I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
? Jorge Luis Borges

Last week I was driving near my neighborhood library and realized I had not been there in a while so I turned in. I didn’t really need a book…I had one or two I was reading…but I felt like I could just use a good dose of library. Summer and the library are inextricably linked in my experience. I have fond memories as a child of riding my bike to the library on hot, sweltering, southern Ohio summer days. The library must have been air conditioned and walking through those doors brought instant relief from the heat while filling my nostrils with that library smell. What is it? Paper? Leather? People? Words floating in the air? Stories just waiting to be told?Wisdom to be discovered?

Walking in I noticed a dad with his three sons. They were lugging an enormous bag of books, that IKEA sized bag that holds nearly everything but the kitchen sink. They were in their summer uniforms of shorts and t-shirts and the older one, a new teenager I imagined, was exhibiting his independent streak by wearing one running shoe and one bright red Croc with mismatched socks. I smiled and silently wished the father all the best. Lugging the bag through the door, the younger one stood with his parent and put the returned books one at a time onto the conveyor belt that took them to that mysterious place that would prepare them for their next reader. The dad exercised great patience and presence.

As I roamed around the library I noticed those who sat at computers and those in some quiet listening areas with large headsets over their ears. In the children’s area, some little ones read with a parent while others worked with puzzles and a few played games on a screen. I thought of the great gift of this institution and how it has shaped not only individuals but our culture. So it was with joy that I watched a story on CBS Sunday Morning about the importance of libraries and the many ways they have grown and changed over the years. No longer a place for simply borrowing books, libraries have become a center of a community. They have always been and continue to be one of those safe havens for so many…different generations, people living on the margins, the curious, the searching, the creative, the shy, the hopeful. Choosing a book and taking it home to explore without cost is a freedom not to be taken lightly.  In fact T.S. Eliot said: “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.” 

And aren’t we all looking for a little hope in a future for us all? With all that is happening in our world, I will take any good glimpse of it that I can. The library seems a very good place to start. 

As I was checking out the stack of cookbooks that I will likely never use but whose pages give me great joy to flip through, the dad and his sons were checking out yet another huge stack of books and packing them into their big bag. They were laughing and enjoying their time together. Much happens at a library and this is just one snapshot. They headed out the door to the reading that will happen this week, these summer days, that will be, before we know it, autumn days.

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” 
? Henry Miller

For the last two weeks I have been traveling. I was privileged to spend time in the south of England before walking along a path known as the Cotswold Way. Spending my days among places and people I did not know allowed me once again to remember one of the true gifts of travel. Navigating streets and fields, hills and valleys that have known a life outside anything I had experienced confronted me with the fact that we live in a diverse, multi-layered world filled with people whose lives are so very different than my own. Ways of getting from one place to another is different. Clothing takes on a variety that can be startling and surprising, beautiful and eye-stopping. Sounds fall in new ways on the ear. Foods common to those in the place you are visiting seem exotic. 

All this combines to create a sense of humility in me. Noticing the ways that other people move through their world in ways that are so different than my own helps me to realize how wide my lens needs to stretch to be a true citizen of the world. Coming face to face with all I don’t know about the wants and needs of others is humbling. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert puts it this way: “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” 

Of course, a person really does not need to leave home to realize this. Yet I am feeling thankful for the opportunity because in the every day walk of my life it is easy to think others see the world pretty much the same as I do, experience it with the same enthusiasm, boredom or anxiety as I do. When placed on soil not our own, challenged to navigate language and life with the hope of being welcomed or at least tolerated, I believe our hearts and minds expand. And in the world in which we are living right now, this seems a very good thing to me. 

Travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer says: “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” 

Today I am grateful to have been ‘taken in’. I am feeling blessed to have sensed my heart and eyes opened even a little, to have looked past headlines and news stories and seen the beautiful humanity with which we spin on this globe. It is a sacred wake up call. I hope I offered what I could… in my ignorance and what little I know. And I hope and pray that it has brought me to the place of being a young fool again, one who can fall in love once more with this world, this planet, these humans, this life with which we each have been gifted.