Story: 22. ) The Pages the Wind Blew Through . . . from A Book is Like a Sacred Isle . . .

     The Pages the Wind Blew Through

During the course of the day, I found myself remembering a specific period of time in my past; and I felt that there were things there that needed greater clarity. I had settled down to write about what had happened when suddenly I had an instantaneous vision in my mind's eye. ...I was looking ahead, and before me on the ground I saw a line of books, laid out like a series of stepping stones, leading into the future. 
  Instantly I understood what it was I was seeing, in my mind’s eye. Each one of these books had helped me. They had been as 'stepping stones' in my thinking, leading me onward stage by stage and little by little, and to where I now was. 
  I realized I needed to acknowledge the part they had played in my life, and to be thankful for them. Though these books were now gone, I no longer had them, they had been as vital components creating the pathway by which I had travelled in my understanding to where I now was.

  Books are each one precious, and to be treasured. Books can take us so far, they can open up a whole new world for us, and we need to assimilate what it is they have for us, and then move on while at the same time being thankful for them, and for how they have guided us throughout our lives.

 The day was glorious. Something unique and beautiful was in this day; I sensed it as I woke up. Later, there was joy all through me, and so strong it seemed I was being lifted up on tiptoes my feet hardly touching the ground! But there was no reason for it that I could fathom; especially since this was a very difficult time in my life.

  It was about a year past the beginning of the long period of having no books but one. We were living at that time on a farm in central Northland, near Twin Bridges. As I say, my books were gone, and I was bereft of all human helpers and teachers; both live ones and written ones; and I was spiritually totally alone: I belonged nowhere, and to nothing.  

  Finding a shoulder bag to carry my one remaining volume in and a towel to sit on, I set off determined to enjoy the sunny afternoon. After leaving the homestead there would be three fences to cross before the river. I soon crossed the last fence, bordering a large wildflower filled meadow, and the river about thirty feet below it, and pushed my way through the trees and bushes till I found the track down to the river. It was very steep. Hanging on to slender trunks and coarse grasses I slithered my way down the slope, till the last part just before one had to jump down it. Here I paused on a level bit of track, and looked around.

  This particular spot by the river was very beautiful and the children and I came here often. The river widened here into a shallow pool overshadowed by dangling willow branches. The riverbank on the other side was high and steep, too; beyond it was a wattle tree plantation.

  The countryside all around was tranquil. There were no houses nearby. It was simply a private piece of paradise. In fact, the whole five hundred acres of this bull and sheep farm was a paradise for us; and the sense of being privileged to live here never left me. In my mind it resembled a park or the grounds of some English stately home: there were large spreading trees scattered here and there in the midst of the meadows; and clusters and pockets of large trees in little dells. It made me homesick for England so very far away and unobtainable.

  The whole farm was bordered by this meandering river, on one edge of it, and by dark pine forests high up on the skyline on the other. And in amongst the rolling fields, nestled in the folds of the hills was a small lake, from which a stream flowed. It ran down past the homestead, where it became its water supply.   

   I grabbed hold tighter to the trunk of a sapling where I stood, surveying the beauty, and looking down at the river. ‘A water supply…,’ I thought. This was my quandary; my pain. I felt as if I had lost an inner supply of it, with the taking away of all my books. They had been as ‘the water of life’ to me; and I did not know how I would find my way, without any more of such books. While I loved living on this stunningly beautiful farm it had recently been a place of trauma for me and fear; but although I didn’t know it yet, this was all a part of the plan and I was at the beginning of a new era in my life; one where LIFE began where I moved out beyond the things I knew.

  Letting go the sapling I jumped down the last bit of the track. After landing awkwardly I picked myself up and walked along the riverbank a few metres, through the willows to the miniature beach. I spread my towel amongst the papyrus grasses at the edge of it, and took my book out also, and put it open, on a rock beside me.

  I was sitting in an area of sunshine; enjoying the warmth of the sun on my arms and legs. A patchwork of dappled light was filtering through the branches overhead, dancing on the sandy shore and the river. Through the branches peeped the distant sky looking crystal blue; a place to see through for a squillion miles. I gazed upward awhile; my heart’s questioning, rising. Involuntary coming to the fore, as a splinter will from out of septic flesh. …One’s specific purpose and gifted work in this world, could it be understood and guided by intuition alone? Or, had I been wrong, and I needed those books? Was I foolish to have given away, all that predigested fodder, my once precious books all infused with the best of humankind’s interpretations of the best religious knowledge? Was I insane? Was I crazy to give up all this? Had I let go too much? In a sudden dip of energy I felt destitute . . . lost.

  The sunshine melted away, and I was in shade now where I sat. I looked down at the parched grass between the papyrus, and at the coarse sand and pebbles on the little beach at my feet. Though the sun no longer shone on it, it was still all alive, and full of life how could I doubt it!

  An ant crawled slowly over my hand. I shook it gently off and watched it scurry away. It, too, was intent on its business of living. First it went one way then the other; turning back on itself several times. I continued to watch it as it went to and fro through the grass. For few moments it stopped completely before a small stone. A mountain for an ant, I thought! Then it was as though it knew exactly what to do, and took off! It sped up and away over the stone; and it was gone. I blinked. I paused.

  It was guided innately, within itself, I mused; all it needed was within it; it needed nothing else. Then all of a sudden I caught what it was I was thinking! Suddenly, it all seemed so very obvious! Then all real knowing it came in the twinkling! In the touch of light, as light as a feather, and as fleet as an ant! 
  I was answered! Light burst within, and rose up in a bubble of joy. How clear it was now! Vision and purpose, so integral to every living thing was in every living thing! Life, in full measure was happening all around; Love, holding all the atoms together: so Life and Love was fully in me too . . . nothing missing!

  I looked up through the bit of blue above me, the informing sky; the realm of ‘sequined dresses;’ firsthand experiences were the ‘books’ to learn from, and all the help I needed, I realized! Wrestled with within, through surrender and love, understood there and learned from, through the ‘stepping backwards process,’ and all assayed and assimilated, by the mind of the spirit: here was the source and crucible of all the living wisdom and knowledge one needed to know!

  The small collection of books that I’d had, had been good, excellent; on that particular level of understanding that they were on they could not be faulted; they’d encouraged me greatly for many years. But, like little six-year-old Anna, I’d already ‘got’ the message, so didn’t need it regurgitated any more in the same dimension. How could you ever go any farther that way? And move beyond what you knew, to what you didn’t know? Always there was more! But, as I say, it isn't easy; nothing worth having is!

  I didn’t realize, until too late, that the more one kept on reading the same sort of thing that one was accustomed with, the more it began to undo all the good it had previously done. It subtly made one stop thinking for oneself: confining thought to one plane: crippling the stretching of our understanding and imagination, so necessary for vision and openness to go farther on in our inner-life. It had all wound me up in static convoluted way of thinking, creating a mental spiral which had got tighter and tighter, until I finally broke down and became very ill. …But, as always, LIFE begins at the point where we put ourselves out and give up our own way! Pain is not bad. Pain is good. Without it we would never grow up!

  ‘The ant…!’ I spoke aloud; I remembered the ant. First it went one way…then the other! …Turning back on itself…several times! That is the process of LIFE! That’s just how LIFE is! 

  A little bird sped by, a welcome swallow. It made me look up. Through an opening in the willow branches overhead I glimpsed a hawk, or a falcon gliding high up in the bright azure sky. Simultaneously, a picture of another bird of prey came to mind: an eagle. Suddenly I remembered something I had learned about budding new eagles on the brink of life, and smiled. 
  When it was time to leave the nest the mother eagle threw her babies out of it! They had no option but to learn to fly, or perish! It was her method of teaching her young! It was drastic, but it worked! Instantly enthused, as I took it in, realizing where I was, spiritually, a burst of joy and energy rose up inside me. I was flying! 
  All at once I felt a gust of wind. My one Book, lying open on the rock at my side, shook, and seemed to come to life. The thin pages began to flip over and over in quick succession. I held my breath! Caught in a sense of timelessness, I observed the pages turning by themselves in the wind, and I was thrilled at the sight! Then just as quickly as the wind had come it suddenly ceased. The pages stopped turning and I breathed again. But for a few moments, I was still and waiting; and then I saw what it meant!
  I had read it for so long the Book was all in me, and in all of me: its work done! Now its human interpreters and commentators were in the past; ‘turned over’ by something greater than any human power; and understood beyond any intellectual ability to do so: being surpassed by LIFE alone: alone all sufficient to teach and illumine me. Just as it had been for me in the beginning of my life, I could rely on the Wind of the Spirit to work ‘the turning of the pages;’ after all, it was his own Book! 
  But what of the darkness I was in; my path was like none other; terrible in the eyes of my acquaintances; worse still in my own eyes. Everything I could do to work out my life by myself had been taken from me. Everything about my path was incomprehensible; I could not figure it out; it made no sense. 
  I stood up. I walked to the edge of the river before me, looking out and around at all the beauty of this hidden place. I saw how the light shone into the pool shimmering over the smooth stones just a few feet below the surface, their colours enhanced by it and made more alive. I saw the willows dip in their long yellowing leaves, and how the fallen ones once freed flowed with the river on its journey to the sea. Wind and water, stones and willows: all symbols of that which was greater that had given them their being. 
  Something made me turn my head. I looked back towards the rock near where I had been sitting. And as my gaze fell upon the open Book, I suddenly wondered where it was that the pages had stopped turning? I went over and picked it up, and read. ‘…I will destroy and devour at once. I will make waste mountains and hills, and dry up all their herbs; and I will make the rivers islands, and I will dry up the pools. And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them.’ Isaiah 42: 14-16 
  I went and sat down on the towel again, the Book open on my lap. Birds were singing. The sunshine had returned. And I was warmed, all through my being. How true it all was, I thought. My knowledge ‘mountains and hills,’ that I had thought so important to understand, had been proven to be no longer of any use: the ‘herbs,’ the insightful things which had grown upon them, had now shrivelled up for me, and died! My internal ‘rivers,’ they had been cut off: they didn’t flow anywhere that was LIFE! They had become as ineffectual as ‘islands:’ islands didn’t go anywhere! All my ‘pools’ of comfort were dried up. The way I had been living it had all ‘turned to custard!' 
  I read on. …But it wasn't a disaster! It was only that my way was being turned upside down! Suddenly I understood. I was going to be led in a new way! On a new path! A path in which I ‘knew not’ but going on it I would know! A way in which one made progress not by knowing, but by not-knowing! Head knowledge surpassed by Spirit knowledge! Now, being made as though I were ‘blind,’ I would be led on a path I hadn't known existed! My ‘darkness’ would be my light: my ‘not-knowing-ness’ the vehicle to take me onwards: there being space in me to go there, because I didn’t fill it up by saying ‘I know!' 
  Oh, but being turned upside down and back-to-front, this would all seem ‘crooked’ to me! Yes, of course, so that I couldn’t judge that I was right, and get trapped in my own self-righteousness: and be truly blind! 
  What’s more, all this was meant to be!! All I had gone through, it had been ‘done unto’ me that I might not be forsaken! It had been the best possible thing that could ever have happened!! The ‘destroying’ and the ‘devouring:’ the dark jolt, and the invigorating insight: both a life-giving consuming; and they came at once, both at the same time! Our light being made dark: the dark made Light; turned around, we could see! 
  I saw it all now as universal truth; it was marvellous. The old had past, the new had come. I laughed. I was free! It was all ridiculous and just plain crazy! But in the twinkling of an eye I had been turned around one hundred and eighty degrees, and made incredibly happy. 
  I looked up and out across the shallow river. Shafts of hazy light, light made visible by the particles in the air were streaming down. Fingerlings of the sun were illumining the willows on the other riverbank. Shades of their dark and light and beauty and truth were being met and matched; kissed by love flowing through the energizing light. 
  I heard a small sound, a tiny plop, and saw a series of concentric circles on the water . . . ripples from a small brown trout as it leapt to catch an unsuspecting fly near the surface of the river. …I suddenly thought of Jonah, inside the belly of the great fish; destroyed and devoured; consumed in order to be given what he really needed! I watched the silver ripples until they faded away and the water was still again; and understood just a little bit more. 
  For all of us, the small but ever expanding circles of influence rippling through our lives could carry life! They could lift our new wisdom and understanding – free of knowledge barriers – and from there, in spirit become part of a whole new insightful generation initiating new things to raise up new BOOKS . . . living pages the Wind blows through . . . to take us even farther; and ever onwards and upwards. 
  Then it came to me! What we haven’t even thought of yet, what ‘eye has not seen, nor ear heard,’ things we have not foreseen or imagined . . . they are only ‘a turn’ away!

                                                

                                                *

Story: 21. ) The Two Sides of Things & Entertaining Angels / from A Book is Like a Sacred Isle . . .

(from new manuscript of short stories about books)

The Two Sides of Things 
& Entertaining Angels

  Leafing through a newly purchased secondhand book the other day I came across a sheet of notepaper, folded up several times into the shape of a bookmark. Maybe it had been used for a bookmark, I don’t know? I looked at it; then picked it up holding it a moment.

  Although I felt as if I were intruding I unfolded the lovely cream coloured writing paper and read what was written on it. There were only three words. They were handwritten, in red ink, in thin capital letters: ‘YOU ALREADY KNOW.’ That was all. Nothing else!

  ‘You already know . . .’ I read the phrase several times. When I personalized it, it felt good. So I toyed with the idea for awhile. This is what I came up with:

  I already know something! In that case, if I already know it, I am not missing it! And, if I am not missing it, it must be in me, already! So somewhere inside me I am already knowing something even though I don’t consciously know what it is!  

  I picked up the book again; and I looked at the two pages between which the ‘bookmark’ had been sandwiched. I noticed a small underlining on the left hand page, in the same red ink. The words underlined were: ‘the two sides.’  Inadvertently I closed the book. (When I later wondered what the context was, or what the sentence was that had those three words underlined in it, it was too late; the page unmarked I couldn’t find it again.) At once I put the two phrases together:  ‘You already know the two sides.’  

  Immediately, an amazing incident from my past came to mind, which illustrated the two phrases when put together; and from that spontaneous remembrance I worked backwards to understand more.

  In what we already know, are levels of meaning and value to learn more.  Ever deepening layers of knowledge and understanding can be found in everything; being revealed, or unveiled to us according to the depth of our desire to see and desire them. ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you…’ 

At base, at the most fundamental level of understanding, there are two sides, or two edges to everything. ‘Entrances’ are the easiest ways to understand these. A window can be looked through from two different perspectives; a door can be entered from two sides; a fence can be crossed from either side.

 If the two-sided-ness of things – their fronts and backs, their insides and outsides; even the very existence of opposites are both perfectly normal in the usual scheme of things in this ordinary world we live in, it shouldn’t be too great a stretch of the imagination to believe that there were two sides to reality as a whole:  ...That this world was one side of a two-sided entity. …That we live on one side and there was something else on the other. …And that if there were two sides to everything we can see, why could there not be two sides to everything we cannot see, which are making life in this world possible?

  In our thinking, most of us can see two sides to any argument; else, of course, there would be no possibility for debate.

  Somewhat confusingly I have always been able to see where the two sides of a debate were saying the same thing. I could never join the school debating club, for instance: I would always see the truth on both sides at the same time, and so I could never take sides, and so I wasn't wanted.

  Light, external and internal, makes possible two things:  by its absence or by its presence are two things: shadow, and ‘un-shadow.’ As external light shining on one side of anything creates a shadow on the opposite side of it, so internal ‘light,’ or understanding, does the same thing, creating ‘shadows’ in our minds where there is no ‘light.’ But the two are not separate they are just back to back. The two sides are joined by whatever separates them. Two-sided-ness is actually the property of one thing. People for instance are one thing, but they have a front and a back, an inside and an outside. This is all so terribly obvious and true that to talk about it seems perfectly crazy! But ‘imagination’ and ‘reason’ are not separate: they are simply the two sides of the same thing: there is no void, no gap between them.

  Whatever we can imagine, can exist; and does somewhere. Because we can imagine it, we can know there is something there which could give rise to the possibility of it. It was simply one side preempting the other; having ‘echoes’ of it, because it was really there.

  This invisible two-sided-ness, I know it not only because I have perceived it in my understanding: ‘in thy light we see light’ . . . but because I have actually seen it with my physical eyes.

  One day in spring, about ten years ago, I was travelling south to Kerikeri. And when I was driving through the south side of Kaeo, near the little church there, on the left, I saw the plain reality of what I am trying to describe and explain.

  Beyond me, on the far side of the little building, I saw a man step into this world. I saw half of a man as he was stepping from an invisible somewhere, into the visible here and now. He was looking straight ahead, across the road which was about two metres in front of him; so I saw the front right hand half of his head and body, and one leg come suddenly into sight as I was travelling towards him; then a moment later, he was all in this world.

  Though what I saw of the half of his body was only for a split second …he appeared to be walking at the normal speed of an unhurried man…what I saw is still indelibly etched upon my memory. I can see it now. It was nothing I could ever have anticipated, nor anything I could ever forget.

  Automatically I stopped the car to pick him up, to give him a ride to wherever he wanted to go; which was Kerikeri.

  If I am alone in the car I rarely stop to pick up a hitch hiker; especially if it is a man; but the curious thing was it felt like the most natural thing in the world to do at that moment. I felt a complete affinity with him. I knew he was an angel, in human form; in plain lower middle class clothes; and I was not afraid. He opened the passenger door and stared at the seat he was going to sit on. Underneath a sheepskin I had put there twenty minutes ago, before I left for town was the first draft of the beginning of my autobiography DAWNING. He stared at it; and with emotion: with much love and compassion, and with great joy; and as though he could see through the sheepskin, read the manuscript of the book in an instant, and affirm it with great delight.

  I was on my way to Kerikeri to post this ‘embryo’ of the book to my beloved friends in the United States. And given the fact that these dear people’s response to the book was going to be appalling, perhaps an angel had been sent to encourage me, that it was not ‘the end of the world,’ and that I was to keep on writing even if I kept on being rejected.

  Later when I felt like collapsing with grief over their comments, I remembered the angel, and his heavenly joy, and the tears flowing down his cheeks as he worshipped with raised hands; and which I had watched with real surprise. I was stunned that angels had emotions. But why not?  Why couldn’t they?  Now I wonder, perhaps he was not actually an angel, but rather a person who lived in heaven and who was sent from heaven. I don’t know? All I know is that he was definitely not of this world: he was lit by a light from beyond the world. His total understanding, and love, and his ability to know unknowable things, were not of the realm of this earth.

  I drove him to Kerikeri. Approaching the Waipapa junction I asked him which way he wanted to go. When he did not verbalize his reply, (this was when he just lifted his arms in spontaneous praise, and tears of love and compassion ran down his cheeks ;) I just drove straight on.

  When we got there, I stopped in the middle of the town; near to the Post Office. He got out, and walked discretely behind the car making as though to cross to the other side of the road; and then, he disappeared; I saw through the rearview mirror. And it all seemed perfectly normal. 

  He came from the Other Side of the curtain separating the spiritual world from the physical world. He already knew . . . everything . . . because he lived outside of time! This was at least the fourth incident in my life when I have been helped by angels who have appeared to me in human form.

  ‘YOU ALREADY KNOW THE TWO SIDES.’ …Our deepest longing is one side of the desire for that which we know not; and the consummation or the satisfying of that desire is on the other side. The two sides complement each other and fuel each other; creating in us a continuous ‘un-satisfy-able’ desire having its only possibility of fulfillment, elsewhere than in this world.

  When we have the sensation of already knowing something before we are told it, we can enjoy the fact that we are eternal beings, and have come from the Other Side, from beyond the constraints of time.

  And the cream coloured, folded paper ‘bookmark,’ that had led me on this long train of thought and reminiscence, I felt to put it back into the book in which I had found it. And that when I went to that secondhand bookstore next time, I would give it back or trade it for another. That ‘bookmark,’ inspiring me with its intriguing message, had given me an idea: I knew what I could do through books, too!

                                                  

                                                *

Story: 20. ) A Window on Reality / from A Book is Like a Sacred Isle: A Rain of Booklight . . .

( from new manuscript of short stories about books:

A Window on Reality

  I simply stared at it a moment, in some confusion. Then quite suddenly I realized what it was that I was seeing, and spoke out: ‘There’s a window in the tree!’ Gold, shining, brilliant, a ray of evening sunlight was reflecting from it; one brief stolen glint almost too bright to behold. I was astonished. It was totally surreal. Here was something beyond what the world contained. Suddenly I felt an overwhelming sense of belonging elsewhere. 
  I suppose I was half asleep . . . which wasn't surprising, really; often when I was reading, or writing I would ‘let go’ so much I could have fallen asleep. And this time, with my fingers on the keyboard, I was writing . . . outside . . . my way of doing it is perhaps far from ‘normal.’ Long ago I had discovered that when it was time for my daily task of writing, the less I had in my head when I began, the more I had in the spirit as I flowed, all unthinkingly; or, the more I had to rely upon my spirit to write for me, whatever was needed; and it did. 
 And so it was that without really thinking about it, I looked up, at our massive tree, which was in front of where I was sitting, and saw there was a window in it. 
  A wooden framed window it was; set quite low, near the base of the trunk. Later of course, I understood its own natural way of getting there, but at first, I knew only the fact that it was there, and it was perfect.

  I continued staring at it, but without blinking. Had I blinked maybe it would have disappeared? As I peered, through half shut eyes, the blinding golden light dimmed, and I saw through the window. Presumably it was enabling me to see inside the trunk because it was through the window that I looked and suddenly saw a library. What appeared to be a beautiful library was there inside the tree! My view of it opened up immediately. I caught a glimpse of hundreds of living shelves lining a circular inner room reaching high up into the tree. Glorious golden books were there filling every shelf giving a warm glow to everything. There were tall creamy candles in carved wooden candlesticks and cradled doves in angels’ wings.     

  I heard the voice of a child speak to me.

 ‘They’re all here!’ she said, ‘Every one of them!’ I knew immediately what she meant and I understood. ‘See! Here are all the books you wrote when you were very, very young. The ones you began but never finished. You loved them, and so they are here! They are all here!’

  My gaze then fell to lower shelves; and I heard her gentle voice say, ‘These are the books you wanted to write but never did.’ I heard the warmth of a smile in her voice, as she beamed towards me a wave of unutterable love. ‘Over there,’ she said, pointing to an even lower shelf, ‘are the ones you didn’t know you wanted to write but would have had you only known;’ she paused, smiled, ‘Judith, you are loved. And we want you to know that. This is the Library of Good Intentions. It is very real, you know. It will be waiting for you when you come: joy is here; and love: fulfillment beyond your own ability to imagine!’

  Though it has taken me some minutes to describe, actually all this took place in only a split second! One brief seeing to take in and perceive all this! But it was a moment outside of time and place, where everything is now and as it has been and always will be, and yet, ever increasing and expanding without end.

  And the wooden window: The Window on Reality? How on earth did it get to be in a tree?

  The pair of them were very busy cleaning out the shed. The pile of rubbish outside of it was steadily growing. Then they felt they ought to get everything out, so that they could clean it really properly. So the things that were to go back into the shed were put opposite the pile of rubbish.

  I could half-see all this industrious work going on, through the intervening bushes, from my vantage point. I was sitting on the old blue sofa on the front verandah, with my legs up and snuggled in a blue blanket, writing, and resting, alternately. Absentmindedly I watched them carrying out many bits and pieces of long forgotten junk; and then, carefully manhandling the thing between them, setting it down away from the rubbish, leaning it against our huge old pohutakawa tree.

  And this is how I saw the coming of the demolition window, and how it got to be ‘in the tree;’ which was altogether a kind of  irrelevant happening that I didn’t take in before; it was only afterwards that I did. Fortunately, the window was not considered rubbish! And, mercifully, it helped administer ‘an eternal second’ of precious comfort, and in a time of a particular need of it. The longing of every human heart is seen and known: we are all loved!

                                                                      *

                        From the Book of Life my loosed leaf pages . . .

                        Hearts of pearls, and shining things . . .

The sequins on the dress I’d wear

When I was taken there . . .

The secret things I had longed and hoped for 

But never, ever, dreamed of . . .

Vol. 1. ) Close to Me Now . . . from The Ragged Writings of Everland

Close to Me Now . . .

Close to me now the air you are that I breathe

With me still, your intimate presence . . .

Diffusing all through me, certain, enlarging

Filling all the yearning places in me – as the

Sweetness of the Amaranth – infusing me here

Making me, through only your essence in me, 

Most truly met . . . and found: and truly loved.

Story: 19. ) Binding Pages Healing Lives

(from new manuscript of short stories about books:
A BOOK IS LIKE A SACRED ISLE: A Rain of Booklight)

  

Binding Pages Healing Lives

   OUR EVERYDAY LIVES form the pages of the book of our life; and the glue and the twine, binding the pages together is the life force of love. Love turns the pages; opening out the story of our lives as a complex whole, never to be fully fathomed in this world, but ever holding before us an intriguing and beautiful promise of what lay beyond it. 

  Approximately half of my sixth year of life was spent lying down.

  I spent three months in a Welsh orthopedic hospital in Glamorgan, South Wales; and an extended period of time confined to my bed, either upstairs, or outside in the garden, according to the weather.

  I didn’t know it, of course, but apparently it was formative period of my life, turning me inward and introverted. Having at so young an age to be reliant upon my own devices for any stimulation and learning, I must have found inner gardens to play in where my outside legs could not go.

  I remember being given ‘Janet and John’ learning-to-read books, but no teacher; and I was left to puzzle out for myself this strange art of reading. But I was interested and wanted to learn; so eventually I did.

  Elsewhere, * I have talked about the only books I can remember from my early childhood; two of which I chewed, and ate the top right hand corners off, so beloved were they to me, and so much did I want what was in them in me. One of these even got to sleep under my pillow each night. But I was not a great reader. I thought too much.

_____________________________________________________

*  The Light Tree Journal; in the story ‘Message in a Bottle;’ Page 330.

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 As I've already explained, everything written must be analyzed and have its beautiful sentences sucked out. I was a honeybee in a nectar-rich flower not flying away until I had all that it contained. So I didn’t get very far in my reading life; and consequently labeled myself: ‘dumb.’

  Another contributing factor to my significant lack of book reading was the Number 24 bus from Whitchurch to Llandaff, on which I spent most of my childhood and teenage years going to and fro from school four times a day. I would get ‘seasick’ if I filled in the time on the bus reading; so I learned to ‘read’ made up books in my mind, instead; and lived an entirely imaginary life, in an imaginary world where everything was beautiful. I had a distinct notion, inside me, somewhere, that beauty led to truth; and I craved truth and loved beauty. I knew that they were each other, wherever they touched.

  When I had learned to walk again I walked to the library regularly; always looking for that which I knew not and loved, and never finding it. I did find hints of it now and then, though; sometimes in the rain puddles, in the colours of the city’s oils as I walked home; and with yet more unsatisfying books to weigh me down.

  In the early years the library walk was with my mother and sister; (my brothers were mostly never at home; they seemed to live hundreds of miles away in England at their preparatory schools and public school.)

  I must confess my love for the local library was not really for any of the books I borrowed, but for the library itself. It was both terrifying and electrifying! It was a magical high roofed world of dark varnished woodwork and paneling with endless mysterious tunnels of dark bookshelves stretching above me to unbelievable heights. I thought it must be heaven to work in a library. But so high a heaven such as I never thought I would be intelligent enough to enter. Being a ‘dumb’ child, surely I could never grow up to reach the glorious estate of a librarian; and so I didn’t. But my awe of city libraries has never waned. They are altogether magic places to me . . . walled realms of possibilities unlimited; filling stations along the sometimes barren road of life.

  At the end of my five year Odyssey of ocean sailing and extreme adventure, I found myself living a lonely life on a beautiful island, fifty four nautical miles off the east coast of Auckland, New Zealand. For company I joined a mail order book club, and read and read; making up for lost time, I think. A wayward life of sea travel had been the main ‘book’ I’d read . . . living and staying alive was mostly all that mattered!

  But this new life of solitude on Great Barrier Island was quickly cut short by a catalytic event that happened there in my inner life. Suddenly my whole world was turned upside down and inside out and radically and drastically changed. Something very wonderful happened to me.+  But, sadly, (…looking back in hindsight, that is,) I was led to a lovely religious community on the Island where I was immersed in books all of one genre; and for the next twenty years read nothing but these kinds of books; and eventually had a severe breakdown.

  The good outcome of this ‘disaster’ was that I packed up all my religious books and gave them all away to church libraries; or burnt them in the incinerator in the garden. After which I recovered, slowly; and I had no more books at all, save one, for some fourteen years. Anything that was only love didn’t need them.

  I knew love was everything. It outranked that knowledge which made of itself an end in itself that in so doing, only made it lifeless, and therefore, obsolete.  

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+  Dawning; an Autobiography; Fragment 3; Page 41

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 ‘When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.’ If it could be done away with, there was something much greater.  Something that would never mould my life into a shape it wasn't meant to be in. I found I had a ‘living book,’ deep inside me that I could read at any time, or anywhere, and that I didn’t need any other book. And, after ‘a losing time’ of listening and longing within me, I began to write my own.

  I found the less I had of stuff: and shells, the more I had of life: and joy which preceded them.  I had sifted through the haystack, till I found the needle – (the needle the camel went through the eye of) – and I developed other capacities for learning, and experiencing, and ‘reading,’ and knowing. The teacher was within; the pearl inside me: the shell discarded.

  Not for one moment did I ever ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater.’ The baby was given me first, and came without any soapy water. The baby could not be washed cleaner than it already was; therefore all the bathwater could be discarded. And it was. And there was joy. There being space for it . . . and if twenty years seems like a long bath, it is perhaps even stranger that it should take fourteen years for it to go down the plughole! But unlearning is a difficult business and much harder than learning.

  It is unlearning that is the key to unlocking the future, and to living there before it happens; before it eventuates there as a generally accepted thing.  If we are not made different in the present, we will be just the same in the future, and therefore be no different there. If I am willing to be made different now, I will be there. But it is a road less travelled; it is not easy.

  It is only recently that I have returned to book reading; and to a wholly delightful broad, broad spectrum of books! And I love them all! I am free!  

  Truly am I grateful for all my years of booklessness: I was tipped out so entirely down the plughole, that nothing of me was left and the babe that remained became itself an open book that filled the world and rushed into all its corners; but that is altogether another story.

                                                                     

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There is the first thing – live – vibrant

There is the spark – piercing – quickening

Then the defining – the collar around its throat

Pulled in – leashed tight with reins attached

Crippling all attempts at the running through

To be free – and out ––– the beyond – quashed

The explaining thing – that could be done away  

Books – the clothes the life was dressed in – those

Made of the stuff of limitations – We know! We see!

Forming in aspiring lines – of only equal length

They march across the page – to clutter – cloud over

The babe essential – the fiery life they came from

Take me away –– remove all my engaging rags

Tear from me all my understandable pages

Make me naked –– let the spark ignite the whole

Burn up my every written image – my feeble encasing

Forge of my first thing – only rippled ragged lines

Rejected now – the living substance of the future

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