Imagine if you will, a child learns to read by the time she is three or four years old. Her mother is later asked to remove her from kindergarten due to apparent boredom by arts and crafts that have little to do with written stories.
The same child is read to at night; not only is she read Bible stories but also mythologies from other cultures, from Greek to Native American (like Little Burnt Face), from Folk Tales to Fairy Tales. Nearly all of her early childhood Golden Books are eventually long gone, passed along by her mother to other children, but elementary school reports reveal that she nearly always placed high in the ‘most read books’ challenges. As she grows older, the girl reads fanciful tales like Wind in the Willows, but she also enjoys flipping through superhero comic books with her brothers. She reads her mom’s copy of Black Beauty along with Heidi. She is encouraged to read the complete 12-volume Audubon Nature Encyclopedia and that starts her passion for learning more about wildlife.
Gaining language proficiency, she reads her father’s science fiction and action/adventure novels, from Red Planet to Doc Savage to Tarzan. She enjoys reading Nancy Drew mysteries in junior high and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities in high school, while continuing to read broadly in nearly every genre.
Her horizon continues to expand and she envisions her own tales happening within the woods on her grandparents’ farm, the giant redwoods on the West Coast, the majestic trails among the Rocky Mountains, the thick swamps of the southeast USA, the bubbling sulfur pots in Yellowstone, and so many more vacation landscapes that trigger her imagination.
A romantic soul, she is captivated by novels that are often skewed towards a hero rescuing a damsel in one form or another, such as those written by the prolific Dame Barbara Cartland, as well as the popular Harlequins. A friend throughout her junior high years recalls the long line of books on this girl’s closet shelf, where during visits, the girls would often simply read together, each stretched out on a twin bed in a room decorated with white & gold furniture, pink carpet, and the soft comfort bestowed by many, many plush stuffed animals.
The girl becomes a woman and, eventually, her romantic vision collapses to a great degree due to personal experiences and, while continuing to read romance for ‘hope’, she also begins branching into an obsession for books in the horror and thriller genres, stories that are somehow reassuring to her for they depict, usually, defeat of the Monsters (human or otherwise) ‘out there.’ In her 20s and 30s, during the 1980s/90s, she was reading nearly everything published in those decades by Dean Koontz and Stephen King and others including the Kay Scarpetta thriller series. Another escape was reading in the fantasy genre, from series like The Dragonriders of Pern to the Shannara Chronicles. And, of course, there were a lot of books in the blended sci-fi/fantasy style.
During the crossover from the 1980s into the 1990s, she concurrently finds her saving grace in non-fiction books about dogs and wolves, nature’s wonders, cats, diverse landscapes as sacred, and woodlands. These mirror her own heart-healing experiences among these beings and, as she is called to care for them on a deeper level at the turn of the century, her library expands to include holistic and natural healing books, many of which show the mysteries of working with energy medicines.
Emerging a bit eventually from the intensity of horror and thriller genres, she dives into the sub-genre of cozy mysteries, generally any of those that contain dogs and cats as prominent characters who support the protagonist, including The Cat Who series, the Mrs. Murphy series, and the Dog Lover’s Mysteries by Susan Conant. Along those same lines, she reads the mystery/adventure Amelia Peabody series and Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon series that takes place in National Parks throughout America.
In perfect synchronicity, the 1990s time frame also includes her initiation into Goddess/Women’s Spirituality, so large numbers of books on those topics and the hidden histories of women, often through the lens of psychology as written by women, begin to line the shelves of her library. Reading broadly across world religions, spiritual paths, from structured traditions to informal animism to deeply profound indigenous peoples and their life-ways.
As a Seeker, she senses that information is a stepping stone into knowledge that, hopefully, is transforming into an integrated wisdom within, just as her library mirrors an increasingly vast subject matter externally. Even during her non-fiction expansion into self-education, she continues to read across all fiction genres. An avid bibliophile, books are always nearby and reading occurs every single day, whether during her lunch breaks at work or between dinner and bed at night. Until around 2003, she had usually been a member of a library near where she worked so didn’t always purchase a book.
Books on different healing modalities turn her toward taking courses in those areas. Books on nearly every religion or spiritual path guide her toward a Wholeness of spirituality. Philosophical and ecological books deepen her knowledge of the natural physical world that surrounds us, all pointing to Gaia, our Mother Earth, within whom we all live and upon whom we depend.
The woman is now in mid-life. She begins to not only write (which has been on-going for years) but publish her own books, going beyond the diaries and journals she has maintained as a writing practice since childhood. These self-published volumes reveal where her heart goes, where her mind explores, feeling guided by Divinity to create and express herself through her beloved language of words. She writes poetic prose, poetry, memoir, and fiction, whatever wants to emerge at any given point in time. Always with the intention of healing and soul-growth for herself and readers.
And still her library grows, expands, evolves. She acquires some old books, a bit worn, from her father’s collection after he died; most were published prior to 1950, books he kept from his own reading journey. Surprisingly, she recalls reading some of them when she was a teenager — probably turned to when she couldn’t get to a library — and she’s reminded of this passion for story that she and her father shared.
Books on culture, social commentary, philosophy, history, a particular lineage and heritage accrue, weighing down already full shelves. Sometimes double-layers are necessary because she refuses to box away her author-teachers.
Embracing her crone years, the library expands again into the Cosmos, into Death, into the Unseen who are part of our world, though most humans deny their existence. Her books now offer deeper more profound ideas on alchemy, the esoteric, magic — from the old masters to more recent ones — astrology, and divination. But newly acquired books also show her the worlds of cryptids, aliens, UFOs (currently referred to as UAPs), the paranormal, parallel universe theory and other dimensions of existence — all of which go in many different theoretical and experiential directions.
The now-elder woman continues to read widely and deeply and to write from her own inner world. Devotion to Sacred Study is a major focus. Her Library still morphing and growing into more than 3,500 volumes as her life dips into the second quarter of the 21st Century. (See, also, my essay: "reading into a Good Life."
