Hello, my friends! It’s time for another quarterly print drop.
For those of you just joining the Substack, I release a very small series of prints once per quarter. I started doing these prints as a perk for my founding tier subscribers (who support me at $90/annually). When you subscribe at this level, you get one of these designs free in the mail each quarter. I always have extras once my subscribers have had their pick, and I sell those in the shop.
I have lots of fun doing quarterly prints—they stretch my artistic abilities, I get to know so many of you who buy my work, and I get to send little personalized love notes in the mail. It’s really delightful, but I only have the energy to do it 4x a year.
So, if you’ve been wanting a little Haunted Librarian art in your life, you can buy prints at 11:00 AM (MST) on August 22. I’ve drawn three designs, and I’ll release them here first before I make them available to the public. (Paid subscribers from $5 and above will get even earlier access, so if you’re a paid subscriber, keep an eye on your inbox for the link! I’ll announce the exact date soon.)
The prints are really high quality, too—they come signed and numbered by me, and are giclee printed on hand-torn archival quality paper.
Now, for the story behind this first piece. It’s called “First Vision,” and it’s a tribute to one of the many stories I was told as a child.
Before now, I spent the better part of my life as a religious believer. I had plenty of questions and doubts, but I kept them tucked in my pocket as I went about trying my best to do what I thought God wanted me to do. At some point I began tugging at all the loose threads that held my faith together, and as I moved into adulthood, they came undone.
I began to realize: if there is some sort of answer to the universe, part of the answer lies in not knowing what it is.
When my husband was a boy, his parents loaded them all in the car to drive somewhere. “It’s a surprise,” they said, “but not a good surprise.”
They took them to get flu shots.
Maybe this life is something like that—we’re going somewhere. It’s definitely a surprise. It’s occasionally a painful surprise, but I like to think that it’ll be better in the end, having gone along with it.
These days I move through the world with even more questions and more possibilities than when I started. I still love stories about folks who try to reach God, who are inching ever nearer towards the heavens—whatever those things mean, in whatever ways.
There’s one story I’m sad to have left behind—a story that I thought of again and again as I drew this piece.
Here’s the story:
Once, a 14-year-old boy wanted to be closer to God. He searched out many different religions, listened to many preachers of many different faiths. They all claimed divinity, but they preached different things, held different services, collected different tithes, and practiced different rules. Overcome with confusion, the boy went into the woods and prayed, asking God which religion was true. The boy was no authority in spiritual things—he was no prophet, no priest, no rabbi or monk. He was just a boy, and in the story, God appeared to him in the trees. God told the boy that none of them--not a single religion on earth—was God’s one, true church, and he should join none of them.
The story goes on—the boy grew up and created yet another religion, with more priests and tithes and churches, just like the others. I know this is how the story ends, because that was the religion I inherited. I believed the stories and paid the tithes and listened to the priests. I learned so much, but in the end, it could not contain me, so I left.
Now that I’m gone, I prefer to end the story earlier in the woods, with just the boy. If I wrote this story myself, I’d tell the boy he could find God alone, in the trees. I’d tell him he could find God in the whorl of an unopened flower bud, in the dewey cushion of moss underfoot, in the hovering hum of an insect’s wings. I’d tell him he could find God in the hush of a funeral song, in the first breath you take upon seeing your beloved’s deathbed, and in the subtle ache of still missing them—even now.
I would tell him that God lives the pause at the end of his own questions—in every possibility unfolding in all directions—more alive in the unknowable void than in the answer itself.
Those were my thoughts as I created this piece. I want to haunt that sacred grove myself and find God in my own way, on my own terms, and I want to leave with more questions than I came with.
Thanks for being here, my friends. May all your groves be haunted ones—illuminated by impossible phantoms and visions.
All my love,
👻Becca Lee, the Haunted Librarian👻
PS—stay tuned for designs 2 & 3 next week!
NEW Prints in the Shop Aug 22! 🗓
Wow!