Family Traditions

One of the rituals my family has always shared at Thanksgiving is for each person to read aloud a passage from something we especially liked over the last year (or, when I was a kid, that we found in some book that very day). Tempted though I am this year to read passages from some of Obama's campaign speeches, instead I am going to share a passage from a book I'm currently reading to which I particularly relate:

"To write, I have decided, is to be insane. In ordinary life you look sane, act sane --- just as sane as any mother of [young] children. But once you start to write, you are moonstruck, out of your senses. As you stare hard inward, following behind your eyes the images of invisible places, of people, of events, and listening hard inward to silent voices and unspoken conversations --- as you are seeing the story, hearing it, feeling it --- your very skin becomes permeable, not a boundary, and you enter the place of your writing and live inside the people who live there. You think and say incredible things. You even love other people --- [nearly as fully and deeply as you love your own children and your husband].* And here is the interesting thing to me: when this happens, you often learn something, understand something, that can transcend the words on the paper." in the words of the character Charlotte Bridger Drummond from WILD LIFE by Molly Gloss

In a spirit of Thanksgiving for the community of writers, artists, and mothers who find each other by whatever means they do and thus discover their kinship to people with whom they share no blood ties, I give thanks for you, fellow-bloggers/readers.

Happy Thanksgiving.

If by any chance, you decide to join in this tradition and post a passage from something you've read (or written) in the past year that is particularly meaningful to you at your website, please let me know. I'd love to read it.

*The actual wording of this passage in the book is "--- you don't love your children or husband at all." I am altering it to be truer to my own experience.