Monthly Archives: October 2026

Revisiting a Rant: The Reading Police

reading,

I have always been a reader. I have written about reading often on this blog. My primary message is that reading is in the eye of the reader: you should feel comfortable reading what you want, when you want and how much you want. And, just in case that’s not incendiary enough, here’s more fuel for the fire: you are welcome to count audio books as reading.

I am poking the bears that are what I have taken to calling the reading police. Similar to the craft police, these social media monitors set themselves up as judge and jury for other readers. One of their main tenets is that those of us who often read 100 books or more a year aren’t really reading in the way we should be.

Here’s my rant from December 2023 where I confronted the reading police for the first team and wrote my own manifesto for readers.

Dwelling in the Mystery

art, poetry,
Farms and Fields and Clouds

My husband told a friend that I have been in a foul mood these days. I did not disagree. Is it any wonder why?

As a balm to my overwrought soul, I was fortunate to spend more time with my parents and their friends a few weeks ago. I heard the new chaplain speak, and her message echoed that of the one I heard from the Bible study during the previous visit. Using the metaphor of a cup filled with water, she suggested that we do ourselves an injustice when we try to fit God into our cup. Instead, she emptied the cup and dropped it into a bucket of water. God is all around us just like the cup in water. We should dwell in the mystery of being surrounded by something much larger than ourselves, larger than our own imaginations.

That same message is the theme of Denise Levertov’s poem, “Primary Wonder.” She gets straight to the point in the first sentence: “Days pass when I forget the mystery.” She goes on to describe all the ways life gets in our way of experiencing the mystery that “there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory.” While some may be put off by the Christian imagery, I think the poem speaks to anyone who has had an experience of getting beyond the day-to-day diversions to a deeper connection with the mystery.

Levertov’s spiritual journey is fascinating: born to a Hasidic Jewish scholar and Welsh mother, she was an agnostic for much of her life, converting to Catholicism in the 1980s.

You can read the complete poem here.