The State of My Brain

The State of My Brain

(“The Lord makes our human spirit like his lamp inside us. It shows us what we are really like.” Proverbs 20:27)

I’ve got enough time to read a chapter or two,
to turn on the overhead lamp and see what the words say.
I’ve been reading from the day I knew that one word and
another
could take me to world without moving a muscle.
A man down the street asked me what kind of books
I liked the best. I was eight or nine and I said “adventure”
though I wasn’t entirely clear what the word meant. He gave
me two books, one about the thirteen original colonies and
I don’t remember the other one. Maybe a Hardy Boys mystery.
I made weekly trips to the library; its front steps were marble.
Sometimes I walked since it was only six blocks from home.
I would take a volume of an encyclopedia and start reading articles
in alphabetical order. I wondered who wrote all this candid information
and how they knew so much stuff.

Reading captured me as a teen. I read all of Shakespeare in one summer and most
of John Steinbeck. The next summer it was Ray Bradbury along with the
poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Rod McKuen got an occasional look.

I read early twenty century playwrights and imagined their words in
my mouth.

Ten years later I was a newly formed follower and read books on
prayer and spiritual gifts and how to manage your emotions by concentrating
on Christ. Truth? I found myself falling woefully behind.
There was a method to pray an hour a day. I managed 15 minutes.
There was a way to speak in tongues, and I mumbled them well. I
never got my mind swept clean from thoughts that invaded constantly.

Today I read memoirs and liberal theology. Today I quiet my mind
with music before I read. Today I talk slower and less certain.
Today I am not sure of my purpose, but I do not shame myself
for the state of my brain.