becomes too much, it is here that I go. A book is joyous to be loved by more than the author. it is loved by the one who is pleasured by it's text. Blessed by it's birth and calmed in it's pages.
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