Just wanted to share some thoughts I had this morning.

As a psychology major and aspiring therapist, I am realizing how important all forms of literature are for my chosen path.

The psychologist must study literature. Books… poetry, fiction, nonfiction, so on… what could provide better glimpses into the human mind?

Literature is the exploration of the human spirit in all of its heights and depths. The true spirit of the psychologist, who is an adventurer and cartographer of such realms, must, then, recognize the profundity of literature —

Indispensable.

For me, it is to learn that it is okay to feel what I feel. That others have felt it too, that others have felt even deeper than I have, and to be taken on a journey to depths that others have explored long before me.

As without, so within. Might literature provide me a treasure map of my own psyche?

And, if a psychologist truly is a “cartographer” of the human mind, spirit, heart, and all of their depths, then I am led to think that, perhaps, the author and the psychologist are not so different —

What is a piece of literature but just that? What is the act of writing but the mapping out of one’s heart and soul?

Some modern psychologists, however, might seek to reduce the incomprehensible grandeur of the inward workings of the human soul into easy-to-understand bites — pathologizing, at times, its grandiosity.

I have come to learn that there is a reason why mystics speak in metaphor, and in parable. There is a reason why the Oracle speaks in riddles that you are forced to chew upon from several different angles for weeks and weeks on end — sometimes a lifetime.

I have also come to realize that our authors and writers of “fiction” are our modern mystics. They are our shamans, they are our heroic explorers who foray bravely into the greatest, most final and unknown frontier of all: our hearts.

The author is privileged enough to partake fully in that most beautiful mystery — our spirits — and come to tell of what they learned, speaking in riddle, metaphor, and parable, somehow, magically, mystically, triumphantly translating and condensing it all into some pages… what a gift!

Our “old souls” are our readers, every page another lap around the Sun, each and every novel another lifetime under their belt.

No. God isn’t dead.

She’s hiding in your pen, longing for you to bring her to life.

She waiting for you in the nearest library, waiting for you to grab her from the shelf, aching for you to lovingly caress her with your eyes as you open that book, that doorway into your own mind, as she lets you know she existed dormant, within your heart, all along.

Yes, it has been said that the mystic swims in the very same waters in which the psychotic drowns. Can not the very same thing be said about the artist, about the author, or about the creative visionary? That hero or heroine who condenses those waters, colors them into ink, and transfuses pages with it?