A loan of perspective

It’s a cloudy, rainy, chilly June morning*.  I'm wearing a wool sweater dress.  The past few weeks have been in the 80's – shorts and tanktops and popsicles.  And I'm so grateful.  Because the past week we have been enveloped in smoke from the wildfires raging in our state.  Low visibility, high-risk for elders and children.  We half seriously talked about flying my pregnant self to visit family until the smoke clears.  And today it rains!  May all the fires be quenched.

I spent the morning at the table ... ok, so it was the early afternoon.  I mean, if we're going to be honest, I slept through most of the morning.  I spent the early afternoon at the table with a cup of coffee (half caf!) and a book.  I've always been a voracious reader.  The weekly trip to the library was one of the highlights of my life as a child.  In middle school I read through the entire – and I mean entire! – YA section at the library, priding myself on reading a novel a day.  I could read more than one on weekends and school vacations.  I have piles and piles of "to-read" books in the house.  Most of them focused on yoga, spirituality, wellness. And novels.  Those too.  I'm booming business for the used book store.

But of late, I've re-discovered the library.  In college, the library was a tool.  A beloved tool.  But a tool rather than a place of sanctuary and timeless enjoyment. A place to research concepts, find sources for papers. And for the last few years I haven't used the library – University or local – very much at all. Until recently.

Recently I've moved away from gorging my brain on a continuous input of other people's perspective on yoga and towards gorging my brain on other people's perspectives on raising children.  Neither are practices that should rely on outside perspective.  And I rather think that I don't (or won't)... in either case.  But outside perspective can do a lot to form opinion, to educate and to inspire. I've always been one to read widely on any topic that I approach. And so I've been reading umpteen books on pregnancy and birthing and mother-wellness – these from my mother's home library (she being a midwife who will be opening a private practice) – and alternating them with books on raising resourceful kids, on unschooling, on homeschooling, on how children learn, on mindful parenting.  I read in one genre until it seems that all the authors are repeating themselves, and then I switch genres until the same thing happens again, and I switch back.  Occasionally I mix it up with a novel.

I guess its my way of nesting...  just as, if not more, important for my mental and emotional movement towards motherhood than the physical preparation work around the house or the entrepreneurial restructuring of my livelihood. 

And so I'm grateful for the library.  I've no doubt that over the years a handful of parenting and home schooling perspective will find their way permanently onto my shelves.  But for the time being, I am grateful.  So grateful to the public library.  For a being a haven in the middle of a long day in town, and for providing the precious free gift of a loan of perspective.

*written last Friday