Two days ago, my husband Farmer Jon and I went through all the non-children’s books in the house.  We now have all the boxes out of the attic, and all the books we are keeping are on shelves or otherwise accounted for.  He took a box to the Historical Society, and we have four more full boxes headed to the library sale.  I think we managed to rid ourselves of about 20 linear feet of books.

Still, the shelves look full.  Oh, and it was difficult work.  Some of the choices were painful.  I am giving away some James Joyce, some Madeleine L’Engle.  But my brain is so much freer.  The voices clamoring in my head for my attention are so much more manageable.

In the meantime, I have discovered some books that I want to read pretty soon.  Already on my stack of current reading was Judy Cannato’s Field of Compassion and Renee Peterson Trudeau’s Nurturing the Soul of Your Family.  I had Mary Oliver’s Owls and Fantasies: Poems and Essays on the stack, too, and my former (and forever) college professor Jay B. Landis’ Verse Assignments.  Now, after The Great Book Purge, I also have Arundati Roy’s An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul and his Prayers for Children, and Edith Pargeter’s (Ellis Peters’) Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet, and Ervin Schlabach’s From Switzerland to America: The Story of the Schlabachs.  Yeah, I know, that’s a lot of hope for my reading potential, but some of that is just dipping in my literary toes while others are for deep water swimming.

Part of the impetus for The Great Book Sifting came from Trudeau’s book on nurturing the family.  My friend Coleen suggested we read it together, chapter by chapter, and talk about it as we go.  The first chapter is about self-care as a basic principle for parents.  If we cannot take care of our own selves, Trudeau suggests, we become reactive in our parenting instead of responding in the moment, we take our children’s behavior personally rather than seeing their innocence, we make mountains out of molehills, miss the really good stuff, lose compassion, and expect too much of them. So I am committing to self-care.  And for me that does not mean an extra bubble bath every week.  That means, at least at first, freeing myself from the “stuff management,” getting rid of what I do not need.  This weekend, the big-people books.  Tomorrow, the children’s books.  Next weekend, the kitchen.  And already, I am feeling my brain clearing.

Oh, and I did actually get a new book in the mail this week, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Johanna Macy & Anita Barrows.  Here’s the first poem:

“The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there’s a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All my becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.”

Gratitude List:
1.  Wassail.  White toast, brown ale, and a bowl of the white maple tree. Awakening the spirits of the fruit trees.  The sap will rise, the buds will swell, the flowers will burst forth in their season.  May there be bees.  Oh Holy Mystery, may there be bees!
2.  Good conversation.  Hard and powerful and awakening questions.  Friends who are willing to ask and listen, and expand and refine ideas.
3.  Morning and sunrise.  Awakening to a new day with the snuggly people in my house.
4.  The dreamtime of early winter gives way to the awakening of late winter.  Seasons change and shift.  We keep whirling ’round that star, in tandem with that ball of rock, our moon.  Light and darkness, cold and heat, the angle of light, the movement of birds and beasts through air and over earth.
5.  Awakening to new possibilities, new hopes, new projects, new endeavors.

May we walk in Beauty.