There Is a Fountain of Gladness

Some years ago, I spent a day away from home. When I returned, my six-year-old daughter met me at the door, hardly able to contain herself.

"Mom," she exclaimed, "Dad and I made a book!"

She placed it in my hands with all the ceremony of an author presenting her first published work.

Inside were some of the little poems I had often read aloud to her, carefully copied onto folded sheets of construction paper and stapled together. It was uneven and homemade in every way--and it was beautiful.  

Then she looked up at me with complete confidence and said...

"Mom, we don't need to buy any more books. We can make them."

I laughed.

Not because she was wrong, but because she was so wonderfully right.

As I held that little handmade book, it dawned on me that my daughter had fallen in love with books. She had not only listened to them; she wanted to make them herself. That discovery filled me with gladness.

She was right in more ways than either of us could have imagined. We did make books. Many of them. Years later, Living Books Press exists because of that same impulse—that books are not merely products to consume but gifts that can be created and shared.

Looking back, I wonder if Charlotte Mason was describing this moment when she wrote:

We commonly make a mistake about Gladness. We think it is a matter of temperament... But there is in everybody's heart a fountain of Gladness, only waiting to be unstopped. —Ourselves

How do you think about gladness?

Often we imagine gladness as something that arrives when circumstances are favorable: when the bills are paid, the children are cooperating, the news is encouraging, and life is finally under control.

Charlotte Mason suggests something different.

Gladness is already there. Like a spring beneath the earth, it waits beneath the surface of ordinary life. It does not need to be manufactured. It needs to be uncovered.

A little handmade book. A dandelion bouquet. A bird spotted from the kitchen window.

The earnest confidence of a six-year-old who believed books could simply be made at the dining room table. Children have a remarkable way of seeing the ordinary miracles around them. Perhaps one of the quiet gifts of motherhood is that they teach us to see them again.

Charlotte Mason does not tell us to become happier people. She simply invites us to "remove the rubbish" (p. 132) that covers the fountain. When we do, gladness arises of its own accord.

I still take that little handmade book from the shelf from time to time. The paper has aged. The handwriting shows her best effort. It is priceless. to me because, for one bright moment, a little girl reminded her mother that gladness was already waiting to be found.