The Secret Room and the Unread Book: Listening Into Peace That Is Not Certainty

Fellow Seekers-

I have been dreaming of a secret room in my house.

To get there, you must pass through the kitchen, then through another bedroom — a room within a room, a threshold layered over a threshold. When I arrive, many of my things lay in dust or covered in sheets. Something about this doesn't feel sad, exactly. It feels honest. Here is what has been set aside. Here is what has been waiting.

Down the hall, there is a gathering. I can hear it — the muffled warmth of voices, something communal and alive. I am not there. I am in the back room, among the covered things.

On the table, a small paperback book. I know it instantly, the way you know a face you haven't seen in years. The Haunted Pool by George Sand. It has lived on my shelf in the waking world for a long while. I have moved it, dusted around it, caught its spine out of the corner of my eye and thought: one day.

In the dream, I pick it up. And then — I am so strong, so certain in this place between worlds — I tear it in half. Then in quarters. I watch the pages leave my hands and drift to the messy floor. The whole room dissolves into a blue-grey mist, the color of early morning fog over still water.

I wake to news: no school today. An out-of-state threat. E-learning. Safety.

I set both kids off on their tasks, moving through the motions of the morning while something in my chest tries not to spiral. The words out-of-state threat circle in the back of my mind like a bird looking for a branch. The world is crumbling in ways I cannot stop, and my children are here, in this house, learning on screens instead of in the world, because the world is deemed unsafe for in person today.

Once the house finds its quiet lull of concentration — keyboards clicking, the distant sound of a video lesson — I reach for George Sand.

I have still not read it. That hasn't changed.

But I open it anyway.

There is a particular kind of joy that lives in an unread book you love. It is not the joy of story, not yet. It is something more like potentiality — the sense of a door still unopened, a world that exists fully formed somewhere just beyond the page. I flip through slowly: a few French verses, translated tenderly into English. Illustrations of rural farm life, simple and earnest. Flowers and leaves surrounding the title. I read the reviews on the back, the small eulogies that strangers wrote for a book they loved.

I trace the ISBN number on the back with my finger, and I think of my mom — the librarian's assistant — and the particular reverence she brought to books as physical objects, as things that mattered beyond their contents.

And then I bring the book to my face and inhale.

This book is a used copy, once held by a public library. That scent — old paper, something mineral and warm, the ghost of decades of hands — lands in my body vertically, like a plumb line dropping from my nose straight down through my solar plexus. Grounding. Orienting. A moment of calm connection that doesn't ask me to explain itself.

I have been thinking about peace.

Not peace as an absence, not the ceasefire version, or sense of safety, the grey-blue room version. I mean the kind that shows up in the middle of the mess. The kind that doesn't require the mess to stop first.

Peace is not certainty. I know this now more than I have ever known it. The world does not have to be resolved for a moment of it to arrive — through scent, through the soft arc of a page, through the memory of a mother who loved books, through a dream where I was strong enough to tear something apart.

Is peace even a state of being? The word makes it sound so singular, so arrived-at. But what I feel holding this book is not a destination. It is more like a thread running through — present even in the tangled places, discoverable even in the back room where things have been covered in dust and sheets, waiting.

There must be peace available in chaos and trauma. There must be. How else could I be standing here, in my living room while my children learn on screens and the news churns out its daily unbearable weather, smelling the crisp pages of a story I have never read — and feeling, briefly but truly, held?

The dream stays with me. The tearing. The blue-grey mist.

I wonder if the back room is not a failure but an invitation — all those covered things, waiting not to be abandoned but to be returned to, in a different season, with different hands. I wonder if "one day" is not avoidance but a form of faith: the book will be there. I will be there. We will find each other when the time is right.

I wonder if peace is something we don't achieve so much as locate — again and again, in small and unexpected places. A scent. A threshold. A dream where we are strong enough to let something go.

George Sand wrote The Haunted Pool in 1846, a pastoral novel about rural France, about love growing from the Earth. I will read it someday. Maybe soon. Maybe in next winter, the world might be quieter.

For now, I set it back on the shelf. I know where it lives.

What unread thing is waiting for you on the back shelf of your own life? What covered thing, what gathering you can hear but haven't yet walked toward? What scent or texture, right in front of you, might be the peace that doesn't require certainty?

Stay wild and true,
Emily

Disclaimer:

**Climate aware work is challenging. If you feel like you need more support please text the crisis line at 741741.

The purpose of this information is for educational purposes only. Always seek the advice of your own Medical Provider and/or Mental Health Provider regarding any questions or concerns you have about your specific health. As always, please use common sense.

Services provided by Emily Grendahl Risinger and Still Wild Healing LLC are for educational purposes only. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classifies herbs as dietary supplements/food products, not medicines. Consult your healthcare provider before using any herbal supplements, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, have a medical condition, or take medications.