I have a dream

Have you got a dream?  A dream that is so big you worry that you may never achieve it?

I have one.  It has been with me for quite some time now.  It stemmed out of my love of books, and especially book clubs.  Book clubs are way too thin on the ground for my liking.  I’m not talking about online book clubs, though they certainly have their place.  I’m talking about book clubs where people meet in person and get to talk and connect and laugh and cry and share.  Books, words really, have an amazing way of bringing people together.

The power of words to connect should never be underestimated”

Yes, about the dream.

My dream is to own a bookshop – a risky business in this world of online books and living in a country where hard copy books are incredibly expensive.  But I don’t care.  It’s my dream.

This bookshop will be unlike any other.  In it will, of course, be lots of books.  But it will also run book clubs, poetry evenings, author events.  It will run philosophy evenings where people can come and debate the meaning of life.  It will have a coffee shop, that brews amazing coffee, that encourages people to grab a book and just be, just for a while.  There will be a “donate-a-book” section so that people who cannot afford books will still have access to them, because who of us doesn’t have books in our shelves that we are simply never going to read again, and some we have never read at all.

Location will be key.  Think sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of life.  I’m thinking a couple of meditation evenings thrown in for good measure.

There will be big leather seats that envelope you as you settled down to read those words, and escape to a world that enthralls.  A roaring fireplace is a given for those wintery days and nights.

Is it too much to imagine a space for classes on calligraphy and letter art, permaculture, paper art, wordsmithing and more?  I think not.

I like to escape to this dream every now and again.  I imagine my shop, full of people, absorbing words.

I, of course, got the idea from a book.  A couple of years ago my husband bought me a sony ebook reader.  The first book I downloaded, whose name can you believe it eludes me right now, was about a woman who had divorced her husband and decided to move down to the coast.  There she meets a man (of course) who owns a second hand bookshop filled to the brim with books he had been collecting over the years.

I wasn’t so much interested in the love fest as I was about the book shop and the stories that it told of the other characters of the book.  It was a hub, a meeting place, where people came to belong.  And that is what I want, my own sense of belonging, and to give other people that sense of belonging too.

Of course, I have absolutely no idea how I am going to get this idea off the ground.  Apparently, it is a very risky business, this bookshop thing.  Nevermind.  I’ll keep working on it.  I have the name and the domain name, you know, just in case.

What are your dreams?  Make them as big as you possibly can, because, you know, you are SO worth it.

Much booky love,