November | 2019 | Lisa Stowe – The Story River Blog

When I’m desperate for something to read I wander over to the neighbor’s little library. The books I find in there aren’t necessarily ones I would pick up in a regular library where choices are many. But when you’re needing a book and the selection is few, you end up pushed into worlds you might not pick to read.

Little community; little library

Have you ever noticed that sometimes the book you find in your hand mirrors something going on in your life? I’m not sure if you are drawn to the book because of events, or if the events make you see things differently so that you pick up something you might not normally.

Both of those things – the neighborhood library, and recent events, have landed a tiny book in my lap.

I posted recently about needing a sister day, and this past week I was gifted with sister days. They were emotional days that make your soul ache and your heart weep even when you struggle to be strong and say the things you need to say.

Sister words

Words like ‘you’ve fought this battle for years’ and ‘we understand you’re tired’ and ‘we respect your choice to go’ and ‘don’t stay because of us’.

When the reality is inside you’re grasping at cloth while your brain screams ‘don’t you dare leave us!!!’

And then here comes this little book.

The bookmark is a pricking, a pattern, for a bookmark made from bobbin lace. And in the cup are wooden bobbins from a sister.

I’d never heard of the author, let alone the book. But it’s a small book to hold in your hand, with rough-cut edges and a beautiful cover. So I brought it home from the neighborhood collection, thinking it would be a distraction, a non-fiction book on how snails operate. Interesting, maybe boring, but words.

Nope.

The author has a mysterious debilitating disease. And into her life comes a snail, with a pot of wild violets. And one night, she can hear the snail munching.

What comes from that moment is a lesson in slowing down, breathing, changing perspectives, adjusting how we look at life.

At the things we have to let go.

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The book reads like a meditation, with the interesting life of a snail thrown in. Like the fact that they have teeth and you can hear them chewing when the world around you is quiet and still enough.

There’s more to this book than just that, but for now, I want this snail to remind me to be quiet and still enough that I can hear time slowing for one sister. I want to feel how an ending for us is a beginning for her, a birth of a different sort, into the world she has faith in.

And during this time left, no matter how long it is, I hope time slows for my sister so that she can feel our heartbeats, feel our love, find her peace, and find the quiet so she can hear what she needs to now.

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There’s a young woman circling me. I can catch brief glimpses of her, as if shadows moving behind trees. Occasionally I can hear her whispered voice, but it may be the wind.

I’ve seen her walking above the sea alone, face lifted to the salt air. I know she feels cleansed, but I also see how gaunt she is. She’s simply escaped the mountains, but not whatever it is that haunts her.

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There’s an old woman waiting for her. A grandmother, or maybe great-grandmother, in her end days. Some say she’s lost her mind, but what some see as insanity others see as vision, finally clear.

It’s like writing. This young woman circling me, creeping up on me, whispering to me, isn’t real. Or at least not yet. But she wants me to tell her story because she can’t. And there’s some mystery there, on the wild edges of the North Sea, where she now walks.

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Some of you nod, recognizing the writing process, understanding that voice in the place where stories begin.

Others, who don’t understand the writing process, might hear this and think it strange, or wonder about someone who says they hear voices in their head.

But this…this is how a story begins.

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