It’s Sunday and I decide to take a walk. Putting my notebook and a few pens in my purse, I’m not sure if I am bound for the Park or the local Library, which is closed but the outside is not. Both have lovely places to sit in the shade of big trees. I start off towards the Park, but something turns me around and I head through the neighborhood to the library.
My pace is slow and I arrive to see that the benches behind the building are mostly free. There is a cricket game being played on the adjacent ball field along with a few folks scattered about on blankets and chairs. I find a nice picnic table and take out my things.
I never know what, if anything, I will write or draw. Sometimes I put everything away again and just watch the trees and the people and dogs and kids and things wiggle and sway in the wind of the day. Today I begin with a doodle across my lined notebook, a notebook designed for words but ever open to other things. As the lines begin to draw themselves a sentence appears in my mind…”and who will sing to the books?”
…and who will sing to the books?…
The sentence seems to come from the library itself…emanating from the vertical walls looking for someone who can translate the speech of vacant public structures and listen to the frequency of imagination.
So I begin to write…
…and who will sing to the books?
in the Library
who will peruse the shelves?
sliding novels, tomes, text books and picture books to and fro
are the books missing the dance?
or reveling in the unfamiliar Silence!
perhaps new words will appear on pages left alone long enough to decide for themselves what passages to dissolve and which future to gently insert
who knew what a boon it would be to leave books alone long enough to sing to themselves!
–written by Jani Gillette sitting outside her local library with no-body inside and every-thing alive!
I believe there is more to come…the beginning of something quite magical and unexpected. A quiet rEvolution going on inside closed libraries all over the country…and not the kind you would expect. It seems the books are reading themselves for the first time, and discovering that they know a thing or two about the written word, about each other, about romance and research, about the vibration of love. And Why wouldn’t they! So here I go, with ears wide open and a soft heart, to see if I can do justice to a new reality borning forth from our beloved books left alone long enough to surprise us all!