{"id":3885,"date":"2015-08-21T14:22:43","date_gmt":"2015-08-21T21:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=3885"},"modified":"2015-08-21T14:22:43","modified_gmt":"2015-08-21T21:22:43","slug":"put-your-faith-in-glacier-bay-alaska-08142015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=3885","title":{"rendered":"Put Your Faith In \u2013 Glacier Bay, Alaska \u2013 [08\/14\/2015]"},"content":{"rendered":"

He had alw<\/em>\"tumblr_m9j1xalAiG1rf19yko1_500\"<\/a>ays felt <\/em>that books created a force field around him [\u2026] he had never had to travel, his conversations with books had been sufficient. Until finally he prized them more highly than people. <\/em>T<\/em>hey were less threatening. ~ The Little Paris Bookshop<\/em><\/p>\n

Or<\/p>\n

Put your faith in books
\nThat\u2019ll protect you
\nPut your faith in books
\nAnd a mind of your own
\nNeither charm nor looks, will make them respect you
\nYou must learn to stand
\nYou must learn to stand alone
\n~ Fame, the musical<\/em><\/p>\n

Amras asked me yesterday how it was that I could have four or five books on the go at once.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy would you do that to yourself?\u201d<\/p>\n

Now he\u2019s gone and got me thinking\u2026why must he always do that?<\/p>\n

An interesting question really; I\u2019ve never really thought of it that way before. As far as how I keep the stories I\u2019m following straight \u2013 I don\u2019t know, I just do. I can pick up a book and flip to almost exactly where I left off, with only a few exceptions (Robert Jordon is one of those; he requires a full 12 book re-read and I haven\u2019t had the time). As to why<\/em>\u2026well\u2026<\/p>\n

I guess that has to do with who I used to be, before I became who I am\u2026<\/p>\n

My mother taught me to read before I can remember such a thing as being taught. There were just always books in the house, always books for Christmas, for birthdays, for any occasion. I compare myself as a child to Sara Crew in A Little Princess<\/em>, which was \u2013 and still is \u2013 my favourite book to be read aloud from. Even now, as an adult, I would treasure being read to. I have only flickering memories of being read \u2018real\u2019 children\u2019s books, you know the See Spot, see spot run<\/em> kind of thing. That didn\u2019t last long. Mum read me real stuff, Treasure Island <\/em>and The Secret Garden<\/em> and countless others that I lost track of. I fell asleep to the Oz<\/em> stories and Kipling\u2019s How the Elephant Got His Skin<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Growing up I didn\u2019t have any friends, the one child on my block despised me and I despised her equally. I wasn\u2019t cool enough to have friends in school, and I wasn\u2019t weird enough to be \u2018automatically\u2019 cool\u2026and there was just me. Just me and a big house and two parents and two dogs; and a Grandma who \u2013 while she loved me very much \u2013 didn\u2019t have much in the way of entertaining a kid; it wasn\u2019t that I wasn\u2019t a nice child, I like to think I was, but I\u2019ve always had that bit of a snobbish tendency and I\u2019ve never let anyone in easily \u2013 so I wasn\u2019t well liked. As a teenager I was a diva \u2013 a total<\/em> diva \u2013 while at the same time being painfully shy so the only thing I was a diva about was my voice, which was the freak voice that the teachers loved and the other students hated because the teachers loved it and I was a bitch about it\u2026so\u2026again, not really all that well liked. Not avoided exactly just\u2026not liked.<\/p>\n

So, since I wasn\u2019t big on making other people see the world as I saw it, and since I seemed to see it differently, and since I wasn\u2019t really big on caring what other people thought as a child\u2026I \u2026ran away.<\/p>\n

Books have long been my closest friends. They don\u2019t lie, they don\u2019t cheat, they don\u2019t expect anything from me, they don\u2019t let me down, they don\u2019t trick me or pretend to be anything other than what they are, they don\u2019t hurt me or disappoint me, they are safe<\/em>. And they\u2019re gateways, I can fall into them, fall through them. I can go to modern day Paris, to Middle Earth or to London in the horrifying stretch of 1888. I can be Alice and fall into Wonderland. I can ride magic carpets, or gain fortunes in diamond mines. I can shadow Catherine as she yearns after Heathcliffe on the moors (Heathcliffe is an ass by the way, I don\u2019t know why Catherine likes him). I can throw myself into a river and learn how to breathe under water. I can see<\/em> it, all of it, sometimes so vividly that when I lift my eyes from the page I find myself started to still be where I started.<\/p>\n

So why<\/em> would I pick just one? If you could go anywhere, savor everything, taste everything, sample the entire smorgasbord of the universe, would you just go straight for the one you knew? The one that was easy? The one that was safe? Or would you take everything? Pick a door any door, a world through each one, a friend behind each cover\u2026a safe haven in every page. Like diving into a pool in the wood between the worlds, that divides us from Narnia and Charne, and every other world ever written\u2026or in any kind of existence.<\/p>\n

Just one? Why would I pick just one?<\/p>\n

We are our stories, stories that are not read do not live, and every story deserves to live and be lived.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He had always felt that books created a force field around him [\u2026] he had never had to travel, his conversations with books had been sufficient. Until finally he prized them more highly than people. They were less threatening. ~ … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-below-the-waterline","category-reflections-below-the-waterline"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3GtNE-10F","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3887,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3885\/revisions\/3887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}