A Collection of Books

Where I consider books that have shaped my life philosophy

I sometimes reach places where I don’t know where to turn, decisions I don’t know how to make, choices, steps, selections. Some people seek oracles and palm readers for direction, I shoot off prayers and listen to the echos from words I thought were important. Some books stick with you.

Last year’s most impactful book was Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. It seems to have wrapped every important idea I have ever had into a nature journal. I still go back to read my commonplace quotes from it. I have also read her book, The Writing Life, and my main takeaway was lots of cigarettes, contemplation and coffee doth a writer make. Does this explain why I am not an author? No, it’s worse than that, it’s my own fault.

Long ago I could have blamed the children but I have time now, and I am cross stitching Christmas stockings, posting memes and making sourdough bread, but I am not really writing. I am living. I am lacking the bravery.

Recently I told someone I was afraid of wasting people’s time with my words. They said, “You probably will.”

And so I turned to stone…but then they said, “You have to fail a lot to become successful.”

A wheel turned in my mind, I asked myself what I ask a lot: is this true? Is there resurrection? Are all things made new? A warm breeze and a lion and I was no longer a statue, and I let myself write a book report. Here we are. There’s a reason a gaze was required for Medusa to turn you to stone.

“The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.”- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I feel that my words are tiresome, but really I think I just don’t want to write them down anymore, for fear of failure. There isn’t even a goal for me, aside from goodness. I want it to be good, and so I run away.

Although The Writing Life is full of good advice for creatives (aside from the nicotine and caffeine of course). I think Pilgrim at Tinker Creek lives with me every day. I cannot help but connect it to everything I read.

I felt this what when I first read Walking on Water by Madeline L’ Engle years ago. Art + Faith by Makoto Fujimura has also been one I have carried with me, candles lighting the way through the darkness of middle age.

“I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life” - Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I mean to change your life. I will do it with caterpillar muscles and the audacity to say things I believe without looking at myself, my ability, or the facts, or the current resources. I will do it with book recommendations and bravery.

I will do it as I fail.

This reminds me that I am going to Paris this summer, for a month. It is insane possibly and definitely risky. I have four children, pets, older teens preparing for college. How did I come to the decision to go there, so my 13 year old to play at a piano academy for a month? Well, first of all, the opportunity arose. He was accepted. But it is a big investment and one wonders. The thing that pushed me to decide to do it was a book, of course. Bedlam in the Back Seat by Janet Gillespie. I have read it a million times in my small children years. She is an author I collect.

It is the true story of a family who traveled Europe in a VW van with four young children in the 1950s and I love it.

“Bob and I had been married for sixteen years and had acquired for children, a house full of furniture, half an acre of land, and 832 old New Yorkers. There were wasps in the attic, a hamster named Mrs. Tittlemouse in the kitchen, two seed-spitting parakeets in the living room, and the two dogs, Mollie and Cluny, who slept in the downstairs bathroom. There was every reason why we should not go abroad”- Janet Gillespie, Bedlam in the Back Seat

She goes on for at least a page and a half to list the reasons they should not go abroad and then said, “There was really only one good reason for going abroad and that was that in the beginning we wanted to.”

I want to go. I want to see what happens! I know to throw caution and guinea pig care to the wind (or a long suffering relation) is always a time to give pause. How much is too much? How far is too far? Well, there are a list of reasons plus two guinea pigs why we should probably take the safe route and stay home, but we want to go. So we are planning on it. The academy has accepted him, the VBRO is booked, the passports are here and I plan to live on baguettes and cheese, and the one French word I can pronounce, “Bonjour!”

I expect it to be difficult, it wouldn’t be an amusing story if it wasn’t. But I aim to change your life, and mine. Maybe I will write it all down.