Book Clubs

I should have been asleep an hour or more ago. Instead, I got caught up in Sue Monk Kidd's latest novel, The Mermaid Chair. Kidd is also the author of The Secret Life of Bees, and I think what appeals to me about her writing is the femenine experience of the divine. The finding of self with, through and around a search for and knowledge of God. I know, lots of prepositional phrases. But that exploration seems to me the expression of my poetics--no, rather the driving force behind my desire to write. My poems are very rarely about the search for God or self, but are often the orienteering markers left on my path.

The real reason for my writing this particular entry, though, is what I found not within the book, but at the end of it. What does it say about our society that we have introductions to books situated at the back of them? Perhaps that we are so goal oriented that we skip straight to the end to see if the return will be worth the temporal investment? That those who read to read dive right in to see where the words themselves will take the reader? That those who read to discuss it later, to know the communion of thought found in a book club, the endangered reality of shared experience and interest in a world of niches also search for some assurance that the interpretation will be common as well? I don't really know, but it seemed like an interesting question to pose.

Sometimes I experience God like this Beautiful Nothing...And it seems then as though the whole point of life is just to rest in it. To contemplate it and love it and eventually disappear into it. And then other times it's just the opposite. God feels like a presence that engorges everything. I come out here, and it seems the divine is running rampant. That the marsh, the whole of Creation, is some dance God is doing, and we're meant to step into it, that's all.
~Brother Thomas, p. 153

Strange that the one quote that most affects me, after the ranting about feminine experience, would be in the voice of a man. But we can't control these things, can we? At the very least, I can't. That's just how I roll.