Learning

I've been learning a lot of late, or at least relearning and reprocessing things that I have known, but have not yet known into action. Slowly I'm beginning to realize that I do not have to be good at everything, that I don't have to be constantly proving myself. This desire, the urge to be superior, I am learning, cheapens the things I love. Paint, poetry, music and, well, existence, if merely done to be the best, or even to be better takes away a lot of the joy and most of the reason for doing these things at all. Yes, I want to be better, but I want to be better because I love these things and want to be able to communicate something through these mediums truthfully and meaningfully (and yes, I mean through the medium of existence as well) and not simply to be the best.

As I write this out it seems such an obvious statement, such a simple concept, but something that I find highly difficult to keep in my brain, one that keeps slipping out as I slip into the day to day and yet it also seems quite significant for living and enjoying that whole endeavor of existence.

"Oh to grace how great a debtor" keeps circling round my head of late and with these kinds of realizations. How simple things get twisted and obscured worries me, but the fact that it isn't so horribly and desperately terrible to forget because I know I am given grace abundantly and constantly is a very happy thought.

A short rave on books.

I must just state that I love books. A lot. I love the elegance of words well formed, the sentences that grab hold and run through your life forever after, the deeper resonances that cannot be put into words but that still fill you with a sense of meaning and an awe of the world around. I love books because it has so often been books that have made me desire to live and live fuller, because books often (or at least the good ones) never claim to be the end all, but merely a pointing finger.

There is also something about the ink, the smell of the pages, the weight of all those words in one's hand.

I have recently been taking more advantage of the Zaventem library's rather impressive English section, have shaken off the guilt of reading in English while I desperately try to cram French into my brain and have accepted again that I need these distant teachers. I realize that this is a rather ridiculous post, but there it is.

I am in intense gratitude for books and language and people like Madeleine L'Engle, Nicole Krauss, C.S. Lewis, Nabokov, Milosz, Wilbur, Marilyn Robinson J.R.R. Tolkien, and many many more.