Dennis Sullivan begins our Christmas Day podcast by reading from one of his Christmas columns on his naïve search as a child for the Star of Bethlehem, which became a lifelong journey to finally find it. Sullivan has compiled 62 of his Enterprise columns into a just-released book, “Homeward Bound.”

He took the cover photo of the rail trail after rain had cleared it of people, leaving a green leafy canopy over a straight shot of pavement. At age 80, Sullivan says, “I’ve got a foot in the grave … All that’s waiting for you, me, anyone is that white light.” Sullivan spends a month meditating on each of his essays, which starts with “une ligne donné” — a given line, as French poet Paul Valéry put it.

“There is a world beneath that line and it is a writer’s job to find out what is below that line,” says Sullivan. “The lines don’t leak,” he says of his writing, crediting Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm as two of his literary parents. “The columns really are poems,” says Sullivan.

He references Virgil’s pace — no more than three lines a day — in writing The Aeneid, quoting the ancient Roman poet: He licked those lines into existence like a mother bear licks her new-born cubs into shape. In the Age of the Internet, when local links are disintegrating, Sullivan’s focus in compiling his book, and in life, is on the local community.

He has been Voorheesville’s historian since 1986 and has led library groups on poetry and memoir writing and helped launch the poet laureate contest that used to be held at Smitty’s Tavern. His work on restorative justice — he wrote “Handbook of Restorative Justice: A Global Perspective” — had international reach but focused too on the local, whether in South Africa or London, as the only way restorative justice can work — finding ways communities can resolve disputes without violence.

Sullivan hopes his book will encourage readers to look at their own lives and write about them.