Dear friends,
One of the benefits of having your house almost burned down is that you give so much less of a hoot about perfection. The idea that a house is a collection of your highest aspirations and desires is singed away, at least in our case. The walls are forever temporary. The floors are lovingly askew. All effort is simply revealed in how things are now. Yes, decisions should consider the future, but the shape of the future is unknown. While portents of things to come may reveal their shapes through visions and dreams, what that shape is in its entirety remains cloaked in mystery. So, if you want to read in a shed then read in a shed. If you want to read in a blanket fort, then build it and snuggle in. If you want to pop a squat in a library, then do it. Co-opt your reading space however, and wherever you desire. Maybe each book you read is a clue to the shape your inner life will take in time. As for now? You are gloriously stuck with the crumbling brick and dodgy vines of the present, lost in the words on the page.
Lay back into it. Rest in the weird shape it takes.
There was a room in a cottage that Jason’s family used to rent on the shores of Georgian Bay. The cottage was an old ship-lap bungalow. A worker’s cottage. The bedrooms weren’t even complete rooms, just spaces designated by plywood partitions. However, each of them had a window. Outside of that window, the water. Being a kid, with the character of life still radically unknown to him, Jason sat in that bedroom listening to the bay winds and waves outside. The sound did not inspire any sort of transcendental knowledge in him, this eight-year-old boy. Not one bit. Instead it endowed the heady, anxious brain of a kid with a present and beautiful understanding of how things were at that moment. Picture the fraught tensions of boyhood dissolving into the simple and reachable shape of a room at night, lit by a little boat-shaped lamp, haunted by water moving outside in the dark, storms possibly approaching. It sounds a little scary, but it was wonderful. It simply was. It was zen. It was heavenly. It revealed the shape of time as something that can be knowable.
We are setting up a new reading spot in our house, and this is what we want it to be like. We want it to frame the shape of time as a simple thing. Grind the whole bloody mess down to a saunter. What approaches, approaches. The shape of things are fine, for a moment, as is. It’s not that we don’t aim to make things better. But really, for the love of a brief peace of mind, let there be one place in life that isn’t cluttered with the pace of visions. We’ve had enough portents and dimensions and depth for a while. Let us just sit the down for a spell and enjoy the light on a white page. Let the books shore themselves, sometimes on their own, sometimes in response to our calls, but let them come like the quiet stars and the lighthouse lights and the lamps of ships in the distance. Things can just be themselves. They can deepen us by existing—by simply existing. Doesn’t that sound like a lovely reading room?
We think so.
Much love,
Jason & Vanessa
