I just checked out a book from my library: A Book of Luminous Things.  This great title grabbed me as I was passing it by on my way to the fourth installment of the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place for my boys.  The Incorrigible children for my boys.  Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy Day for my daughter.  Lumionus things for me.  Aren't libraries the best?

A Book of Luminous Things, it turns out, is an anthology of poetry collected by Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz.  I have long had a Milosz quote written on the back of an index card:
One murky island with its barking seals
Or a parched desert is enough
To make us say: yes, oui, si.
'Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world.'

I dug out the card with this excerpt from the poem "A Magic Mountain" after I came home from the library with A Book of Luminous Things under my arm. There's a box in the back of my closet with things I have gathered over the years: slips of paper with quotes; a picture of my grandma on her wedding day, her nose scrunched in the smile we all inherited from her; a print of a VanGogh self portrait and one of a field in Arles; a sepia picture of Mount Jumbo in the 1930s; a card with a quote from Antoine Saint Exupery that reads: "you become responsible for what you have tamed"; a score of creek rocks.  And though I seldom peek into this box, if a fire were to ravage my house, it would be one of the first things I grab after my children were safely secured.

It's funny isn't it?  These odds and ends can have no significance for anyone, but remain treasures to me.  Magpie-like, I have lined my nest with glinting bits of this and that.  But here's the thing about this box: when I open it, I know who I am.  I am clear about what I value.  I see (as plainly as we ever get to in this world) my heart and mind.  Matthew's gospel records Jesus as issuing a general warning about what type of treasure we gather.  Do not gather up treasure on earth, he says, where moth and rust destroy, where thieves break in and steal.  But gather up treasure in heaven, where these forces of decay can pose no threat. This wisdom contains the oft-quoted: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

I am thinking about this quote as I consider the box in the back of my closet.  Perhaps my heart is tucked in cardboard beneath the pile of clothing donations to the goodwill.  Perhaps.  But more likely, it is here and there in these bits of heaven that I have found - Milosz's murky island with its barking seals, VanGogh's self portrait, my grandmother's wedding day grin, rocks softened by Rattlesnake creek.

And these are luminous things indeed.

Milosz closes his anthology's formidable introduction (free-ranging from Cezanne to Schopenhauer to Goethe to Buddha), with this light and lovely statement:  "Yet, since I am obviously interested in the visible world, again and again unveiling itself and offering itself to the eye, I would have nothing against calling my anthology a book of enchantments."

And that is what I have in the back of my closet, I guess, a box of enchantments -- a record of things luminous that have unveiled themselves, even momentarily, and studded my life with their beauty.