“Reading brings the presence of other times, characters, and cultures into your mind. Reading is an intimate event.”  – John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes, p. 55.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

What happens when we read deeply – when we truly enter the story that we are reading? In a little book that we can toss into our purse or pull up on our phone, there may dwell peoples, kingdoms, kindnesses and treacheries, vast worlds of good and harm, dreams, muddled intentions, complexities, inconsistencies, life and breath and death. This “entering into” can happen to the writer of the story as well as the reader.

In the oral tradition, we can also enter into story as listeners or tellers. With deep listening, we are no longer in the room with other listeners and the storyteller; we transmigrate. At such moments, we have crossed over into story.

Such is the transmigration of soul. We go – with the story, through the reading – into spaces that appear smaller, yet they are cavernous. More than “being” caverns, the stories – imagined, read, written, told, and heard – lead us “through” caverns and out into the light of other lands, other times, other peoples.

Have you, as you are nearing the end of a novel, had that experience of impending longing, that feeling of “Oh no, soon – too soon – all these people, all these characters, all these places will be leaving me (or I will be leaving them). I will miss them. I do not want our time together to end”?

If you know something of this feeling of impending loss, then you know something of what we did as young children, when we passed into the light of imaginary worlds in our pretend play behind the couch or in that cozy corner of the living room. If you have experienced this longing of not wanting the novel’s characters to depart from your life, then you hold familiarity with a great facet of the storytelling gem: you have some knowledge of story and the transmigration of the soul.

 

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

Are there particular novels or stories where you have connected deeply to place or characters? With what books, if any, have you had that experience of “impending longing” as you neared the end? If it has been years since reading one of those novels, why not go back to the story and meet those old friends again by rereading the text? Who else might you want to introduce to those characters? Would you like to talk about your experiences with those characters with others who have also read the book? Or, do you want to “hold that experience close” and keep it private? Would you like to share with the author your appreciation and connection with the characters in their story? If the author is alive, why not write to them? If they have died, why not write to them anyway – and pour forth what their sharing of story has meant to you?

 

(Music: Courtesy of Adrian Von Ziegler, “Sacred Earth.” )