Bending the Page

While I’m sitting here, stalling myself from really writing, I’m reading spam emails, writing FB posts, starting a new book read.. I began to wonder at the places we leave off.

Particularly when it comes to books.

I’ve begun to go back to the library more in the last year or so – when I was a young girl I would come home with stacks of books, it wasn’t unusual for me to have 25-35 books, and be reading them all at some point – no book ever went unread I promise you. Of course sometimes this meant I had over two dozen books with late fees on them, but thankfully most libraries will waive childrens fees (or did then).

“I saw you standing in the same way then, but I can’t remember where or when.”

Somehow I fell out of library practice (I think it occured when I was in my early twenties, ended up with some $90 in late fees and never felt up to dealing with it so I just.. didn’t) but there in the dark winters of NW WA state I found my way back to the local library. Now in California again I have picked up the habit with a vengence.

“the force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my blood.”

I’m surrounded by 15 library books at the moment (this does not include my own stash of course), I think I’ve read 10 of them and I don’t want to return them just yet because, well, I want to reread parts of them.

“Oh, you mean change your thoughts.”

“No, thoughts are powerless.

They are neutral.

It’s the belief you have in them which has the power.

It’s all in the emotion. Think of emotion as energy in motion.”

-Writing down your Soul

 

Lacking enough random slips of paper to hold my pages (and sometimes those slips fall out) and not wanting to follow in the footsteps or fingerprints of those that have marked the pages with ink, I’ve started folding the corners before I turn the page. A bookmark of a sort, one I never would have thought I’d find myself doing.

 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”

doesn’t make any sense.

-Rumi

 

Marking a book?! A library book?! In some small way it seems to mark it, crudely yes though somehow without the sin of a mark of pen.

There are a thousand ways to go to sleep,

to walk through our lives unaware of and unable to be with what is

and so unconscious of what and who we are.

…We are rarely still. We seldom find Silence.

We do not rest.

And tired people do not want to wake up,

don’t have the energy to wake up,

can’t even fathom it as a possibility.

-The Call

 

But here I am, marking the books, even temporarily, as mine.

And I wonder, as I’m reading and I catch another readers, now unbent, markings in the book;

where were they when they did this?

what were they reading?

Did this mark where they left off, or where they wanted to return?

what words spoke to them on this page, that held them there in mind and body, even soul, to mark it?

My eyes roam the pages, wondering at the  moment it’s edges were bent.

Why have I been marking them? Because something there rang true, something there on the page was like a bell, tolling an awareness I lacked before. A light came on in the dimness of my day, and I wanted to return.

 

I am in between stories. The old one is gone,

and the new one is just beginning to take shape. -The Call

 

 

But I also wonder, where do we leave off in life? Where and when do we “mark” our days as we do these pages, to come back to, to find what we might otherwise forget?

**All text in red italics is not my writing or my words and I hold no ownership over them.

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• Turn the Page Already (mistygatlin.com)
• Turning a blind eye…. (lunaticoutpost.com)