Om

I just got into one of those arguments with my husband.  You know the ones.  The ones where you fight over the intonation or the word.  Just one word.  Yet the fight will take an hour it seems.  You've gone places you don't want to go and swore you would never go again just to prove your point (which is still right).  So for the last twenty minutes, my chest has still been in turmoil.  The storm is just raging inside.  Like after watching a particularly surprising and terrifying or uncomfortable scene in a movie.  It takes a little time for me to calm down.

But as I was perusing through my Google Reader, I came across this photo of a library in the woods.  /sigh.  Complete calm.  My "happy place" that I go to when I need to calm down is a forest.  A deep, dense forest alive with large, overgrown and untidy trees.  When that doesn't work, I go to books.  I escape into another world.  I recently was reading a book and came across this paragraph that felt so familiar, like it was my own skin.  "She threw herself into books, emulating each character she met.  She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week.  We think, in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us in to a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let."

So here, in this one photo, I have both the environmentally calming trees and the mind-numbing (or sometimes mind-raging) escape of books.  Complete. Serenity.

Bring it on, Mister.