I am endlessly fascinated by people who actually use all of their art supplies.
Wait.
Hello! How are you? How are things in your world?
I should have started with that.
But I am. Endlessly fascinated, I mean. I'm equally fascinated by people who can use all of their pens, or sharpen and then write with all of their pencils. I'm intrigued by anyone who writes in all of their empty journals, or - and this completely boggles my mind - reads all of their books.
I mean. I just. It's... wow.
Are you one of those people? If you are, please tell me all about it. Tell me what it's like to be done something - something that is precious to you.
I recently discovered that I can share all of my (well let's get real, I won't be sharing ALL of my) e-books with my husband. He wanted to read one I had, and after trying all of the nefarious ways to get the file to him, we wondered if there was a real way - a legal way - and it turned out there was!
An interesting thing happened when I found the list of all of my ebooks. That list is numbered. I'm not going to tell you what the total number of e-books I have purchased since 2011 is, but I will tell you that after I took out the 'whattheheckwasithinking???' and the fiction, it turns out that I have 507 non-fiction books and 205 fiction books on my kindle app. And that's before my pre-order for Hagitude by Sharon Blackie arrives on the 1rst of September.
(Please don't write to me about the evils of Amazon. I know. But I live precisely forty-five million, thirty-seven thousand and sixty-two miles from the nearest browsable, english-language bookstore, and have for the past 7 1/2 years. We all make choices.)
So for a moment I thought, 'what if I actually read all of those books?' I mean, what if? I also have about 300 books in my dry room, in varying degrees of read-ness. Most of the ebooks are also in varying stages of 'read', but it appears that I rarely sit down and read a whole non-fiction book from start to finish.
But where do I start? And can I add books to the list as I go? What if I didn't buy another book until these were all finished? (Sorry, I had to stop for a moment and lie down due to the pain caused by my hysterical laughter.)
What would happen if I actually read all of my books?
I just got a book out of the dry room, and as I lovingly leafed through it, finding gems and remembering why I loved it in the first place, I wondered something else:
What if I only read this book this year? What if I chose just one book as my companion for the next year or six months of my life? What if I took that book, sentence-by-sentence, page-by-page, idea-by-idea, and learned everything the book had for me before moving on? What if I dove deep into the experience of this book for a long, slow length of time? What then?
What would happen if I cultivated a relationship with just one book?
I haven't decided which I'll do or whether I will do anything at all, but the idea of really committing to a relationship with my books or a book really appeals to me. I know there's Magic there.
I'm not sure why I am sharing this with you except that, as I said, I am fascinated by these ideas. Have you ever had a book that became a companion? Have you ever collaborated with a single colour or a single method or a single ingredient or a single view in every possible way you could before moving on? Have you ever let a single thing truly teach you?
Do you have that deep relationship with anything?
It's a time of slowing down and waiting and wondering. So many people write to me asking about how to find their purpose. What if you stopped looking so widely and dove into what you already have around you for the answers? I can tell you that 90% of those 712 books are all from the same 3 basic thematic categories. That alone tells me a lot about my purpose. If I read all of them - committed to my relationship with them - I know I would learn something about myself, and be somewhere different at the end of the process. But equally, if I sat down with this one book and read it and wondered about it and responded to it, I know I would learn something there too. I know that would alter me just as profoundly.
What calls to your soul? What unfinished business can tell you about who you are? What calls you into deeper relationship with it?
Our world is such a dialled-in/ plugged in/ wifi-full place. How can you step out of that and into a deeper relationship with what matters to you?
And how can what you collect tell you more about what that is?
I'm fascinated by it all and would love to know how it goes.
With so much love,
This WEEK!
“Live Into It” - my 4-call course that is all about getting ready to step into the magic of 8/8 and then living it - not just doing the course or having the a-ha and then going back to ‘normal’.
Whether you believe in it or not, I think that all of those people believing the magic of something creates a kind of… well, magic! So it just makes sense to do some. And I love me some 8s.
We’ll gather live (or the calls are recorded) and spend 1 hour together each day for four days.
We’ll gather, get clear, get accountable to ourselves, get ready, and then start Living Into It on the 8th.
JOIN US! AND if you join by Wednesday and use AUGUSTMAGIC as the code, you’ll get a discount! YAY!
xo
I buy non fiction ebooks when they're on sale so I have a book ready on a topic when I decide I want to learn about it. I don't think I'll ever read all the books I've bought, but sometimes I look down the list and wish I'd learnt the secrets from all of them.
This reminds me of a chapter in a book I read (several times) called The Sacred Year. It's one of those books that you don't know how it fell into your lap because it's not something you would have chosen (he's a theologian and and I'm not religious at all). The author choose 12 spiritual practices to deepen over the period of one year and one of them was called Lectio Divina. He talked about how most people skim or scavenge books, not really reading for depth, intimacy or meaning. Lectio Divina is when the reader comes to the text hungry and full of desire. Not looking for shiny ideas, but wanting to be nourished and fed...to be formed, not informed. You take a book piece by tiny piece, chapter by chapter looking for a word or phrase that strikes a chord and holding it with you all day, revisiting it, thinking about it, contemplating it, etc. I've always loved this idea. Reading and rereading a book until it lives within you. Until it's formed you as much as it can. This has been that sort of book for me over the past few years...I've come back to it (or at least several parts of it) often. Now you have me thinking about what book may be my next one to devour over the next couple of months or years...