Salutations, bibliophiles.
Today, I’m very excited to bring you
.Maddie writes
, where she seeks out goodness, truth and beauty in literature, art, and life. As I’m sure you’ll have guessed, if you like BTMU, you’ll love Maddie’s substack too.Here, Maddie shares with us the book that got her through the eerie time that was the covid pandemic. Enjoy!
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It was the Winter of 2020 when I got that email… School was closed. I was out of a job. I don’t have to explain what that felt like, because almost everyone reading this probably had a similar experience, whether it was a full-stop at work, or a massive transition to working from home. It was mind boggling to have the entire rat race of our world suddenly screech to a halt. All of the things that had seemed so important, all of the commitments that we couldn’t live without, simply faded away into a new status quo of cancellations and zoom calls.
When the constant droning of the workaday world suddenly came to a standstill, the silence (for many of us) was deafening. In it were the feelings and thoughts that we had not wanted to deal with. Work had been a conveniently busy place. As a substitute teacher in a town of 6,000 people, there was not much for me to do “from home” and nowhere for me to work outside the home, so I found myself staring down the long tunnel of empty days and alarming amounts of free time.
Now, this would usually be a dream come true to my introverted self. However, my husband and I were in an interesting place in life. Having been married two years, we had eagerly looked forward to that positive test every month since our wedding date. But, it never came. Looking back, I can see in hindsight that, by that time, I had been carrying a decent back-log of unresolved emotions for quite a while (grief, emptiness, and a general feeling of purposelessness). I knew that as soon as I didn’t have work to distract me, they would all come rushing up to the surface. And rush up they did.
To put it lightly, those were some hard and painful months. Stuck at home with nothing to distract me, I decided to face these feelings head on. I planned on pushing through them, or waiting them out, whatever needed to happen in order to get through them. What I didn’t plan on was running into the frightfully skinny, red-headed girl with stars in her eyes, who came skipping down the path one morning, on my daily walk. She traipsed along until she was right beside me, slipped her little hand into mine and led me out of those dark woods, into the sunlight.
I first met Anne (or re-met her) when I was browsing the shelves of the children’s section at the local library down the block. I didn’t realize then what a Godsend that little library would end up being for me. Lost and in need of something, anything, to read, I picked up the first book in the series: Anne of Green Gables.
I finished it in a week. And I went back for more. Within a month’s time I had gobbled up the entire series. I laughed. I cried. My heart broke all over again. But this was a different kind of breaking. They say (don’t ask me who “they” are, but whoever they are, they are pretty wise) that truly beautiful things break your heart, not in a way that harms or destroys you, but in a way that opens you up to receiving more of the goodness of life. I think sometimes our hearts need to be pierced by real beauty, so they can be opened.
To me, Anne was the representation of the rediscovery of beauty. That wonderful book opened my heart up again to the sheer goodness of the world around me. In my pain, I had closed myself off to it. But there was something about Anne’s unapologetic love for life that spoke to me in my darkness. She saw the beauty in the world that I had forgotten about. Seeing her open herself without reserve to all the world had to offer encouraged me to do the same. Suddenly, when I went on my morning walk, I was struck by the raw brilliance of the sunrise. I was enthralled with the whisper of the wind as it rushed past my face; The turning of the seasons captivated and soothed me. I made friends with the trees, collected wildflowers, and listened to the hum of the bees as they went about their daily work. As I sat watching the Autumn breeze play over the grass in the meadows, I couldn’t help but wonder how long it had been since I had really looked at the world around me. It was simply beautiful and I was so grateful to be a part of it. This realization rushed in upon me with a force far more powerful than any pain I was experiencing.
Anne taught me that beauty has the power to heal. It wasn’t that the beauty of the world somehow replaced or crowded out my pain. Rather, it mended it. Anne helped me see that in waiting for the single rose to bloom in the garden of my dreams, I had forgotten to admire the daisies. But as little Anne might tell you, a field full of unexpected wildflowers is arguably just as beautiful (if not more so) than that one, planned, glorious flower.
Now, I can’t give all the credit to Anne. I spent a lot of time in prayer and silence, working through things. But there was definitely something in that little book, something in the way that Anne saw the world, that woke my heart up again to the poignant joy of life. Along with that, came the unexpected awakening of desires that had been sleeping for so long I had almost forgotten them. I rediscovered stories that I used to love. I listened to podcasts and started baking again. I even wrote a book.
I can never thank Anne enough for what she did for me. But I can try to live out her philosophies each day, because I know now that my own heart (and the heart of the world) will be better for it. Mary Oliver once wrote that the world offers itself to our imaginations. What Anne helped me realize was that this offering is a gift, a gift that has the power to change us in profound ways, if only we open ourselves up to it.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers
itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese,
harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in
the family of things.
— The Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver
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Lucy Maud Montgomery was amazing to have created Anne wasn't she!? I actually never thought of the fact that everyone didn't grow up on those books. My experience reading the Anne of Green Gables books was around 11 or 12yrs old. Like you, I went through one book after another. Which is a good thing because in my later teens, I could mainly watch the movies due to health issues. What an inspiration her characters were and are today! Later some of the books would be lost in a house fire and those that weren't wouldn't have the ability to stay together any longer but I could never bring myself to throw them away. Due to that, I made some drawings and painted them on top of a collage that I created with the pages from my Anne books. That was a form of therapy in a way because I truly loved those books. That may seem odd to some, seeing as how they are just books but I could relate to the many trials Anne went through as I'm sure many others can. That was helpful while growing up and something that meant alot to me.
Lovely piece. I found a desperate need for my childhood books during the lockdowns too, as I suspect many of us did. For me that’s Little Women, Ballet Shoes and A Little Princess. They’re always with me inside when the going is hard but I felt an overwhelming, urgent need to read them all again. I need to revisit Anne sometime too.