Imbolc and the Moon of Tides

Wednesday gratefuls: James Talarico. Go, Ken. Maddie. Veronica. Bone Scan. Echocardiogram. Exercise. Shadow.

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Fingers

 

Kavannah: Shleimut.   I edit and revise. Ancientrails. Superior Wolf. I tell friends I love them.

Tarot: Nine of Arrows, Devotion

“… “weary” warrior who is battered and bruised but keeps moving forward with determination.”

 

One brief shining:  Tsundoku. My large ottoman has four stacks of books. I clean it off, new books find their way to it. Over and over. I feel no guilt, not even regret. All these books, all of them, add to me, even if briefly held.

Kate got me a print a long time ago. A frocked scholar standing high on a library ladder, reading from one book. Holding another ready. Since I was young. Reading. Reading from one book, holding another one ready. It sat on the wall next to my sink for years.

Tom sent me the word. Tsundoku. If you saw the books piled on my couch, my upstairs reading chair, housed neatly in bookshelves that line my 900 square library, you’d know the word applies. He said it applied to him, too.

Here’s how it happens. I’m in a period of interest. Let’s say how the far right came to be. Matthew Taylor’s, The Violent Take It By Force. A book on the philosophical roots of replacement theory. I do some internet searching, find Furious Minds that explains three strains of MAGA thought. Another one on the John Birch Society. Another on the KKK in 1920’s Indiana.

I buy them. Read Taylor and Furious Minds. Both of which lead me to new books. Or. Emergence Magazine has a sale. Nature My Teacher. Collections on meditation and Mother Earth. More books arrive.

I tire of learning, learning, learning. Need fiction. I find a trilogy like All Souls by Deborah Harkness. Buy them all. Buy twenty volumes of the Dresden Files.

See how this happens. Judaism, the people of the book. My people. I read to learn Kabbalah. About the parsha of the week. Take classes that have required reading. A community, like me, surrounded by books.

Another. Writing a book about werewolves. Ovid. Lycaon. Commentaries on Ovid. That collection of folklore. Writing a book focused on Duluth, Lake Superior, Lakers.

Poetry. By the dozens. Art criticism. The ways of war when Joseph joined the Air Force. Another book shelf of horticulture books. Bee keeping. All these books.

Amazon enabled me. Easy access to any book I felt I needed. Brown boxes with the swoop on my front steps. Oh. I ordered this?

Most of the books I buy I intend to read. Some are for reference. The purchases on long term enthusiasms like Celtic history, folklore come in even as new enthusiasms crank up the Amazon bill with books on emergence, geology, Islam, Greek Orthodoxy.

God, I can’t stop. My mind hungers. Always.

Wait. Could there be a book on tsundoku? With information about the 30,000 books in Umberto Eco’s library. Explaining the collection of the British Prime Minister Gladstone. The one that became a residential library.

If there is, I’ll find it.

And, yes. Buy it.

No. I won’t need it.  I will hold it.