When We Read: Michael Valliant

When We Read

by Michael Valliant

You pick up a magazine on the Eastern Shore and flip through it, hoping to learn something. Maybe you want to figure out where to eat, or you love the area and are curious about living here. Maybe you grab the new Tidewater Times every month as soon as it comes out and you think of the writers as friends. Any which way, when you sit down to read, you want to take something with you, something you can use, something you remember.

This is what we do when we read. If you’re like me, your expectations change depending on what you pick up. When I sit down on the back deck with Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, I want to be transported in both time and place in order to share the universal experience of a small-town summer with an everytown cast of characters. And I become this:

"Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people in the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. And when you’re all to yourself that way, you’re really proud of yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.”

Tidewater Times

June 2022

When I read fiction, I want to go to a world I don’t live in to learn more about the world I do live in. I want to experience people, places, events and emotions that are born out of someone’s creativity, to inspire my own as well as to connect with someone I have never met and probably won’t.

If I meet someone who loves the same novel I do, we’ve begun a real friendship based on a fantastic (as in fantasy) experience. Reading fiction can be as important and integral to our lives as learning science or math, in terms of how we live our lives and how we relate to others.

As people, we can be a disappointing lot. There are times when I have no desire to be around almost any people in the world. People are what get in the way of being able to love humanity. And then I can read something like this from George Saunders:

“Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else, disrupting the delusion that we’re permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we’re saved!) other people are real again, and we’re fond of them.”

When I read, I reboot, refocus, re-center and I find I like people

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again and can go back into the fray.

I’ve got 20-plus years of experience as a parent. And I still don’t have a clue what I am doing. Mostly I show up and keep showing up. And there are things about being a parent that teach me something about the need to let go, that go far beyond talking about children or teenagers ~ that stretch out to anyone or anything we care deeply about.

Poet Maggie Smith interviewed Mary Laura Philpott about Philpott’s book of essays, Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives. Smith writes:

“Bomb Shelter asks ~ and attempts to answer ~ questions we all ask ourselves: How do we cope with the unexpected? How do we feel secure when so much is unknown? How do we find the hope and courage to keep building our lives when the ground seems to be

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When We Read And, to put things in perspective, she writes: shifting beneath us?” “If I can scrape up some evi-

And I pick up Bomb Shelter and dence of a thing made beautifully Philpott writes about her son hav- or a gesture made kindly, then I ing his first seizure and visits to can believe, for a few seconds, that neurologists and diagnoses and this world is careful and kind. And being scared as a parent, and as a if I can believe that, I can believe father of a daughter with epilepsy, it is safe to let people I love walk I know those feelings and my heart around out there. It’s my own atbreaks for her son and her family. tempt at foresparkling (as opposed And, at the same time, I am com- to foreshadowing), seeking out forted by the solidarity of a writer hints of good, even planting them sharing what it is like as a parent myself, so I can believe there’s to go through something I know too more good to come.” well. When I read essays like Phil-

Philpott writes about the need pott’s, I want to foresparkle, to look to look for simple joys, gratitude for the hints of good to come. And I and hope, and the need to applaud find another human being, another these things when we find them. parent, trying to make sense of car-

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ing for and walking through things we don’t fully understand or know how to deal with.

Over the past six years, I have spent a lot of time reading Scripture. When you study the Bible, you quickly learn it is really a library full of many kinds of writing, containing stories and speeches, history and poetry, that reach back over thousands of years. It’s not really a book in the sense that we think of books. The Bible is written for our learning, for our growth, and for us to wrestle with. It asks us questions, the first of which, in Genesis, is “Where are you?”

Trappist monk Thomas Keating continues, “‘Where are you?’” God’s question to us never changes. In some cases, life has been so tragic that we are not free to decide where we are. But the power of divine grace, especially as it is experienced in contemplative prayer, opens us to the unconscious and introduces us to a world of unlimited possibilities that are unknown to us now.”

When I read the Bible, I ask my-

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self where I am, and where I am in relation to God.

I can’t imagine my life without reading. It’s one of the things that brings me joy, wonder, questions, laughter, tears, connection, compassion and creativity.

When we pick up and read a book, or a newspaper, or a magazine, we are both where we are sitting or standing, and we are somewhere else completely. As you hold this issue of Tidewater Times in your hands now, or you read it online, you hold stories, reflections, memories and questions of the various writers. You have photographs and art and advertisements that can fill your mind in so many ways.

When we read, we go places. Where do you want to go?

Michael Valliant is the Assistant for Adult Education and Newcomers Ministry at Christ Church Easton. He has worked for non-profi t organizations throughout Talbot County, including the Oxford Community Center, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum and Academy Art Museum.

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