Passions

Girl Reading, Pavel Shardakov (1957)

   I have been passionate about many things in my life. My interests have come and gone. Some, like Irish dancing and goats, were bubbles of my life that lasted a couple years, consumed me, and then burned low to a dying ember.
   There is one passion in my life that has pretty consistently followed me through various life changes. Reading. I read to live and live to read. For me, it's all one and the same. Without books, reading, stories, characters, places a plots--those things that permeate a readers life--I would not be the person I am today. Reading has contributed to the best parts of me. It has held me up in times when I though I truly couldn't go on. It has stabilized me during fits of singular passion when all else in my seemed to narrow and become one burning interest. Reading has taught me to be the human I am today.
   Which brings me to why I am so passionate, TODAY, about reading. I am a school librarian. I look around me at these children who are on the cusp of drinking in this big, awesome, sometimes horrible but ultimately incredible world. They are bombarded with so much more than children of my generation and the generations before me were. I know, I know. It's so cliche. "Children now are crippled by media, fast food, Hollywood, spiritual apathy." You can pretty much insert whatever is the popular outcry at the moment. And it's true. Children today are going to have to wade through a lot more debris then their predecessors did to become well-rounded, engaged human beings.
   But, I think there is something that can ease the process. Something that can bridge the gap between the upbringings and growing ups of yesterday and today. Something that, in the end, allows us all to join this collective dialogue of humanity. And that, I believe, is reading. Reading books, yes. But, more than that, just reading. Reading the newspaper, articles, journals, poetry, cookbooks, maps, letters, and on and on. Reading exercises our brain like no other activity. It is for the brain what yoga, running, walking, swimming and hiking are for the body. If we feed our children's brains with unrestricted reading material, I promise you, they will FLY. They will flourish as human beings. They will know how to access the world in an age when global understanding is so, so terribly important.
 

Girl Reading in a Chair, Hans Versfelt

I believe so strongly in literacy. No just passable literacy. Excellence in literacy. We need to teach our children to read and to read well. They need to know how to read for information and life skills but they also need to learn the skill of reading to join in the human dialogue.
   Reading children fairy tales and picture books, rich classics and template series all give them a wonderful literate world to fill their souls. Having reading material easily accessible is key as children grow older. In  this day and age, if you live in America, books are free for the taking. Book are everywhere. Little Free Libraries have exploded across the country into the thousands and public libraries are alive and thriving. Most towns have a bookstore with either used material or new. You don't have to buy anything. Just sit and read.
   As you get older, learn the art of reading "on the fly." Stash a book in your car, in your purse, on your iPhone, by the stove, next to the toilet, at your desk. All the places where you might find even 30 seconds to read a paragraph.

Reading in a Hammock, Peter Bezrukov

   I know this is nothing you haven't heard before. I just feel that it needs to be said again and again. We NEED to teach literacy. We need to give ourselves permission to use literature as an escape into another life and world. Because, in the end, we aren't escaping, we are only opening the doors to new worlds and growing in the understanding of the one we currently inhabit.