Comfort book

I know many people who have comfort foods-- I guess I do too-- but yesterday i discovered (again) that that isn't where I really find comfort. And I found a comfort book. It's a book I have read cover-to-cover once and read snippets of many times. I realized that, whenever i am reall tired or stressed, and i reach out to my bookshelf (filled, BTW, with many books I really want to read and have been meaning to for months), I always end up sitting down with "The Treehouse" by Naomi Wolf. I don't get to the new books, or the books that are still unread but have gotten old sitting on my shelf, but i always come away feeling comforted and at peace... which, i guess, is the reason i reach for that bookshelf anyway.

So, why "The Treehouse"? Is it a brilliant book? I'm not sure... i guess that depends on what you bring to it. The writing isn't flashy, but simple. It's basically a collection of essays about the author's father-- a very interesting man, it seems!-- and about the lessons he taught her. Because he was a poet and a teacher, poetry-- in the broadest sense of the term, poetry not just in the context of writing poems but poetry as an attitude towards life-- is the theme of the whole book. In the author's words he was the kind of man "who spent much of his life convincing othersiwe sensible people to quite their comfortable jobs and follow their heart's passions." the other structure in the book is the process of building a treehouse (in case you are wondering where the name came from)... the author and her now 80-something father are building a treehouse for her daughter at their house in the countryside. It is in the process of building this trehouse that he teaches her all these lessons about poetry that she, as a rebellious daughter and a professor herself, had long resisted.

The chapters of the book are organized by the lessons he taught his creative writing students, and the first one, the most important one, is probably a large part of why i reach for this book in times of stress. The lesson is: Be still, and listen. So simple, so profound. When and how and why did we lose that simple ability to be still and listen? Listen not just to noise around us, but listen to silence. So much of my life is a clamor of so many different noises, and I have to consciously find time, early in the morning before anyone wakes up, just to catch those few quiet moments with myself. But because that first lesson is the undertone for much of the book's attitude-- towards the poet, towards life-- this book always manages to calm my frazzled nerves and help me take a deep breath.

What about you? Do you have a comfort book? Leave me a comment telling me which it is and why!