100 Days of Gladness: Day 35
There are too many to name — the writers who have saved my life.
But they’re out there. And they have no idea.
Sometimes even I had no idea.
No clue how close I was to drowning until I read the passage in The Poisonwood Bible where one of the daughters laments to her mother that she has no life of her own. And the mother says to the reader “One has only a life of one’s own.”
In that moment, a large, lost part of myself was redeemed.
Other times, when I felt a grief too big for language when my dog died, I came across the last few pages of Richard Adams’ Watership Down. Those words drew back the curtain on what it might actually be like to pass into the next realm. That view felt real. It felt plausible. Beautiful beyond the grasses and winds and warrens of this world. In that moment, I felt peaceful, comforted.
Gandhi’s autobiography expanded my spiritual life, pressed my feet into the real world, made my place in it urgent.
Byron Katie’s Loving What Is freed me from a an annoying, sometimes crippling community of crazymaking thoughts and beliefs.
J. K. Rowling taught me how to access Platform 9 3/4. She inspired me with the…
