Dear Friend,

Our Lenten Adult Spiritual Growth class this year has focused on paying attention, on how we notice the Good News in the world so that we can ground ourselves in it. I’ve been thinking about that this week in terms of what gets tucked away; not hidden, exactly, just set aside. A receipt used as a bookmark, a photograph slipped between pages, a to-do list on the back of an envelope. The things of everyday life that don’t disappear so much as wait.

There’s a film below that catalogs these kinds of objects; specifically, the things library patrons leave in books that they return. The traces of their lives that traveled briefly with a story only to surface somewhere unexpected. I find it quietly delightful, not because the objects themselves are particularly remarkable, but because they are so very ordinary, and because someone bothered to notice them. (Though it does make me want to leave little lovely notes in library books for other people to find.)

I think that might be the whole thing, really, noticing. Paying attention to what you’ve been carrying without quite realizing it, being willing to look at it when it turns up. Being curious about what it might have to say to you. Maria Popova, who writes The Marginalian, spent thirty days doing something like that deliberately: pulling random books from her Little Free Library, picking up small things on her walks, and trusting that what emerged would tell her something she already knew but hadn’t yet named.

And then there’s the song. Which is about something similar, and a great deal harder.

With gratitude,
Pastor Sarah

Little Free Library Divinations: Searching for the Meaning of Life in Discarded Books and Found Objects

by Maria Popova

During a particularly hard season, Maria Popova gave herself a daily practice: pull a random book from the Little Free Library in front of her Brooklyn home, take a walk and pick up something small, photograph it under a microscope, and let words from a random page and the object she found spark something new. She did this for thirty days. The results are strange and lovely, and the practice itself is the kind of thing that makes you want to try it, or at least to pay closer attention to what you happen to find today:

“The words invariably arranged themselves unconsciously into the day’s… divination? koan? poem?… that always surprised me, always revealed what I myself needed to hear that some part of me already knew.”

Read the full article here.

Sara Bareilles debuts ‘Home,’ a new song about grief inspired by Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert

Anderson Cooper & Sara Bareilles

I’ve linked to a particular moment in a longer interview between Anderson Cooper and Sara Bareilles, in which they listen together to Sara’s new song, Home, which was inspired by a conversation between Anderson Copper and Stephen Colbert about grief (both men lost their fathers when they were ten years old). (You might remember that I shared that interview back in 2022.) The whole video is worth watching, but it should start just as Anderson and Sara are introducing the song. You can scroll back about two minutes to listen to a clip of the interview that inspired it and/or keep listening after the song plays to Anderson and Sara’s ongoing conversation about the song and grief. Or, you can just listen to the lovely song.

An Ongoing List of Things Found in the Library Book Drop, Usually Being Used as Bookmarks

Kayla Abuda Galang

Library worker Daniel catalogs an assortment of forgotten objects left in returned books. Based on the poem by Sam Treviño.

Mindful