Eat Pray Love: Bali

I have had this post on hold for ages because there is some stuff at the very end of the book that is incredibly powerful, about a time the author took a vow of silence, and I wanted to include it. But I have been really busy, so you will just have to read it for yourself if you are curious! I have mixed feelings about the new movie coming out, mainly because Julia Roberts is playing the lead. I like her OK, and think she will pull off all the humor well, but I just don't see her portraying the intense spirituality parts.... Hopefully she will surprise me. For now, here are two other favorite parts from the Bali section:

He keeps his body strong, he says, by meditating every night before sleep and by pulling the healthy energy of the universe into his core. He says that the human body is made of nothing more or less than the five elements of all creation - water (apa), fire (tejo), wind (bayu), sky (akasa) and earth (pritiwi) - and all you have to do is concentrate on this reality during meditation and you will receive energy from all of these sources, and you will stay strong. Demonstrating his occasionally very accuate ear for English idiom, he said, "The microcosm becomes the macrocosm. You - microcosm - will become same as universe - macrocosm."

***********************************

The Balinese don't let their children touch the ground for the first six months of life, because newborn babies are considered to be gods sent straight from heaven, and you wouldn't let a god crawl around on the floor with all the toenail clippings and cigarette butts. So Balinese babies are carried for those first six months, revered as minor deities. If a baby dies before it is six months old, it is given a special cremation ceremony and the ashes are not placed in a human cemetery because this being was never human: it was only ever a god. But if the baby lives to six months, then a big ceremony is held and the child's feet are allowed to touch the earth at last and Junior is welcomed to the human race. ...

Everyone was alternately interested, not interested, tired, laughing, earnest. But Ketut and the baby seemed to be locked in their own experience together, riveted to each other's attention. The baby didn't take her eyes off the old medicine man all day. Who ever heard of a six-month-old baby not crying or fussing or sleeping for four straight hours in the hot sun, but just watching someone with curiosity?

At the end of all the chanting... Ketut made a drawing on the bottom of a pottery bowl of the four directions of the universe, filled the bowl with holy water and set it on the ground. This hand-drawn compass marked the holy spot on earth where the baby's feet would first touch.
Then the whole family gathered by the baby, everyone seeming to hold her at the same time, and - oop! there goes! - they lightly dipped the baby's feet in the pottery bowl full of holy water, right above the magic drawing which encompassed the whole universe, and then they touched her soles to the earth for the first time. When they lifted her back up into the air, tiny damp footprints remained on the ground below her, orienting this child at last onto the great Balinese grid, establishing who she was by establishing where she was. Everyone clapped their hands, delighted. The little girl was one of us now. A human being - with all the risks and thrills which that perplexing incarnation entails.

The baby looked up, looked around, smiled. She wasn't a god anymore. She didn't seem to mind. She wasn't fearful at all. She seemed thoroughly satisfied with every decision she had ever made.

Eat Pray Love - India

More things I loved from this book... The next section was devoted to the part of her trip she spent in an ashram.

This is from early in the section:

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.... The Yogis say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair.
Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surrounding with poise. Only from that point of even mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you. True Yogis, from their seat of equipoise, see all this world as an equal manifestation of God's creative energy - men, women, children, turnips, bedbugs, coral: it's all God in disguise. But the Yogis believe a human life is very special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God-realization ever occur. The turnips, the bedbugs, the coral - they never get a chance to find out who they really are. But we do have that chance.
"Our whole business therefore in this life, " wrote Saint Augustine, rather Yogically, "is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen."

And then from a little bit later:

I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all these acquisitions and accomplishments - they run you down in the end. Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a bandit - will behave like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out of the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it. At some point, as Richard keeps telling me, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you.

And ladies and gentleman, right here we have what is without doubt my favorite sentence in the book:
Which is a sentiment I completely respect except for the fact that I totally disagree.

Aaaahahahaha, what was that I said about feeling a connection to this woman?

Eat Pray Love - Italy

I think I have a new favorite book, at least in the nonfiction world. Well, if you take out the parenting type books lol. Although it was found in the travel section of Powell's, I would almost put this book in the self help or spirituality - at least it was for me! I can't even begin to explain how much this woman reminded me of myself! Her spiritual journey was so inspiring to me and has me really interested in pursuing yoga more than I have in the past. If you haven't read it, the three words in the title each represent a theme for a country the author visited on a year long trip of self discovery. I loved so much about the book, I thought I would break my comments up into three posts, just like the book sections!

Before really delving into her time in Italy, she takes us on a bit of a journey through her recent past. One of my favorite things in the book takes place on a trip to Indonesia, while visiting a medicine man:

"I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights but also devote myself to God."
Ketut said he could answer my question with a picture. He showed me a sketch he'd drawn once during meditation. It was an androgynous human figure, standing up, hands clasped in prayer. But this figure had four legs, and no head. Where the head should have been, there was only a wild foliage of ferns and flowers. There was a small smiling face drawn over the heart.
"To find the balance you want," Ketut spoke through his translator, "this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God."

Wow, so simple, but so deep!

Then we get to Italy, where she has gone primarily to learn to speak Italian (and to eat of course). I am not going to write out the whole chapter here, but she devotes an entire one to explaining the history of the Italian language, which I had no idea about, and it blew me away. An entire language based on poetry. Ah, now it really does make sense how beautiful it is!

But I must mention food! There is much to choose from, but I think this is my favorite passage:

...before I left Rome, he gave me the name of a pizzeria in Naples that I had to try, because, Giovanni informed me, it sold the best pizza in Naples. I found this a wildly exciting prospect, given that the best pizza in Italy is from Naples, and the best pizza in the world is from Italy, which means that this pizzeria must offer... I'm almost too superstitious to say it... the best pizza in the world? Giovanni passed along the name of the place with such seriousness and intensity, I almost felt I was being inducted into a secret society. He pressed the address into the palm of my hand and said, in gravest confidence, "Please go to this pizzeria. Order the margherita pizza with double mozzarella. If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples, please lie to me later and tell me that you did."
So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered - one for each of us - are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears over hers, she's having a metaphysical crisis about it, she's begging me, "Why do they event bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?"

LOL, and the craziest thing about this is my daughter just married a guy from Naples, so there may be plans afoot to visit there. Gluten and dairy be damned. I will be trying the best pizza in the world if I do make it over there!

100 Books

I saw this on a friend's blog and thought it was neat, and then it started going around Facebook a bit too. I like the way it is here because there were more options. I changed the way it was done a bit because the original had an underline option. Blogger doesn't seem to have that in their tool bar, and I am too lazy to add the html LOL, so here is my version! Some of these I am not familiar with. If I didn't italicize it, and it is a book you love, let me know!

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Put 3 stars next to the ones you love***


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen***
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien***
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee***
6 The Bible – lots but can’t claim all
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte***
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman********* OK, a few more than 3 stars haha
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Works of Shakespeare – well, most of them…
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien***
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger***
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell – I even own a first edition!
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald – not sure how I missed this one in school!
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky***
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia
34 Emma - Jane Austen***
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne ***
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*** – one of the greatest books ever written imho
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - love his stuff but haven't got to this one yet
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins-
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ***!
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - loved the movie so really want to read it!
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville – just one of those books I never wanted to read – I know I should one day!
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett***
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - parts... I just can't deal with Joyce LOL
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker*** - one of my all time favorites, along with everything she writes!
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White***
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad***
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery ***!
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams ***
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare***
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl ***– think I have read all his books!
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Siblings Without Rivalry

I am finally reading Siblings Without Rivalry by Faber and Mazlish. I have been putting it off, thinking I won't really need the techniques until Akasha is a bit older, but I am so glad I read it, because there is actually a ton of stuff about helping a sibling deal with a new baby in the family.

One of the first things that struck me was the part about how much your "sibling story" plays into who you become as an adult. I think this is so true in Ron's case. He has often said he thinks he is a workaholic because there is a part of him still trying to please his father, and it makes sense in relation to his sister. He has explained how Germans think boys need toughening up and girls should be spoiled, so I am sure that made his father's treatment of him seem all the worse.

Then I thought it didn't really apply to me, because my brother and sister were so much older, but then I had an "aha" moment. My brother and sister were both always so great to me, but they MUST have been somewhat resentful, because I was ridiculously spoiled when young. I didn't realize that until I was older, and I feel badly about it now, but I didn't have a clue back then. Now I wonder if that is somehow tied to the way I always feel like people don't like me, even when they act like they do.... Of course Ron says all women feel that way, so maybe I am just normal with that!

I liked about 90% of the book and even noticed several things I could imagine myself saying that I never thought of as problematic, so I think it will be a great help to me. There were only a couple things I had problems with. The first was a continued use of what I think of as "victim language". I love it that they talked about validation so much, but their examples were often things like, "He made you really mad when he said that." I hate that "made you" crap.

My biggest peeve was how they handled bullying though. Their basic strategy is to pay attention to the victim. Hmmm, there is that word again. I totally disagree with that. Of course I understand you don't want to yell and scream, but looking for the underlying need is important, and you don't want to reinforce the victim mentality either!

Overall I still give it the thumbs up. At least I have gotten past my "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" phase with books. In the past, if there was one little thing I didn't like, it would ruin the whole book for me, but now I can see this book as an important resource for the things I did like. Maybe it is because I am more confident and clear in my parenting choices. It does make it hard to want to recommend it to others, however. I feel like I need to write up a list of resources along with "warnings" to go with them!

Amazing Book from my Youth

Have you ever come across something from your youth and had an "aha" moment about how it was an integral part of you became? Well, I had one of those just recently. Awhile ago, I was organizing books and decided to read something from my daughter's collection. This book caught my eye and immediately brought back memories.


So I started to read it again and couldn't help but think about how it is connected to so many things I am fascinated by - spending time in nature, living off the land, wild edibles, survival skills, even falconry. Could this book be the origin of some of those interests...?

It is funny I was also immediately struck with adult thoughts, like how crazy to have kids reading this book since it is about a boy "running away". Is that the kind of thing I would want to encourage? And yet, when I think of my childhood memories of this book, it really had nothing to do with that. And it wasn't like he left a bad situation. He just wanted to live in nature and be self sufficient. So I let that go.

And then it turned out the most touching part of the whole book for me is when his father comes up looking for him. There is no criticism from him, not even concern really as he sees how well he has done, only glowing happiness at his success. Coming from the recent unschooling conference, what a beautiful example of supporting your child's passion!

I just finished it today. I didn't remember how it ended at all, and it really knocked me for a loop! I won't talk about it here in case anybody decides to read it (or reread it like me!), but I will say it made me cry. Not that it takes much these days, but it really was a beautiful finish.

The Birth House

A group I am in read The Birth House recently, and today there was a get together to discuss it. As I expected, I didn't have much time for uninterrupted conversation with Orion there, but it was fun nonetheless, and I just wanted to take a quick opportunity to say what a great book it was. Of course, the subject matter was intriguing to me - an old style midwife and her apprentice in a rural area practicing at the time doctors were just beginning to try and take over birth. But the actual story aspects and quality of the writing were fantastic. Definitely one of those books that were hard to put down!