Consumate page bender…
Yes, I will confess I am a consumate page bender. I love to bend the
pages of books to mark my place. I’m sure that somewhere in the world,
a librarian is turning uneasily in her sleep as these words are typed
out onto my screen. Not only do I bend the top corners of the page I’m
on as a bookmark–but I also bend the bottom corners of pages that have
something particularily powerful on them or something that I connect to on some level. I can go back to a book I
read, flip along the bottom pages and find quotes and passages that
caught my attention–which is how I have started to do my quotes blog. We’re reading Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth
in my Mythology class, as well as watching a good number of the
interviews with him that make up the Power of Myth. I had read a good
deal of his works before the class, but this past Tuesday was an
interesting interview. Joseph Campbell has a sortof catch phrase he
coined…”follow your bliss.” He said about this idea:
I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great
spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent
the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat,
Chit, Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness.
“Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my
consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what
I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my
rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both
my consciousness and my being. (p. 149)
To that end, Campbell further on notes that while in the past, the
entire earth was a sacred place to the people who lived on it, now in
the busy chaos of today’s world it is important for each person to find
a sacred place to simply be. He writes:
is a place [or time] where you can simply experience and bring forth
what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative
incubation. (115)
Standing at my bookshelf looking through my books and flicking along
the bottom pages searching for tonight’s quote–I realized that this
was my sacred place. Sitting with my laptop when the rest of the house
is dark, quiet–sleeping–skimming through books and typing up
thoughts. This is where it is for me.
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