No. 31

August 19, 2024

I was cleaning my work space this morning- going through books, sheet music, and misc. items to filter out what to give away and create more openness. I get into this mood once in a while usually after a busy period. Frankly- I can’t think straight, or feel anything, when there are too many things lying around. And we all know how things just pile up on its own over time.

When I was sorting through my desk I noticed that Invenias No. 31 had been sitting around on my desk for months. When I try to put it away in the box on my shelf I noticed some of my favorite books on the shelf. A minute later I found myself on the floor reading page 185 of Colin McPhee’s “A House in Bali”, a page I randomly flipped to. Right as I was doing that -- an idea came into mind, which was that reading can be like travel, and that books can take you to places! It made me take No. 31 back out of the box, silently acknowledging that a strange connection had just occurred. Right then and there, I decided to complete the project by recording myself reading pages of these books.

After I recorded “A House in Bali”, I grabbed Gabriel García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera”, flips to page 185 … and even I couldn’t believe it when it happened, but a dry ginkgo leaf fell out of the book! I will not know the significance of 185 or ginkgo leaf for some time, but that was definitely not a coincidence (Today is also the day of the super blue moon by the way). The third book I visited was Ryszard Kapuściński’s “The Soccer War”, an old favorite.