I hadn’t read a novel in years. Since before I married Talon. But yesterday I finished Where The Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens, and suddenly my whole body is full and empty at the same time. The eerily familiar feeling of something being ripped from my insides, a piece of me taken with the closing of the book, my soul forever entwined with that of the characters. My heart is so full with their beautiful love, the struggles of humanity and nature and life, and the happy-sad ending that is both so unlike anything I’ve ever read and so normal. I hadn’t forgotten what reading was like, but I had let the importance of that feeling slip away. I am so fulfilled by simply knowing the stories someone else wove, experiencing their words in a way that breaks from simply words and becomes something I can be immersed in. I’ve missed reading. Now I want to gobble up every book in my apartment (which is a lot). I can’t get the stories of Kya and Tate and the marsh out of my mind.
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Last year was a year of powerful women. My network of feminine was loud and strong and full of driving energy. We were exploring our feminism through the firm knowledge that we could do it alone, together out of love and want but not necessarily out of necessity. It was a year of independence and autonomy and needing no one. We celebrated the women who spoke out, who held their heads high, who accomplished the large. We were validating and we were loving, but mostly we were strong. This year is a year of powerful women, too. But this is a softer power, one that celebrates the nurturing sides of the feminine. This year is about a mother and her new child, about the embrace between a girl and her grandmother in Moana, about grace and unconditional love. The fire has not gone out, but it is simply a warm, life-giving one now, not one that rages and destroys. This fire is about flowers and holding hands and quiet tears. It is about long nights discussing the intricacies of our deepest desires, about seeking the most good. It is about Rachel Hunt Steenblik’s Mother’s Milk, and seeking a connection with our Heavenly Mother. It is about finding the divine feminine in each of us, about embracing and unlocking our purest energies of love and acceptance and sisterhood. It is still brave and it is still strong, but it is also gentle. I'm a sucker for a good metaphor. When I was in early high school, I was surrounded by the kind of people who read simply for pleasure. They were, as the writer of my twelfth-grade English textbook would say, escapist readers. They propagated the idea that we shouldn't shred books down to their individual parts to find deeper meaning. The curtains are blue; the curtains are blue. Their crowning sentiment was that books say what they mean, and no more. And while I would still argue that my twelfth-grade English textbook writer was a pretentious prick, I'm quite proud that I've moved on from that crowd. Because although maybe when an author says that the curtains are blue they say that simply because why not blue, there is absolutely nothing wrong with also deciding that the blue means something to you. Because, as YA-giant John Green so often says, books belong to their readers. And this reader wants to think about things. She wants to take the world for more than just face value, she wants to dig deep and pull people apart into their component pieces and try to figure out what makes them tick. She is so deeply unsatisfied with so many people's answer to the question of "why?" because people never pull the truth out from inside them, explain the whole background and every bit of reason to it. They just go with the easy, even if they believe it's the hard. She's been told that science explains the how and religion the why, but "By relegating the things we fear and don’t understand to religion, and the things we understand and control to science, we rob science of its artistry and religion of its mutability." I remember when Katrina hit.
I remember sitting in my second grade classroom on the ground floor, where the first graders usually lived. In the corner, mounted to the ceiling, was a little black box of a TV, and when Katrina hit, my teacher never turned it off. For the next few months — and maybe for the whole year — the hours of news footage I had watched out of the corner of my eye stayed vibrant in my mind. I saw the floods again, the pain again, the sorrow again every time I went into the school office and saw boxes full of donations, every time I walked into the school library and saw the containers asking for money to help the children of New Orleans rebuild theirs. I'd lived through many a tornado, but I knew that what we were talking about now was something so much larger than that. I remember when Katrina hit, and I remember how terrible it all was. Today I went a little rogue and drove myself up over the mountain to Gettysburg, PA. I do this from time to time; vaguely mention I’m leaving, wander for a couple hours in an off-puttingly conscious fugue state. And today, with no money and shoes only on second thought, I chose to drove East.
I live about forty minutes west of the Gettysburg Battlefield, a location more well-known and popularly visited than anything in my little town could ever hope to be. I have been there many times. It’s a tourist location, a historical site, somewhere every relative who dares to visit us wants to see. And we take them, hearing the same old story of nineteenth century warfare, climbing the same old towers, and tripping over the same old cannons. It’s an experience which lacks originality; it has never been thought provoking. But today, driving slowly with windows down and music silenced, then sitting barefoot under a cannon, I allowed it to be. |
I'm Audrey, a college student and existential rambler.
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