It's Gettin' Real...

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Today I finished reading ma mere's book. It is good. Good. Goodness~

I took my time going through it....leafing through the pages slowly, savoring every word...willing it to saturate my heart and mind like a soothing stream of truth. Ma mere does not mince words. She never has. *This is what is simultaneously so amazing and awful (at least to my pride) about our relationship. A relationship I have learned to embrace and encourage...even when it hurts.

Chapter by chapter, her book titled Booked delves into the depths of Literature, and how God's gifting of it gave her insight into, or even moreso, actually formed her self and identity---even her awareness and understanding of a Divine Creator. It is a concept I have never come across from this exact angle--and it is keenly acute in its accuracy. Truth lives and breathes within the bindings of this book, and I am blessed to have been witness to such a work.

As I read I had my highlighter waiting to whisk across the words, coating the ivory with color--an iridescent roadmap there to remind me of what resonated within my heart, so that I can return back to the wisdom again and again. For one specific chapter, the section surrounding Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary, I chose green. Little did I know at the time that a more apropos choice could not have been. For Emma, the heroine of the book is plagued throughout the piece by an attitude of awful discontent---dramatic in its dire needs and wants, and a spirit stolen of satisfaction by the criminal clutches of romanticism.

Green goes with the envy that is Emma's as she glances around her world, riddled with routine and mundane daily duties when all she desires is the excitement and glamour she imagines awaits just around the bend out of her reach and belonging only to others. Yes, those others. Even an emerald-hued haze hovers around her kind and loving husband--whom, in comparison to the outer world and the men she makes idols from afar, she now finds disdainfully dull. 

Dr Prior (author of Booked, and ma mere) describes Emma's dilemma (yes, that was a painfully unavoidable rhyme you just witnessed....): 


"She keeps 'waiting in her heart for something to happen,' something of excitement to fulfill her longing, her unbearable heaviness of being." 

As I ruminated over these words, Emma's unmet longings, I saw a mirror of myself. Waiting....looking from afar in awe, at others. Wanting. Aching. Longing. Failing to see what is right before me.  Unable to sit in the stillness and see....how blessed, is  (or can be) my reality~