When it comes to books, I'm a reader, not a listener. But I recently spent about nine hours listening to Emma Lou Thayne's autobiography; mainly because that's the only way you can get it.
If you want to know what's in this little unsung gem, you have to let her read it to you word by word.
And given the author — and how much she values connections — that seems perfectly appropriate.
Thayne calls her book "The Place of Knowing: A Spiritual Autobiography" (it's available on Amazon.com). And over the past decade I've seen fragments and segments of it from time to time. A couple of years ago, she finally stitched it all together. It is like a quilt, with blocks of personal history, meditations, quotations, dreams and poetry sewn together.
Sometimes it takes a poet to not only teach us about the realm of the Spirit but to let us actually experience the place. David's Psalms do that. As do several verses from Eliza R. Snow. Now we have Thayne's contribution.
And as the consensus Matron of Mormon Poetry, she's just the right soul to give us a glimpse of the mystic unity behind our fractured impressions of the world.
Of course, the notion of a Mormon mystic sounds contradictory. It's a classic oxymoron — like "freezer burn" or "jumbo shrimp." LDS people are more known for being literal and practical. They are doers, not meditators. But if, as Mormons believe, all truth holds together as one whole and all light has but one source, there is no reason a perceptive and gifted LDS writer couldn't tap into the taproot of it all.
Thayne traces her own mystical insights to the other-worldly experiences she went through following a horrendous automobile accident. She tells how events before the accident — deaths, births, hearing Helen Keller speak — all hinted at some form of transcendence. Then she shows how events afterward — family projects, writing retreats — became occasions for teaching and telling about what she calls "the flame," "mercy alive" and other poetic images.
The writer Eudora Welty once said that our lives, like a good novel, move from revelation to revelation. That is apparently how Thayne's life — and her autobiography — move.
I realize that in an era when people tear around without a minute to spare — quite literally — that asking someone to sit and listen for nine hours is asking a lot. But that, it seems to me, is exactly Thayne's point.
To find true fulfillment, we must eventually move beyond "busyness" as usual.
We must find pockets of solitude and sanctuary in the world and in ourselves — places, as Emily Dickinson says, "where the meanings are."
In fact, I half suspect it will be some time before the author sees this column. June is usually her month to retreat to her cabin in the canyon and get reacquainted with herself.
If what emerges from her current sojourn is as vital — and necessary — as "The Place of Knowing," it will have been a month very well spent.
Jerry Johnston is a Deseret News staff writer. "New Harmony" appears weekly in Mormon Times.
e-mail: jerjohn@desnews.com