What Is This Book?

In Conversation #004—What is This Book?

I have been asking myself what this book is, and why it has stayed with me for so long. My editor has been asking me this too. I am sure you are equally curious. What is it I am birthing, with my editor as midwife. Of course, we will not know its full character and personality until it is in the world.

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The clearest answer I have right now is that it is not a book of answers. It is a book of orientation. A way of asking how we live within the world we inherit, and how we might still live beyond it. A way of staying with the questions that shape a life, especially the ones tied to dignity, power, belonging, history, and how we remain human inside what surrounds us.

The question of dignity has been with me all my life. I think the book has stayed because that question has stayed.

Not as an abstract idea. As a lived one.

Over time, I have come to see that power and hierarchy are often treated as if they are the prize, though they are limited arrangements. There are only so many seats, so many titles, so many positions a system agrees to recognize. Dignity is different. Dignity is not a one-person gain. It is not zero-sum. It expands what becomes possible for all of us.

That matters to me deeply.

I want dignity for myself. I want it for others. I want it for the world around me. And I think this book has remained because that thirst has remained. That search has remained. The desire to understand what allows a person to live with clarity, coherence, humanity, and self-respect has remained.

The writing keeps asking me to return to simplicity. To heart. To clarity. To coherence. Almost like water. Not shallow. Clear.

Maybe that is part of what this book is trying to protect as it becomes itself.

Not certainty. Not conclusion.

Something closer to soul, to our collective humanity.

Perhaps that is also what we search for when we are trying to live with dignity.

— Judithe

Notes written while a book is becoming.