soul library

Bare yours to the world.

Share it on Goodreads, display it prominently in your living room, peruse it periodically. Be unashamed of what goes into this library but engage the process of curation as a practice of self-development. Become the kind of reader who you aspire to be and always aim up, not in the sense of the height of your brow in relation to the literature you read but in the way you are pushed continually to be, witness, and understand more.

Sit with your picks whether they be your first, true “soul book”, fifth, or your fifteenth. Anyone who reads long and liberated enough will find their true self touched by a writer’s words. Embrace and cling to these touchstones of time, these anchors of essence.

Whether they be tattered and filled with marginalia or pristine collector’s editions, hold and return to them as you do friends from college or a hometown, mine their depths as you would a holy text’s, and recognize their eternal truths are only thus because you are who you were and always will be who you become.

A dedicated space for my own holds pillars in my life like A Sand County Almanac and The Overstory, the writings of Tomáš Halík and Antonin Sertillanges, Natality: A Philosophy of Birth and Practicing the Way (and if I was a braver man with a bigger shelf The Lorax would be among these too). Books that came to me long ago as meditative, restorative ways I return to myself and others that have more recently appeared to serve as Kafka’s, “axe for the frozen sea inside…”

A book’s presence lends purpose.
Some of these words are theirs.
The person I am does not exist apart from them.

At twenty-five now, I await with anticipation the soul library I’ll have when I’m fifty and then seventy-five. The good life is for those that taught me early that books are a screaming bargain, and always will be, because for the price of a downtown, third-wave ounce of espresso and milk, you can buy a time capsule to another world or a body-swap machine to another’s life or a brain accelerator to another way of being.

When you discover you can walk away forever changed from reading words on a page, something transcendent floats to the surface of this one wild and precious life and presents to you a new, unafflicted way of being with others in the world.

I bare my soul to these interlocutors in the conversations, pauses, sighs, banter, and ecstasy I have with them.
Maybe you’ll find you can bare yours to some too…