Expanding The View

Starting in my early teens, and lasting for the next 25 years or so, I collected words and saved them.

I read the newspaper and clipped articles that moved me, ideas that opened my eyes, essays that inspired me, and pasted them all into a big journal type book. I read books, watched movies, went to lectures and seminars, collected more words, and pasted the best of the best into that book.

In the early 90’s, ready to do something more with my life, I opened that book. I was sitting in a little alcove off the living room of my sixth floor apartment in downtown LA. It had a floor to ceiling window offering a fabulous view of both the cityscape and the apartment courtyard with its lovely landscaping and pool, but when I opened the book, the view faded away, and something more expansive took its place.

Inside that book, I found the quotes and ideas that had developed my understanding about perception and its role in life. I traced the path it had taken me in, and with that I began designing and teaching the class called The Shift®, which then became the book Living In Grace: The Shift To Spiritual Perception.

My life changed, and the book was put away. I moved it from place to place, without opening it, for another 20 years or so.

I knew why I didn’t open it. I knew that it contained too much inspiration, too much heart, too much for me to look at, so it remained closed while I “got things done.”

One day last year, it came out of storage. I moved it to my reading chair, and opened the first page. That’s as far as I got that day because that first page was more than enough.

Months later, I am only on the fourth page of that very big book stuffed with magical words; words so thoughtful and moving, I can only eat a few bites at a time.

Some of the people that wrote many of those words never became well known. However, what they wrote lives on, and I want to find a way to honor them. Even though I have only made my way through a few pages of that book, I have found a few of those word artists, and ordered their old, mostly out of print, books. I want them to know – they are not forgotten.

The third day I opened the book, an article about my dad that he sent me back in 1984, fell out. The article, an interview with Dad, gave the history of why he studied Utopias, and anti – Utopias, and why Science Fiction became part of that study.

I see he too was a collector of words, and had found a way to honor those that moved him to a different way of thinking, and expanded his view, by writing annotations about each writer’s work and producing bibliographies so others can find them. Now his book collection has its own room in the library at Penn State (The Arthur O. Lewis Utopia Collection), where it is inspiring the next generation of readers and writers.

I don’t know how I can honor other writers the way he did. However, I can quote them. I can continue to practice trying to be a writer of long lasting, and life impressing words. I can attempt to be part of that tradition started so long ago by the first writer who carved in stone, hoping to make a difference by recording words, the symbols that do their best to describe life.

One way we can all honor writers is by promoting their words. Today, it is easy to help, by first reviewing their books on Amazon, and other online book outlets. From there we have all kinds of social media that we can use to spread the words, and we can tell our friends all about the great books we read. In these ways we can all say, “What you do makes a difference to me” and isn’t that what we all desire – to make a difference.

Each of us adds to the wholeness of life, and whether we write the words, sing the words, speak words, or share words, we are expanding the view; so share please, in your own way and use your words!