I’m finally beginning to find my creative resting place within the new rhythm I have been seeking to establish this year, having intentionally moved from full-time to part-time ministry and relocating to my first ‘home’ in the South Island. Both movements are helping me establish a deeper sense of peace within and without in this latter and largely unexplored season of life and faith.

I’m a lover of ideas, words, concepts, images, new frames of thinking, and of having the space to exercise my imagination and be in the company of others who are doing likewise. As an introvert, there is nothing I enjoy and crave for more than getting lost in a book. I’m one of these people who read with a pencil nearby or scraps of paper within my grasp, so that I can put a tick alongside a particular paragraph, or underline a phrase, write a comment in the margin, to hold in my awareness for later reflection. Then into my journal go these various transcriptions, selected underlining’s, questions, thoughts, connections, imaginings, lest I forget the experience and insights gained of that moment in time, that living encounter with another’s thought and living story.

Last week my eyes caught the simple title of an article that arrived in my ‘inbox’ of mail from a source I regularly read, often putting it aside for more than the cursory glance. The title was Underlined Words by writer Stephanie Paulsell (Christian Century July 8, 2022).

She writes, “In Valerie Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive, the narrator tells us: ‘I don’t keep a journal. My journals are the things I underline in books.’” Paulsell, reading this sentence, underlined it; yes, as I did also, before going on to read what followed. Moving on, Paulsell noted that she did try to keep a journal, managing only intermittent entries – much like myself! For her, “underlining passages in books, though – I do that every day”.

She goes on to explain that, “a few years ago I began transcribing the underlined passages I most wanted to remember into a notebook. Medieval readers (monks, mostly) called passages like these ‘sparklets,’ bits of text so arresting that they seem to sparkle up from the page. Monastic readers transcribed these sparklets in collections called florilegia, a word that evokes flowers in a garden. Luiselli’s narrator describes the light such sparklets produce – the light that flickers in our brain when we come across words for something we have experienced but have never had the language to describe. Something we underline so we won’t forget.”

Now that I have transcribed the above underlined words into my journal, thus have engaged in this wonderfully illuminating act and art-form of florilegia, I will not forget. Truly, as Paulsell makes final comment, “the creation of florilegia, whether through underlining or transcribing, shows how fluid the boundary is between readers and writers. Transcribing other people’s sentences eventually creates a new text, words set down next to other words in a new order.”

How wondrous is that?