Yesterday was a glorious October day here. One of the ones you cherish because you know they are fleeting—a warm day, after a cold spell, where the light is too golden to be summer so you stay out a little bit longer.
We had an amazing soccer game, relevant only that my son and I both left elated for his fun, and headed out much later than usual (I am one of those home by 7, brush your teeth, get a book in bed kind-of-moms). We recounted the soccer game in the car, as the light and the leaves fell and we careened toward a little town called Doylestown.
Doylestown Bookshop is a booklovers book shop. It is wide and old; it is cozy and spacious. It has gifts that booklovers love—cooking things and candles, journals and pretty whozy-whats-its. We have spent countless days there; to me, it is also a marker of the bookstores I grew up with. The bookstores I stood by when everyone told me kindle or bust, and here we are—print in hand.
The day of the book release my mom, my aunt and I went into said bookstore, where I initially, awkwardly hid a couple of stack aways while I watched my aunt wait in line to order my book, at a bookstore.
I realized I blended in like a woman with a kerchief and glasses in a 1950’s movie, so I walked up and stood plainly in the moment and watched the new employee, ask my aunt, “What’s the spelling of the author? B-R-E?”
My mom did an excellent job maintaining her cool. I know there are so many other ways to book launch, and they are coming too: author events and interviews, but there was also something else that was transpiring.
In that moment, I was so many ages. I was watching the same aunt who stuffed me into a car packed with her teenage friends when I was a little smidge and careened me across town to hockey rinks and tennis courts, like a beloved mascot. She was also the one who walked with me as I got ready for my college graduation (the rest of the family saving her seat), as of course, an English Major.
I stood there as the kid who climbed trees to read books; the teacher who taught books; the ruminative who thought how poetic it would be to have a book; and now a single mom who somehow wrote a book she didn't see coming, and at moments never thought would finish, and we all stood there together at once in a cross-moment of creation and completion. It felt good to be with those that were there when the dream was still only seeded in the ethers. It feels good to be on radio shows and at author events and taking with strangers. All of us were standing there next to the seasonal crockpots and mushroom detailed ladles, watching my aunt order Rebirth.
After the soccer game, my son went up to the same counter and asked, “Can I have my mom’s book?” He was elated when the cashier handed him something he recognized. “Mom, your book is here!”
We found a nearby macaroon shop, to celebrate in, selling cookies and cream gelato, with a warm tray of au pain chocolate at 7:45pm on a last summer night and I kissed my son’s head at all the miracles I was holding.
He looked at me with a cookie-and-cream gelato grin and beamed, “This made our day.”
I agreed.
Our human consciousness is being pushed through a birth canal right now of a narrow uncertain tunnel. It seems like everything is being taken from us we spiral and twist from warm, known waters, into a dark tunnel with this universal force of pressure, but what waits on the other side is everything. What waits—if we choose it, if we make the choice that matters—is something that is a little better than it was before. Warm croissants and good bookstores have always been my favorite, but with my son and a bookshop, the moment is a bit better than I could have conceived of ten years ago.
It all matters.
The little things that we say don’t matter, that we are okay with giving up on, and let go—they matter because they matter to you. What is not yours will be wrested from your hands in the beneficence of that impending canal. I will not lie and say it was easy or I always believed, or I saw where this was going, but for whatever reason, walking along on a perfect night of October we had this moment that I know I will pull out years from now, with cold bones under a hopefully delightful blanket and know that I must have done something good, as the song goes. Because I could have said it didn’t matter and I could have done the practical thing that kills beauty, but I didn’t.
It’s not easy, I know. But you can do it. Whatever came to your heart or your mind as you read, give a little oxygen today to it, if only in the kindness of your thoughts:
“Because the cosmos is with us. Every aspect of consciousness is in this body. All beauty, all ease, all that we seek to attain in this consciousness is within ourselves at every given moment. We just have to untangle the knots that prevent us from feeling these experiences within ourselves. It’s so applicable because we live in hard and harsh times.” - Lilavati, Rebirth
It all matters. The gelato. The doubt. The soccer. The bookstore over Amazon. Warm over cold. Someday over today. Celebrating over silence. Uplifting over hiding. There are the things we get to create because we are here.
It all matters because you matter.
Rebirth can be found on Amazon (who just raised its price), but you can also buy at any local bookstore or Thriftbooks.
Inspiring me to believe in myself and what I see as the best day. Taking different roads and being vulnerable. Thank you always for your words and presence in my life.