A Love Letter to Curtis Memorial Library

I recently stood in a packed lobby at Curtis Memorial Library (CML) in Brunswick, Maine, waiting for someone to cut a ribbon.

The ribbon was for a redesigned lobby. Not a new wing. Not a new building. A lobby. And there were people everywhere. I kept looking around thinking, all of these folks came out for a lobby.

That's when I knew I wanted to write CML a love letter.

Here's my confession. I rarely check out books there. I love the children's books, but I can't tell you the last so-called adult book I took home. And I'm there several days a week. That gap is the whole story. CML is a library, and calling it a library almost does it an injustice.

In December of 2024, I sat in the fireplace room and started writing a paper called “If We Want to Heal the World, We Need to Heal Men.” That paper led me onto the Heart-Strong Adventure. The adventure led to Heart-Strong becoming a nonprofit. All of it started in a chair by a fireplace in a building I didn't pay to walk into.

Now when I walk those halls, I walk through my own life. The courtyard in the summer. A seminar room where our board held its visioning meeting. A staff member who taught me to use the photo scanner so I could send childhood photos to an illustrator. A coffee carafe from the Library of Things, checked out for our first WILD retreat.

And on August 14, CML is hosting the closing show of FROM WITHIN. The library gave me the room where this all started. Now it's hosting the last show of one of the things that room helped to start.

Read the full piece on Substack.

Learn more about Heart-Strong at www.heart-strong.org.