On books opening doors in a soul.. strangely. SOLC – Day 1

So, it happened again.

We’re about a week away from wrapping up our Feature Articles, and we’ve been reading at the beginning of the period before we begin Workshop.

I’m not committed to any one book at this period in my life — “this period,” meaning this time following my mother’s death a little over a month ago.  Hers is the first of any one person I’ve ever been close to in my entire life.

Maybe you know what that’s like? .. I don’t.

So, yeah.. we’re reading, doing what we haven’t since we came back from Winter Break in January, nine days before my mother died.  When I returned from her funeral a week and a half later and we got rolling again, Reading Time was the first to take a hit.

Catch up, catch up, catch up!! Curriculum!!

We began reading Monday, and the strangest thing happened — each time I picked up my book, I wanted to weep.  Three books, three attempts to connect and commit to reading with my kids, three distinct murmurings deep within.

It would start with a reaching.  I could feel my eyes widen, not just an attempt to peer past light and shadow and the frames of my old-eye glasses, but a widening that I could feel manifesting from my core, along the edges of my collarbone, to the tips of my shoulders.  Eager, attentive, reaching.

Listening.  Beckoning.  Pleading, my mind quivering, like a raindrop delicately holding onto the tip of a winter twig before it willfully surrenders itself to gravity.

Three times, I was moved at a level I do not understand, to words I fully comprehended, entry chapters that held no gravitas, no twist, no climax.

Now, I’m a believer — you’ll come to know that if you decide to follow this blog — I like to think I get God and how faith and the soul work.  I’m also an apprentice, of sorts, of people and society and the effects of stuff on our psyche, our persons, our relationships, whatever..  I like knowing this and have been studying it in people, characters, situations — myself — all my life.  I get life. I love life! and figuring it out!..especially when a knowing of a thing seems reachable.   But this!

This wanting to cry within the first paragraph of book immersion.. just a book, any book..

That’s almost a far cry from sanity, but just another face of humanity, isn’t it? .. a joyous mystery to me.

I can’t wait to come to understand it.