Birdsong and Sunrise

Eleanor Jane was a bookworm by nature, from childhood, faced with the blessing and burden that pushed boundaries and expanded up and out, away and beyond the circumspect mold she saw around her. It wasn’t just her intelligence or empathy, her ability to observe and problem solve, that one day constructed the ladder leading her out, though. It was the instinct to survive.

Eleanor moved quickly through the halls, floating from aisle to aisle. Flipping light switches. Sweeping dust bunnies and clearing cob webs as she went. Making way for the sunlight cascading through the tall stained glass windows. Windows so beautiful, one could only imagine the worlds held within the images portrayed.

Everything had to be just so. A morning rhythm, a meditation. A prayer, really. Although, to whom or what, she didn’t really know. All Eleanor did know was this place was her shield. The only place quiet enough to allow her mind to rest, her heart to slow, and the knowing to be heard. She had found her home among the grand stacks of the library and knew it best to stay and seek refuge.

The knowing, as best she could describe it, started as a deep empathy as far as she could remember. But in late childhood, she noticed a shift. At first, she simply felt a connection with people’s pain and joy, their sadness and hope, even exhalation. It wasn’t voices that she heard, and she couldn’t read people’s thoughts. It was different than that, a full-body experience of the beings surrounding her. She didn’t hear them, she knew them. All of them.

She’d sought no one’s opinion on the matter, just that of the authors who wrote books on similar reported occurrences. And, in doing so, the library became the one place where she could quiet her soul.