Each year, I travel across the country to the Grünewald Guild, a wondrous retreat center and art-and-faith community in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. For some years I taught a class there called Soul of the Book, in which folks created books that evoked something of the sacred text of their own lives.

I don’t always make something when I’m in the midst of teaching a class, but one year, I began to create a wee book as the week unfolded. Envelopes from our cups of tea became its pages; its text, words that emerged in our conversations around the table, scribbled down on scraps of paper and tucked into the envelopes.

Tonight I open the tea-book again, leaf through its pages, pull out the sacred scraps of text that I gathered at that shared table.

As I settle into time and space and art,
there’s part of me that’s feeling rescued
said one class member as she fashioned her book.

I’m really on a binge about being happy
said an eightysomething woman who also told us,
I’m going to make my mistakes into a masterpiece
and who asked us one day,
What do you see when you close your eyes?

Books are my parallel life.

Watching the silt settle until clarity comes around.

If someone were to say something nice about me,
I would hope it would be, “She lived in the mystery.”

If you were to create a book made from the ordinary objects of your everyday life, what would it look like? If you were to compose its text from the conversations you share in, what words would appear on its pages?