But the Greatest of These is Books
In response to Dancing Elephants prompt 8 of 52
This week’s prompt from Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles encourages gratitude.
Vidya offers six possible prompts to choose from and I contemplated each of these. In considering which to write about, at first I wanted to be resonant or strategic: What feels the most poignant? What title or tag would be most relatable to others?
This is how I arrived at the first two items on my list of three things I am grateful for in my life — family and hope.
Family
My family is a blessing. This includes my birth family, extended family, and also my husband and son (and our pets, too). To be grateful for family is cliché, but it’s also true and important.
My family is both expansive and close-knit (I have two siblings and twenty first cousins). Some are scattered about the country; some live just around the corner. The whole lot is abundant in love, curiosity, acceptance, weirdness, laughter, and imperfect humanity.
We are lucky.
Hope
Hope is essential. As the esteemed General Leia Organa once said, “Hope is like the sun. If you only believe it when you see it you’ll never make it through the night.” Or, to quote another outstanding woman:
“”Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops — at all…”
— Emily Dickinson
Hope is invisible and elusive. You have to believe in it even when you don’t yet know exactly what you are believing in — when you don’t know the words.
Sometimes, imponderable hope is the only thing that moves me forward in a given moment, and I am thankful for that.
Books
After reflecting on the profound, resonant, honeyed answers to this prompt, I shook myself and said, “Allisonn, be more authentic — look around. What small, tangible thing are you really, truly grateful for each day? What brings you palpable joy?” And there it was — books!
Well, I just love them. Some people grew up loving books, and I am not one of those people. I grew up running wild and rarely reading, although my sister read to me. Actually, my sister coached me through learning how to read with the help of the Brambly Hedge series.
As an adult, she loaned me books by Barbara Kingsolver and Ransom Riggs and was instrumental in igniting my deep love of reading.
Books are infinite. They feel good. They smell good. They contain secrets and knowledge and dreams. They contain family and hope. Sometimes they are hope — sometimes the sanctuary of a story is a thing to live for.
Memoirs, novels, journals, religious texts, informational texts, guidebooks, ebooks, cookbooks, dictionaries — let us celebrate books and never ban them. Let us give thanks to librarians, authors, publishers, Johannes Gutenberg, and everyone who deals in stories.
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