a girl like me

I just finished another book. I must say, I am on a roll. For the first time in a long while, I have rediscovered a love for reading. I might recommend "Love Walked In" by Maria de Los Santos, but only with the disclaimer that there are some poor choices of expletives.

If and when I fall in love, I mean really fall in love, I may quote this line...

A real life doesn't mean getting what you want: the achievement, the privilege, too, is knowing what you love. But getting what you love? Having what you love love you back? Oh, my friend, it's a miracle: your one tiny life's head-on collision with divinity. Page 299


I guess I could quote it now. Being on this side of eternal bliss--the "pre" side, or Prebliss. It still fits. The divine head-on collision that is the miracle of true love, really is a miracle.

When I am a writer (notice there is no IF), I will love this line even more than I did when I read it the first time...

Getting the words right mattered, but so did describing his voice when he talked and capturing the feeling that filled her as he spoke and after he spoke. She thought about the word "capture," how it put a writer on par with a fur trapper or big-game hunter, and how it implied that stories were whole and roaming around loose in the world, and a writer's job was to catch them. Except of course that a writer didn't kill what she caught, didn't stuff it and hang it on a wall; the point was to keep the stories alive. She felt skeptical about this way of thinking about writing, she decided, but was glad to have considered it. Page 203

Because I am a therapist (even in training), I love this line now. The job of a good writer, rather a good therapist (ah...does it fit?), is to keep stories alive. Stories are whole and roaming loose and free. Helping others capture their stories, to tell them and re-tell them and look for the shining moments of joy and gratitude and imagination and creativity, that is what puts me on par with the big guns. hm? Do I sound very strange? This is just where my mind went--on a safari where people's stories are the game, but not just their stories, their hopes and dreams and intentions. The ones that so often are ignored when they enter a therapist's office.