4/30/17 RMB Tarzan

4/30/17 RMB Tarzan

Dear Rita Mae Brown,

Today is the last day of April. It seems important to mark the passing of time, endings and beginnings in particular.

I am reading Hotspur, your second book in the Jane Arnold fox hunting series. I’m also enjoying errands here and there listening to As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes on CD in my car. By my night stand is Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman.

This morning I watched the latest version of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan come to life in the film The Legend of Tarzan staring Alexander Skarsgard.  

What is all this leading to? The puzzle of it all, words, books, why we write and the stories we tell.

We can live vicariously through characters, experiencing far more than each of us will in our own lives. Conversely, words can energize us to reach further than we might have risked on our own, or provide us the knowledge to do so.  

Our match can be found in words of others, the one that mirrors what we are on the outside and the one that mirrors our insides. In discovering each other, through the imagination of our authors, or their research, we discover a bit more about ourselves, our world, and all of the possibilities breathing there.

This is a how we learn and absorb our universe, by watching the rising sun, the faces we pass, and the words we devour. We are a curious lot. Our duffle bag full of inherited traits, adjusted by what has been learned, provides us everything we possess to charter our course.  

It is all an illusion, though, what we see and how we interpret it are vastly different from what another sees and the effects on that person’s life. One may face eminent danger and another reads about “those people over there” (the very ones facing danger), their worlds being worlds apart.

And, whether fiction or fact, there is this tug, internal and everlasting, connecting one being to the other. Our heart goes out to Tarzan as he rescues Jane. Our awareness expands as the scientists uncovering fossils from ancient times re-write history.

And I am convinced that words will ultimately act as the bridge from here to there, one book at a time, connecting us to our past, future, and each other, our saving grace. Words feed the depths of our hunger.

Sincerely,

Loraine