Sacred Space

The street was sunny and bustling this morning as I made my daily rounds down the block to the bank and the post office. I opened the door to the store and felt the profound quiet of this space surrounded by a busy town. The sunlight streams in dustily, I'll admit, through big windows and I feel immersed in a sacred space. It is not always so, but today that's the way it is.

I think that part of this cathedral like sense comes from feeling connected to those who have come before me. I feel like one in a line of bookseller's, a gracious empathic family who began this store and ran it for the thirty years before my time. There is a sense of them here, prices marked in their hand, ancient books bought with their wisdom. It is something to appreciate and something to live up to...this heritage.

April is National Poetry Month.
A Poem for today:

Fable of the Ant and the Word
by Mary Barnard

Ink-black, but moving independently
across the black and white parquet of print,
the ant cancels the author out. The page,
translated to itself, bears hair-like legs
disturbing the fine hairs of its fiber.
These are the feet of summer, pillaging meaning,
destroying Alexandria. Sunlight is silence
laying waste all languages, until, thinly,
the fictional dialogue begins again:
the page goes on telling another story.