Everything is a book

Today's realization:

Everything is a book.

Okay, maybe not literally.  Conventional books are made of paper and ink and thread and glue.  Ebooks are made of electronic bits and bytes.  And clearly not everything is made up of paper, ink, thread, glue, bits or bytes.

But figuratively, in the land of symbolism and imagination, yeah, everything is a book.

And what is a book?

It's a container.

A container in which  we store ideas and innovation, history and change.  We use words to look forward and backward and to stare, rather confused, at the present.

Great.  So books are containers.

So is a really great burrito.  A burrito is a container for culture, for flavor, for sustenance, for comfort and sometimes for companionship, if enjoyed with others.

Like a book.

So is a cat.  A cat is a container for its physical bits, for the scientific stuff that makes up a cat.  But a cat is also a container for poetic inspiration, for the evolutionary history of its species.  A container for affection and tactile enjoyment and comfort.

Like a book.

So are people.

 I realized that everything was a book just today.

My nephew posted an old photo of himself on Facebook, from when he was in his late teens, maybe early twenties.

I was flipping through some of the old photos he had posted, of long gone pets and such, and came upon this particular photograph.

At first glance I thought it was my 17 year old son.

And I realized that people are books.

I saw that picture of my nephew, and the pages flipped forward to the pages of my son's face.  I flipped the pages back further, towards the beginning, back to my nephew's face, to his mother's and father's faces.   The words and sentences may have  changed as the pages were flipped, but the tale those pages told carried through.  A quirk of an eyebrow, the angle of a jaw.  All of it written there for the reading.

Like words.  Related, connected, each built upon he words before them.

The beautiful thing about words and  books, is that  there are no boundaries about how they can be combined.   Each new combination creates a marvelous new story.

Just like people.

And as with  people, there are always those who try to tell us what books to read and not read.  Those who  hold their black markers over the words, censoring ideas with which they disagree.  Those who strike the match to burn the piles of books they deem  dangerous.

And yet there are always some books that escape the censoring pen and the flames.

Why?

Because all stories deserve to be told.  All books deserve to exist.

Someday the books called "humans" might actually realize this.

Until next time.