Wednesdays with Words: The Living Page by Laurie Bestvater

Mason had shown me that the notebooks can be forms of vitality, literally the shape and outline, the liturgy of the attentive life. {p. xv}

The Living Page by Laurie Bestvater

So, as Mason says of herself overall, she was not an innovator in this regard either. The Keepers who were scholars, the movers and the shakers in science, the arts, and exploration on whom she called regularly in her classroom, she knew enough to imitate. To that extent, Mason comes to the art of keeping notebooks naturally, not in a vacuum but within the context of the Western notion of Liberal Arts which fairly demands some of these academic disciplines. {p. 10}

If Mason is unique at all, it is in her simple but profound insistence that we regard the child a born person…I am proposing that it is with the forms of vitality that Mason makes an appeal even more explicit and revolutionary. {p. 13}

This book? This is giving me a lot to think about. I received a free review copy from Laurie, and I’ll be writing more about it. That link over there? It’s an affiliate link. If you are interested in Miss Mason’s “forms of vitality,” as Laurie puts it {isn’t that a beautiful phrase?}, you’ll want to get your hands on a copy.

Did I mention I’m in love with this book? Because I am. Now, if only I were better at keeping track of notebooks. As I told some friends yesterday, I’m more like Einstein, keeping shredded notes and bits of scribbled napkin in my pockets, than someone with a beautiful notebook worth bragging about, but I still see the benefit of writing down thoughts or quotes or whatever. I love the idea of a row of beautiful notebooks to call my own, but I know that my personal reality is always three notebooks, containing who knows what {health notes, sermon notes, random quotes, and more} scattered all over the place, and I just pick up the one I can find. Sigh.