Book Are Companions
My favorite home objects
Yesterday, I met my friend for tea. We live just far enough apart that our get togethers require intentionality and we make it count. She brought me a haircare set I’d ordered from her friend, and I also asked her to bring back a book I loaned her because “part of my 14-year-old self lives inside and I miss her presence.”
It was a joke, but also true. It wasn’t a book I planned to read anytime soon—but books are the most prevalent objects that adorn my home and I actively look upon the spines and covers piled, placed, and stacked throughout. They make the space warmer and more vibrant, they provide portals for pondering and possibility.
In Slow Flow Studio this past month, we talked about books as oracles—because they are many things and a staple in my creative life.
Books Are Oracles
I welcome a healthy dose of magic when it comes to my creative practice. I don’t need certain conditions to fill my sketchbook, but I’m happy to create some that invite me in. In our “Welcoming Fall” session we drew a card to discover our intentions, find an offering. Very often, reading and responding in conversation offers some of this same magic for me. I always find what I need.
I don’t remember where I first heard about it, but I brought home a coffee table book called Sacred Spaces, and I’ve been cozied up with it off and on this weekend, savoring the words and beautiful photos.
EDDIE: When I need inspiration for gardening, I'll sit in there and look through the books— that's my sacred space as well.
CARLEY: I agree. I love looking through my design books, too. There's something so restorative about that quiet act that it feels sacred.
—Eddie Ross & Carley Summers, interviewed in Sacred Spaces
It’s the last day to take 20% off when you upgrade your subscription and join Slow Flow Studio. I’m preparing our studio explorations for winter’s approach when you upgrade to paid with Slow Flow Studio—we’ll hold space for our creative practice as we explore the concept of home, encountering our nearby world through walking, still lives, and the way we find and shape room for living an art-full life.
Books are knowledge, but the ones we choose to bring into our personal spaces are charged with so much more than that. I’m sure they outnumber anything else I have in my home, and they pepper every room.
Ross and Summers use the words restorative and sacred when it comes to their gardening and design books. I like the idea of coffee table books as genre—specific to space rather than subject. Books we’re meant to see and live with and encounter as we go about our days.
How often do you crack the spines of these bigger tomes—actually peruse the text that accompanies the images? Sacred Spaces is filled with interviews with the people whose homes Summer photographed, and it’s been a joy to dip in and out. It’s been a reminder to converse with these books that I often see but don’t always dip into as often as I could.
But even if my art and design and home and coffee table books are more often stacked, propped, or displayed they still have so much to offer as company, comfort, and curiosity.
They’ll often spark a thought or a question, and intermingle with something I might read on a blog, or listen to on a podcast. It continues the conversation that then finds its way into journals and sketchbooks, a smudgy synthesis that propels us forward.
On my drive home from visiting my friend, the book she returned sitting in the passenger’s seat next to me, I listened to the latest episode of Common Shapes, where Cody interviews Nic Antionette, who talks about “living a right-fit life.” This weekend, as simple as it’s been, has felt like a slice of my own right-fit life. Keeping the company of books and making marks and recording in my sketchbooks, my morning pages, bullet notes—and occasionally it all spilling out of the bound books onto loose paper or canvas.
Future Companions
I mentioned one of the books I brought home from the Crystal Bridges art museum shop, and here are a few more I’m hoping to welcome before too long (in case your coffee table or mantle or shelves need some artsy companions too):
Ruth Asawa: Through Line | A museum docent had a station with an Asawa-inspired activity, and she lit up talking about Asawa’s work .
Drawing in the Present Tense | I didn’t see this one at the museum but stumbled upon it recently. I’d like to study drawing more intentionally this year (not as a means to an end but the final offering). I did page through these two books and hope to grab copies:
The Artist’s Sketchbook: Inside the Creative Mind
The Art of Drawing: British Masters and Methods Since 1609
The Mushroom Color Atlas | The colors in this book were so enticing. I just didn’t have room in my suitcase to take these all home!
Warhol: The Textiles | I’ll devour patterns and textiles any day, and I enjoyed this selection of Warhol’s work.
Why is it so enjoyable just to scroll even a virtual list of books? I’m already happier to think of them.
Speaking of creative gifts (to yourself or a loved one), you can gift a subscription to Routine to Ritual’s Slow Flow Studio for 20% off today, and schedule it to deliver on the date of your choosing. You can also save 35% on art prints and classes on my website through December 8.
Click below to get started, and you can print off this gift tag to share it with your loved one.
To your delight,
Nikkita