Moon People

A book is a little bound world casting its light onto an enormous unbound Earth.

A writer, driven by inexplicable forces, creates, channels, summons, invents, and reconstructs an alternate universe. It is a difficult and highly personal process that draws upon everything a writer has experienced, remembered, perceived, and wished.

A novelist is a writer that builds a world, like a god, so as to help herself comprehend this tale of sound and fury we call a life. And she sends it out to others, a host of strangers, inviting them to teleport to a familiar place, a planet of love, loss, joy and death.

Books are tiny celestial objects that populate the vast universe of our hearts. They spin, and hurtle round the Kuiper Belt until they collide with one of us. No such collision is random.

If you are a reader, you know. The right book at the right time. Medicine angels of revelation and cure.

People are like that too. They seem to enter your orbit and stay there, like moons. The good ones do. The ones that come to teach.

Michael is one of those moon people. He found me at the ocean. We bonded through our dogs and our mutual affection for a stretch of beach called Rodeo, known for its strand of tiny polished stones.

He told me a story about how he had almost died there and brought me to a boulder he clung to after he was swept into the rocks by a rogue wave. He said he felt he was given a second chance at life, for he was saved by two strangers who risked their own lives for his. We became instant friends.

They are such strange, beautiful conceptions. Books are like mirrors in which we recognize ourselves in the lives of others who aren’t even real in the way we understand reality. That makes them art. Perhaps the most immersive and affecting art form. The highest of them all.

This is a blog about books and people. How they come into our lives. How they change us. A great book becomes like a friend, whose mere existence on the shelf is enough to remind us of an incomprehensible hope. By what right do we claim to know the power of love and miracles? What gives us the audacity of belief — in all of this, sea of memories and perception? By the right of stories and these shared worlds that bind us.

One day I will tell you the story about the boy who was saved by books. The god of gemstones and downed insects. The god of willows and dandelion spores. The god of small things.

Read, dear reader. Board a ship. Find a world.