All The Books I Am Not Reading

My friend Kathryn left a bit of a challenge a few entries back when she commented on the tower of books on her bedside table.

I don't have a bedside table.  I have a narrow five-shelf bookcase.  And I have the floor that runs alongside the bed next to the wall and window.  I couldn't begin to count the book-and-magazine content of those two spaces.  Let's just say that I'm surprised I haven't sprained an ankle yet by sliding across the floor clutter when I get out of bed.

The top shelf of the bookcase:

Dan Charon's You remind me of me.  Crisp and shiny.  I haven't opened it -- looks like something that caught my eye at the bookstore one day.

Edward Rutherford's The Princes of Ireland.  One of those centuries-long sagas you can't be without.

Piers Paul Read's The Templars.  After The DaVinci Code, who isn't curious?

Jack Kornfield's A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life.  His guides to Buddhism are always accessible.

Pema Chodron's Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living.  Pema Chodron saw me through the most agonzing period of my life.  It's been four years, but I really can't read her again, not yet.  I just look at the name (on any of a number of books lying around here) and I am immediately transported back to a place that feels like suffocating ice and terror.  But I keep her around, knowing that there's a  lot to be gleaned during periods that are not so infused with trauma.  I just can't do it yet.

Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's The Rule of Four.  A DaVinci Code rip-off.  Not so entertaining.

Mary Oliver's House of Light and Blue Iris.  Now these, these I can pick up anytime.  Herons who live and herons who die. 

And why I am not reading?  Or walking?

Well, as of this week-end, we will have delivered three children to four colleges.  Burgeoning charge cards, health insurance forms, debit cards, trips to Linens 'N Things and Target, basement searches for wayward sheets and blankets, runs for first aid and cosmetic supplies, discussions of courses and activities and jobs -- and that little up-ender, Katrina.

I have teaching, and my own graduate class (for which I should be working on a paper at this very moment), and the Adult Ed and Spiritual Formation committee and the Session at church, and working on hurricane relief, and the bills, and the house -- the house?  Oh yeah, heaps of clutter practically get up and follow me wherever I go.  I guess that's the house.  I've been to a reunion and I've been -- uh -- exploring certain other options for my life.

So I will leave (literally, too, since tomorrow it's off to Chicago) with a Mary Oliver reminder of what I really should be paying attention to:

THE LOON ON OAK-HEAD POND

cries for three days, in the gray mist,

cries for the north it hopes it can find.  

plunges, and comes up with a slapping pickerel.

blinks its red eye.  

cries again.  

you come every afternoon, and wait to hear it.

you sit a long time, quiet, under the thick pines,

in the silence that follows.  

as though it were your own twilight.

as though it were your own vanishing song.