Gratitude Sunday: Writers

Yesterday was a book day.  It began with seriously contemplating, for the first time, purchasing a Kindle and ended with a new book club meeting.  As I think about things I'm thankful for on this gratitude Sunday, I think about all the gifts books have given me through the years.  As an awkward only child living in the country, books gave me a glimpse of the world beyond the small Kansas farm community where I lived.  Through them I learned which fork was my salad fork, what life was like in different times and places, and about the many possibilities and opportunities that were open to me.

It's been an interesting journey ... beginning with weekly trips to town to visit the Carnegie Public Library (thank you, Andrew!) where I started at A and was proceeding slowly through the alphabet when a kindly librarian explained that some books were better than others and gave me a reading list.  And now I'm about to buy an 8 ounce device that will hold thousands of books ... and there are over 600,000 available for instant download.  That little Kansas girl could never have dreamed of such abundance ... even if "some books are better than others," that's a lot of books.  Jeff Bezos of Amazon recently announced that they are now selling more electronic books than paper books.  That one revolution may save more trees than all of our recycling programs.

Last night ended with the first meeting of a new spiritual book club, dedicated to reading one chapter every two weeks of Deepak Chopra's "The Book of Secrets."  His first chapter ties a lot of this thinking about books together as he talks about the incredible wisdom of cells.  It is estimated that there are around 50 trillion cells in the human body.  So far we don't know what holds them together in the forms we see walking around every day but we do know that the cells are in constant contact with each other.  Information flows and each cell shares its information freely.  And that's what writers do ... they ... we ... share information.  A lot of the time we don't completely understand why we are so compelled to share what's on our minds, what happened in our childhoods, how to use the latest gadget, or our deepest, darkest secrets.  But thinking about cells makes it a little more understandable.  We are cells in the Universe and it's in our nature to share information.  It's just what we do.

So, today is a special day of gratitude for writers everywhere ... writers of all types ... writers of books, writers of movies, writers of blogs, writers of graphic novels.  Writers write and the information flows.  And, perhaps, it's information that holds all the cells of the body together and maybe it's information that holds our world together.