Grazing Board, But Make It Books
How to find real, accessible, everyday rest in your reading material.
(A note: I guess this email is [siiiigh] too long for your inbox. If you want to read it without being interrupted, click the title!)
Dear Friend,
Last night I couldn’t sleep, and so I sat by my window and tried to find a star. Finding a star has helped me sleep since I was little; I like remembering I’m small, and that there are giant burning balls of gas that are actually HUGE but that look like pinpricks to me. The scale of things is impossible to understand, and the sheer ridiculousness of all this comforts me. But last night it was cloudy, and there were no stars. So I went downstairs to look at my books.
What’s your relationship with your books? I mean your literal, tangible books; the ones you own and (presumably) keep on shelves.
I have seven categories of books I own. I’m sure I’m leaving out categories that other people have, and I hope you’ll chime in in the comments regarding my oversights. But here they are.
CATEGORY ONE: Obligation Books
Books I received as gifts, and so I feel like I can’t give them away, because what if the person who gave me the book comes over to my house and starts looking for the book they gave me? Someone went to great lengths to think of me and give me a book, and I haven’t even had the decency to imagine that I will read it, so it is the absolute least I can do to hold on to the book as though I might, someday, in a world that we all know doesn’t really exist, make time for it.
Occasionally, Obligation Books come in handy. Someone gives me a book that I don’t think I want, but then I read an article about it and I come to understand that I was wrong to not want it. Then I already have the book and don’t have to wait for it to come in at the library.
CATEGORY TWO: Opportunity Books
Books that were free, and they seemed kind of interesting, maybe; and then THEY WERE FREE! They were in a Little Free Library or on a table of books at a business that were there for the taking. So I took a book, because (and this is important) IT WAS FREE.
CATEGORY THREE: Status Books
Books that I want people who are looking at my bookshelf to know that I have, and honor enough to display, even though I am probably not going to read the book again, and let’s be honest, will probably not need to reference it. “Invisible Man.” That second Paulo Freire book that didn’t really do it for me, but it proves that I am not a casual Freire fan; I am a REAL fan who truly cares about radical pedagogies.
CATEGORY FOUR: Pretty Books
These are supposed to go on a coffee table, but I have a baby / toddler, and so I have no coffee table.
I’ll lump into this category graphic novels and memoirs, which I just can’t bear to give away, because they’re too pretty. This is my favorite format, and even if a graphic book isn’t very good, I still am filled with appreciation for the amount of effort that I know went into it. I have a lot of these, and I am quite sure I’ll never read them again, but the only way I’ll get rid of one is if you see it and say, “Oh! I want to read that!” If that happens, I’ll give it to you.
CATEGORY FIVE: My-Friend-Wrote-A Books
I’m a writer and artist, and so I’m friends with many writers and artists. I will always keep and honor their books, no matter how I feel about what’s written in them, because whether or not I feel strongly about the material, I absolutely feel strongly about my friends. I know what it is to throw your heart into something so huge (and paradoxically small!) as a book. These are sort of sacred, and also, they are signed.
CATEGORY SIX: Holy Books
Books that I LOVED in all capital letters, and will definitely reference again, because they changed my life. I wish these all fit on one shelf, because that would be tidy, but I’m constantly having to move my Holy Books into other places (off my Holy Book Shelf, pictured above, before I read “Come As You Are” and “4,000 Weeks”) because I have to make room for new ones that (dare I say it?) I love even MORE. My friend KT posted on Instagram recently that they write on the inside cover of their Holy Books the date that they revisit the book, and what is going on for them at that time. Here’s their copy of “All About Love.”
I love this idea because I fundamentally believe in ALL writing-in-books behavior (I’m less sure about highlighting, but I’m not AGAINST it). You may feel like arguing with me about this, and that’s fine; we can argue about it. I will not be changing my mind, and I will probably not change your mind, but it takes all kinds.
And with that, we come to
CATEGORY SIX: Grazing Books
This is the category I’d like to talk with you about today, because I’m curious if you use books this way, and if not, I’m going to suggest it for you as something to sink into this autumn and winter.
Grazing Books are really the only sort that I’ll buy anymore. Books that are given to me as gifts sometimes turn into Grazing Books, as well as books that I see in Little Free Libraries that magnetize me in a very particular way.
A Grazing Book is a book that, whether or not it was intended to be read straight through, from beginning to end, is not consumed like that. It is a nonlinear book. It’s the kind of book that I use to collaborate with the universe. I wrote this week in my 10 Things newsletter about how I use Tarot Cards, and that’s similar to what I do with Grazing Books. And here I offer a caveat.
A lot of my strategy for getting through life — something that can only be described as totally inexplicable and strange — is “behaving as if.” I am borrowing this language from a conversation with my AlAnon sponsor, and as soon as I heard her say it, I felt my brain light up with recognition. Behaving AS IF there is a higher power. Not asserting that there is, or that you know what it is, or that the magic (or lack of magic) of existence can be (or is meant to be) solved. Instead, you let go of the need to not only PROVE such a magic, but also of the need to actually BELIEVE it. On hard days, I just decide to behave as if there is God. This is (as pointed out to me by a different friend and colleague) called Fictionalism, and it works well for me. I don’t need to stand behind a belief in tarot or astrology or herbalism or acupuncture. When I engage with those practices, I choose to behave as if I believe in them. And this perspective literally always leads me someplace (at least) interesting.
When I am with a Grazing Book, I behave as if the book has something to offer me, and I’ll just spend a short time — a shallow time, in some ways — turning the pages and looking for whatever that is.
Lately, I’ve been grazing two wonderful nature books: “A Field Guide to the Familiar” by Gale Lawrence — which is now out-of-print, but was given to me by my girlfriend after they read about it in an Instagram comment; and “A Handbook for Nature Study” by Anna Botsford Comstock, which was published in 1931, and a facsimile of which was given to me by an ex-boyfriend’s mother in 2009.
Both books this week offered asters.
I’m telling you: I wasn’t LOOKING for asters. Even though right now, Chicago is squeezing out its final blooming flowers in the form of asters, I still wasn’t looking for them. I turned at random to a page in each of these books, and there asters were, waiting. Both writers told me to really look at an aster, under a hand lens. It’s not just that asters are flowers within flowers — it’s that they’re flowers within flowers WITHIN FLOWERS — little blooms making up the centers of little blooms that make up the stalks of wildflowers.
Being asked to look at asters made me realize that I hadn’t looked at them before — not really. I mean, I can identify an aster, sure, but I haven’t spent the kind of time I spend with asters as I have spent with daisies or sunflowers (both quite similar to the aster, as “The Handbook for Nature Study” points out), and being told to look at the asters made me wonder why I’d so far ignored them.
I think the answer is that I don’t really like to look at fall. Asters are the last flower — the bumblebees glut on them almost savagely because this is it; after this, everything seems to die. I don’t want to look at that. I don’t want to acknowledge it. I am afraid of winter because I am afraid of death. I have such a hard time seeing all of this as part of a cycle (and that’s because I’m INSIDE the cycle; I’m a living thing with a pesky ego; I don’t want to hold the hardness of death as a necessary part of life). I noticed that noticing and naming my aversion to winter gave me a great sense of ease. Acknowledging that I am living my life now and that it won’t go on forever, that winter is a part of the cycle, that we are here and we die, and that’s painful, but it’s ok — emitted an odd kind of a relief.
I was interested that in “Field Guide to the Familiar” the author had placed asters at the beginning of the book. How could this be? Asters are at the end of the year. They should be at the END of the book. So I flipped back to the first page, and found this:
“The first frost is a clear ending of sorts, but it’s also a beginning. More than any other natural event, it’s an edge or dividing time that we can record each year as a point of reference.”
This knocked me down, conceptually. Winter as the beginning. The frost as the only hard edge in the scheme of something without edges.
And so I read on. Gale puts bumblebees next. She writes:
“Whereas honeybees — and, incidentally, human beings — store food to sustain their species through winter, bumblebees find it more efficient to invest their genes in a few individuals and then die.”
Simple as that.
I’m happy to be sharing with you what I found while grazing, and to tell you that it helped me, to see what others had seen; to lean into the things that are scary to me. And I invite you to choose books for yourself to graze, too. It’s one of the loveliest, quietest resting experiences, with zero stakes, because if you don’t find what you need, that’s on the universe; it’s not on you.
Here are some of my grazing books, which I chose for their titles, or the pictures on their covers.
I also graze old old magazines, like these:
And this morning found this in a 1950s issue of Cosmopolitan.
This is why it is not hard to behave as if. It is always interesting.
And by the way, as both my nature books were eager to point out: the meaning for the word aster, in Greek, is star.
Parenting Paragraph
T is chatty, and I feel excited about it. She knows six words (maybe seven?): mama, dada, dog, cat, up, bye, and maybe mayyyyybe out — although out strikes me as being complicated, so I’m not sure she has that one all the way. I encouraged her to make her first word “elephant,” because what a story that would be, but she didn’t go for it. The first time Luke and I were sure she knew was she was saying, it was “mama.” Before T, I’d always hated the word mama. It felt precious and sentimental and put-on. This was before I understood that it is easier to make the same sound twice when you’re a baby — like your words are a rubber ball you’re bouncing against the ground and you have to work to get them to stop. Now this one word, a word I always loathed, is so beautiful to me that it sounds like music; like a chime that rings out through my whole body and makes me wish I could play it again, like in the Taylor Swift song that is sort of about the same thing.
sophie!
here is a list of my reactions to this delightful sharing:
1) thank you!
2) the whole email DID fit in my inbox
3) cute cool butterfly!
4) cute cool cat!
5) great book categories (i especially love "My-Friend-Wrote-A Books")! i have categories like "want to read, "WANT TO want to read," "books by thich nhat hanh," "graphic novels," and more.
6) "I fundamentally believe in ALL writing-in-books behavior" <-- i like it! (if this post were a book i would write that in it)
7) love behaving as if. (also re: magic, it seems cool to me that either magic definitely exists or definitely doesn't or somewhere in between or maybe beyond existing and non-existing, and any one of those things if true and/or provable would be a cool thing, so whatever the case is, i don't know what it is, and it's cool. also magic is real.)
8) cute cool owl!
9) "a pesky ego"! <-- great phrasing!
10) "Winter as the beginning"!!! (you know how jewish holidays start at sundown the night before? i like thinking of autumn/winter as the night before the day of spring/summer begins!)
11) ASTER MEANS STAR! wow.
thanks for this all, friend!
I really enjoyed my shallow dive into your world, I will return...
I am also a fan of audible books, and my all-time favorite is "Before We Were Yours" by Lisa Wingate...