It's getting dark

Learning to Walk in the Dark ~ by Barbara Brown Taylor, 2014, spirituality

"Come inside now, it's getting dark."  That is my mother speaking, saying the same thing she said every night when she looked out the kitchen window and saw that the sun was going down.  It did not matter whether the window was in Kansas, Ohio, Alabama, or Georgia.  Dark was dark, and she wanted her children inside.  It must have cost her a lot to call us, since it meant that the quiet house would soon be filled with the noise of three small, loud girls, but she did it anyway.  She loved us enough to let us play outside until the cicadas cranked up and bats started swooping through the sky; then she loved us enough to call us inside so that nothing bad would happen to us in the dark.

That's one look at a beginning in this book, the beginning of the Introduction.  Here's the beginning of the first chapter.  One a view of childhood, the other a view of her life as an adult.

It is late August.  I am lying in my yard on a blow-up mattress waiting for Friday to become Friday night, which is how I know people are wrong when they say, "It's as clear as the difference between night and day."  That might be true at noon or midnight, but here at the liquid edge between day and night, the difference is so unclear that there are many words for it:  sundown, twilight, nightfall, dusk.

On September 26, 2013, less than a year ago, my friend Donna and I drove from Chattanooga to Atlanta to hear Barbara Brown Taylor's lecture at Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church on the edge of the campus at Emory University.  She talked about this book, coming out a few weeks later.  I've been in the process of moving this year, so I'm only just now getting around to reading it.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays.  Click here for today's Mister Linky.