tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71952771153407825652024-01-19T17:15:02.129+11:00Universal Heart Book ClubWalter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.comBlogger157125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-52176249412651703012017-01-18T20:41:00.000+11:002017-01-18T20:41:33.496+11:00Walter Mason reads a book about Paris, singing and a writer's belongingI have never been to Paris (a lapse I intend to remedy this year) but I have always loved it, chiefly through the books written about it and the writers who have lived there. <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8913036/The-Horror-of-Love-NancyMitford-and-GastonPalewski-in-ParisandLondon-by-Lisa-Hilton-review.html" target="_blank">Nancy Mitford </a>and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/15/inside-pearl-edmund-white-simon-callow-review" target="_blank">Edmund White</a>, two of my favourite novelists, famously made Paris their home, and because of them I have gone on to fall in love with such great Parisians as <a href="http://untappedcities.com/2013/01/31/visit-homes-of-four-french-writers/" target="_blank">Marcel Proust</a>, <a href="https://bonjourparis.com/archives/la-maison-de-jean-cocteau-buzz/" target="_blank">Jean Cocteau</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colette" target="_blank">Colette</a>.<br />
<br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patti_Miller" target="_blank">Patti Miller</a>’s intriguing literary memoir <a href="http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/book.aspx/1338/Ransacking%20Paris" target="_blank"><i>Ransacking Paris</i></a> is an attempt to understand a year she spent in that city, seen through the prism of French writers she has grown to love, principally <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne" target="_blank">Montaigne</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/81KfDXTTtXE" target="_blank">Rousseau</a> and <a href="https://qz.com/874930/i-was-suddenly-uncertain-of-my-true-capacity-simone-de-beauvoirs-daring-response-to-imposter-syndrome/" target="_blank">de Beauvoir</a>.<br />
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It is a book I picked up with no great expectations, but which immediately hooked me with its quiet beauty and its understated intelligence. <a href="http://www.lifestories.com.au/" target="_blank">Miller</a> is not a showy writer, but she is one who feels deeply, and her <a href="https://goodreadingmagazine.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/qa-with-memoir-extraordinaire-patti-miller/" target="_blank">Paris</a> is a subtly understood one, a place that mixes itself up with her own, more prosaic, memories of growing up in rural Australia, and going on to deal with her own shortcomings in the world’s most romantic city.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Patti Miller</td></tr>
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<br />She spent a year in <a href="https://thyme-for-tea.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/interview-with-patti-miller-author-of.html" target="_blank">Paris</a> living in a couple of sparse studio apartments with her husband. This husband, not a writer, provides moments of clarity to the infinitely more romantic <a href="http://faberwritingacademy.com.au/pattim_curiosity.html#.WH81FVzayUk" target="_blank">Miller</a>, and has a tendency to give voice to thoughts she had hoped would simply go away, though she has guiltily thought them herself as well. A big part of the genius of <a href="https://penguin.com.au/books/ransacking-paris-9780702253393" target="_blank"><i>Ransacking Paris</i></a> comes from this relationship, a type that Miller so rightly identifies as rarely occurring in literature. Hers is a happy marriage of long duration, and they are a middle-aged couple in love with each other and happy in their companionship. So there is no great romance in this book, no hackneyed Gallic adventures featuring big-handed men and warm romps in the Provencal countryside. Instead there is the ordinariness and the occasional irritation of two people who have known each other for a very long time and who have decided to change their lives by doing something very different.<br />
<br />Though many writers get a mention in this book, the great star of it is <a href="http://montaignestudies.uchicago.edu/h/gallery/" target="_blank">Montaigne</a>, a man who <a href="http://www.thingsmadefromletters.com/2016/01/13/patti-miller-on-curiosity-and-memoir/" target="_blank">Miller</a> adores and who she remains fascinated by. She transmits some of this enthusiasm, and makes her readers keen to follow up on this great essayist with a perhaps undeserved reputation for being difficult. In the pages of this book he is a great eccentric and a wise, though flawed man. <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/imortal/2014/08/05/montaigne-a-skeptic-and-secular-humanist-before-it-was-cool/" target="_blank">Montaigne</a>, it seems, had been destined for greatness, or at least peculiarity:<br />
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“…he was woken each morning of his childhood by the sweet thrumming of the harpsichord because his father believed a child should not be rudely awoken; he had a Latin tutor from babyhood and learned to speak and read Latin as his mother tongue.”</blockquote>
<br />The wonderfully subtle <a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/thought-as-style-montaignes-essays/" target="_blank">Montaigne</a>, who allows paradox and even contradiction into his world, is a perfect companion and guide for <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/writing-language/The-Memoir-Book-Patti-Miller-9781741149067" target="_blank">Miller</a>, who is a thoughtful and shy woman trying to navigate a new life in middle age on the streets of a town she has unduly idealised. She makes friends by leaving notices pinned on walls, she joins a choir and she has odd relationships with physiotherapists and elderly outpatients, all negotiated in a language in which she has no great depth of aptitude. She is hapless, and so extraordinarily sympathetic. Her world in Paris is not a perfect one, and so the reader can easily imagine themselves in her place, occasionally exasperated by a foreign milieu leapt into slightly too late in life.<br />
<br />It is this capacity to be the clumsy everyman that makes her writing about music so interesting, too. Like <a href="http://amazingdiscoveries.org/S-deception-music_philosophers_culture_plato" target="_blank">Socrates</a>, she decides to take up the study of music later in life, determined to be always growing intellectually and creatively. But she is conscious that in this, too, she is something of a fraud, as she has none of the reflexive musical understanding and sophistication of those who have grown up listening to classical music and absorbing its lessons and emotions. She tries, and in this book she even falls in love with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_cantata" target="_blank">Bach’s cantatas</a>, singing them enthusiastically in her choir while the sophisticated Parisian women around her prefer the Janis Joplin number that had been included especially to make her feel more comfortable.<br />
<br />Miller’s quintessentially Australian dis-ease in her surroundings is charming, and she never makes the mistake of seeming too clever or interesting or perfectly accomplished, a common failing in travel memoir. It is in this, too, that she makes this book even more multi-layered and interesting; she is wrestling with the writer’s experience, with the necessary lapses in ordinary morality that the writer must almost daily indulge. This is the source of her anxiety in “ransacking” a city not hers, and also in writing down the story of a dead friend and her still-living son. In a self-created world the writer is free to hide or disguise her own traumatic moments but what, she asks, “can be done with the pain of other people’s stories?”<br />
<br />This is a fascinating book, clever and provoking and also, if it’s what you are looking for, a simple love letter to <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/ransacking-parris/6346882" target="_blank">Paris</a>. <a href="http://eastsidefm.org/ransacking-the-city-of-love-a-review-of-patti-millers-ransacking-paris/" target="_blank">Miller</a>’s own interior journeys are traced along the streets and avenues of an old city, and the reader’s own stories emerge too. I have never been to <a href="http://newsroom.uts.edu.au/news/2015/10/ransacking-paris" target="_blank">Paris</a>, but when I go there I will be better equipped thanks to this wonderful book. <br /><br />Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-65749689899862461362016-06-07T22:50:00.000+10:002016-06-08T08:29:33.567+10:00Poet Michele Seminara on late blooming, ordinariness and Rainer Maria Rilke <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://www.stephaniedowrick.com/published-works/books/in-the-company-of-rilke/" target="_blank">Rainer Maria Rilke</a>’s <a href="http://www.universalheartbookclub.com/2015/02/sheridan-rogers-walks-in-rilkes.html" target="_blank"><i>Letters to a Young Poet</i></a> were, and still are, a tremendous gift – an outpouring of wisdom and affection towards aspiring poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Xaver_Kappus" target="_blank">Franz Kappus</a> as he struggled to reconcile his desire for a creative life with the necessities of making a living; and a gift, over a century later, to this not-so-young aspiring poet, as I too struggled to reconcile my need for creativity with my duties to the world. In <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/new-translation-of-rilkes-letters-to-a-young-poet/3005170" target="_blank"><i>Letters</i></a>, <a href="http://www.universalheartbookclub.com/2012/12/rilkes-prayers-of-young-poet-as-he.html" target="_blank">Rilke</a> speaks passionately about creativity, spirituality, love, solitude, and of that which is deepest in us, that which is ‘inexpressible, and takes place in a sphere that no word has ever entered.’ <br />
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As would-be poets go, Herr Kappus and I were, in many ways, standing at opposite ends of the same journey. On writing to <a href="http://www.stephaniedowrick.com/blog/in-the-company-of-rilke-us-publication/" target="_blank">Rilke</a> for advice, the 19-year-old cadet was deciding between the life of an artist and that of an officer; on first reading Letters, I had already thrown myself into the life of wife and mother, and was now looking to rediscover the writer I always felt I was.<br />
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Poetry came to me late and unexpectedly. I had always written, but now with three young children to care for, my hands were, quite literally, too full to pick up a pen – and so I hatched a plan. I would compose verse in my head (my memory was too poor to compose anything longer!) rolling it around in my mind as I hung out the washing or stirred the soup, gestating words until the moment came – late at night– to give birth to a poem. <br />
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Yet what began as a pragmatic choice soon flared into a passion. Unlike prose, with poetry, I felt no need to labour over plot, character or word-count; it was a form of expression that seemed to speak directly to, and from, the soul. And while I had always been a voracious reader, with new-found desire I now devoured poetry, and in doing so came upon <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/literature-literary-studies/In-the-Company-of-Rilke-Stephanie-Dowrick-9781742371801" target="_blank">Rilke</a>’s words:<br />
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<i> The whole thing is to carry the (poem) full time and then give birth; to let every impression and every germ of a feeling consummate itself entirely within itself, in that which is dark, inexpressible, unconscious and unattainable by your own intelligence, and to await the hour of the delivery of a new clearness of vision. That alone is to live an artistic life, in understanding, as in creating.</i></blockquote>
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Good heavens, I thought, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke" target="_blank">Rilke</a> was talking about – and to – me! Here was a poet who did not distinguish between the ordinariness of everyday life and art: ‘No need to separate art from life, as Art, too, is only a form of life and by living in no matter what way one can be unconsciously preparing oneself for it’. Instead, <a href="http://www.uvm.edu/~sgutman/Rilke.htm" target="_blank">Rilke</a> trusted in the directness and simplicity of nature and human relationships to feed his creative flame. He exhorted his protégé not to ‘be led astray by the surface of things’ but to ‘only be attentive to that which rises up within you, and place it above everything that you see around you’. Well, this I could do, and without leaving home. Liberation!<br />
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Furthermore (and quite incredibly for a man of his era) <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/499/000028415/" target="_blank">Rilke</a> felt that women were better placed than men to plumb these creative depths, believing they ‘must at bottom have become richer beings, more ideally human beings than fundamentally easy-going man, who is not drawn down beneath the surface of life by the difficulty of bearing bodily fruit’.<br />
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Of course this sounds rather old-fashioned (it was written, after all, in 1904) but it didn’t to me at the time, since I was indeed engaged in the earthy business of ‘bearing bodily fruit’ and could attest to its power to ‘draw me down beneath the surface’ into closer connection with ‘nature… the simple and small in her’ and away from the distracting ‘claims of the many things which talk and chatter’. Which is not to say that men and women cannot equally access these depths, but only to say that, as an isolated mother of three young children scribbling away in the suburbs, these words held great power for me and lent me confidence to trust my own instincts and abilities.<br />
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In <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/dennis_hopper_reads_from_rainer_maria_rilkes_timeless_guide_to_creativity_iletters_to_a_young_poeti.html" target="_blank"><i>Letters</i></a>, <a href="https://dualpersonalities.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/enjoying-rilke/" target="_blank">Rilke</a> took great pains to impress upon the lonely Herr Kappus the importance of solitude (I had little chance of that!) and suffering (never in short supply), believing them to be art’s – and life’s – greatest teachers. He urged Franz to bear his ‘griefs’ gladly, for these ‘are the moments when something new, something unknown enters into us.’ As a Buddhist practitioner and as a human being I knew this to be true; now, as a poet, I was discovering it anew. The poems which invariably moved me as a reader seemed to shoot straight from a deep, wordless space of suffering and growth inside the poet; and my own poems, when I found time to dash them off, were springing from the same space. A complex emotional nexus of suffering, creativity and transformation was occurring for me exactly as Rilke described it. At such moments, he explained:<br />
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<i>Our feelings are dumb with embarrassed shyness and everything in us retreats into the background. A stillness grows up, and the new thing, that nobody knows, stands in the middle of it and is silent. I believe that nearly all our griefs are moments of suspense, which we experience as paralysis, because we can no longer hear our estranged feelings living. Because we are alone with that foreign thing, which has entered into us…we are in the midst of a state of transition, in which we cannot remain…The new thing in us, that which has been added to us, has entered into our heart and penetrated to its innermost chamber, and is no longer there even—it is already in our blood.</i></blockquote>
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These words left me paralysed, yet at the same time some wordless intelligence inside me stirred, and I felt a heightened sense of interconnection. In my experience, this is the effect of all great poetry, of all great art – a feeling of stillness and acute awareness, as if a gong has been struck deep in your soul, the reverberations causing something in you to start, shift, and quicken. If, at such moments, we can express ourselves authentically and skilfully, I believe we have the power to create similar transformations in the mind of the reader. Sometimes creativity of this calibre springs from grief, sometimes from joy, but always from deep awareness. As Rilke advised the young poet when asked to critique his creative expression: ‘Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.’<br />
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<i>Notes:</i><br />
<i>All quotes from Letters to a Young Poet by <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/rainer-maria-rilke/" target="_blank">Rainer Maria Rilke</a>, translated by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_D._Herter_Norton" target="_blank">M.D. Herter Norton</a>.</i></blockquote>
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<b><a href="https://micheleseminara.wordpress.com/author/micheleseminara/" target="_blank">Michele Seminara</a> is the author of the recently released collection of poetry, <a href="https://rochfordstreetreview.com/2016/02/11/a-common-engagement-with-understanding-martin-langford-launches-engraft-by-michele-seminara/" target="_blank"><i>Engraft</i></a>. She is the managing editor of <a href="http://verityla.com/" target="_blank"><i>Verity La</i></a>.You can buy copies of Michele's book and read more about her <a href="https://micheleseminara.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">at her blog</a>. </b><br />
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Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-15892343243126626332016-03-04T17:18:00.001+11:002016-03-04T17:19:14.867+11:00Meg Welchman - cancer survivor, journal writer, psychologist, mother, artist, great woman! - tells her story<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Meg Welchman has a story worth telling. And courage we can be inspired by, and learn from. She has been forced by recurrent illness and circumstances to face more than any of us would wish. Don't turn away, thinking that Meg is the kind of hero most of us couldn't be. Out of her suffering and fear and the immense intimacies and even the weird glorious moments of illness, she has insights to benefit us all. Her wonderful book, </i><b>This Present Moment,</b><i> </i><i>an art therapy journal based on fifteen important themes of life, including Love, Hope, Courage, Creativity and Resilience, is exquisitely illustrated by Grace Cuell. Details below about how you can buy it. And please do buy it - for your sake, not for Meg's only. But first, Meg's story of writing.</i><br />
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I have always loved books. Growing up in a small coastal town, my favourite place, besides my bedroom, was the town library. The library was an old red brick building that was dimly lit and deathly quiet inside. It had a distinctly musty paper smell that made my stomach churn to such a degree that I would need to detour to the restrooms before I could continue walking the linoleum aisles. I would wait in line to flick through the dog-eared cards that made up the library catalogue, housed in long thin narrow wooden box drawers with tiny round metal knobs at the front. A small rectangular lined card for each item in the building. The cards held secrets - the intriguing Dewey decimal numbers and the scrawled handwritten names of those who had previously borrowed the books. This strange place bursting with stories. I dreamed of being a librarian. <br />
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I would scan a pointer finger along plastic covered spines in those quiet aisles languidly scanning for a new story that would satisfy. I took my time. I preferred biographies and real stories rather than fiction. Books were my favourite accessory. I would most often walk with a book in hand, and had piles teetering haphazardly on my bedhead. I would read multiple books concurrently, by the light of my bed lamp or, if late, under the doona with my torch. Each book would provide a chapter, it would be lovingly book-marked and then placed back up on the pile. The next book in rotation would provide another chapter, and so on. I can’t recall when I started reading only one book at a time.<br />
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As I progressed through school my dream had flipped, from reading and being surrounded by books as a librarian, to writing a book and being an author. I was motivated by the joy of shaping something out of nothing but an idea. I loved how writing could take you from point A to point B via numerous side-steps on the way, usually in such a fashion that you wouldn’t know how things would end until you felt the words falling out onto the page. As I grew and my interests diversified I let writing slide. As an adult practically every second person I met “had a book inside them” but not many of them would actually write one. Other things became priorities. University study, career, love, and then family life. I continued to write periodically in beautiful blank paged journals that my husband would present to me for Christmas or birthdays. The writing in these journals became more urgent when disaster struck. My father’s devastating drawn out death after years of emphysema, and our infertility woes riding the highs and disastrous lows of IVF.<br />
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Eventually, when the miracle children arrived, first a son, and then two years later, a daughter, I wrote out of joy and a need to chart their early days, with the thought that they would read the diaries when they were older. Not long into our daughter’s first six months on earth I would find out I had breast cancer, in fact, secondary breast cancer that was life-threatening as it had spread rapidly and aggressively through my lymph glands and into my liver. It was inoperable and incurable. Everything stopped but my mind kept racing. Suddenly those diary entries became vital. I filled volumes of notebooks and started writing a blog. Almost six years on, I am still here. [<i>Hurrah, Meg! Hurrah!! eds.</i>]<br />
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At the end of 2015, just as my debut book <i>This Present Moment</i> had returned from the printers, I attended my daughter’s primary school art show. There was incredibly brilliant drawings and paintings on display; works in the style of Kandinsky, Picasso, Magritte, Monet and many other famous artists. All of whom were once children, just like this hopeful bunch of five-year-olds. The artworks hung under a colourful sign proclaiming brightly “EVERY CHILD IS AN ARTIST”. We were all children once; we were all artists. Some, a few of us, continue to flourish as adult artists. Most of us do not. “I don’t have a creative bone in my body” or “I can’t draw to save myself” are some of the mantras people tout as explanations. Well I am proof that you do not need anything magical to create something beautiful, even by simply colouring in the hand-drawn mandalas that feature in <i>This Present Moment</i>. All it takes is making time for your dreams and some coloured pencils to really let go!<br />
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The driving force of <i>This Present Moment</i> is mindfulness. Being in each moment as each moment unfurls. Not living in the past of “what if” or the future of “what might be”. <b><i>You have now</i></b>. All we have is <b><i>now</i></b>. The book takes the reader on a journey through fifteen life themes that illuminate the gift of “now” combined with a hand-drawn mandala to colour.<br />
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<i>“In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit”.</i><br />
<i>Albert Schweitzer – Nobel Peace Prize Winner</i><br />
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My inner spirit was rekindled by many close friends and family after facing cancer and chemotherapy three times. I have been a recipient of vast kindness and care. I am lucky to have such people in my life. I wrote <i>This Present Moment</i> to thank them, in particular, to thank my generous husband and beautiful children, and to my circle of friends who took on child care and meal making during my low hours. <b>These small acts of kindness made a huge difference</b>.<br />
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When I became a psychologist I learned that pain shared gives the chance to feel differently in order to act differently. In writing <i>This Present Moment</i> I have shared some of my pain with the hope that anyone reading it will also allow themselves to do just that – feel the pain and then build on that feeling to act differently. To take a running leap towards life. A big fat juicy creative life! Because, we are all artists.<br />
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ABOUT MEG<br />
Writer Meg Welchman was diagnosed with aggressive incurable secondary breast cancer in 2010 just after the birth of her second child. After chemotherapy and surgery, she faced another two life-threatening reccurrences and is now, thankfully, in remission. As a psychologist with a background in relationship counselling and positive psychology, Meg was interested in how people cope with adversity, and after finding her own way through such treacherous times, she was inspired to share her story. Illustrator Grace Cuell developed an interest in drawing mandalas as a tool for mindfulness during her travels. As a Fine Arts student with a passion for mindful living, Grace wanted to create something beyond her studies that contributed positively to the world. <br />
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Together Meg and Grace have created an art therapy journal based on fifteen important themes of life, including Love, Hope, Courage, Creativity and Resilience. “This Present Moment” is designed to give peace and focus through colouring and contemplation. With a distinctly “hopeful” flavour, Meg charts the pivotal moments that reflect each of the themes over the last five years of living with cancer. This Present Moment is for anyone facing a difficult diagnosis, a difficult relationship or any difficult situation. It is both a “how to” for navigating a path through the darkness and a wakeup call to jump into life.<br />
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HOW TO PURCHASE<br />
<i>This Present Moment</i> is available online for $29.95 through <a href="http://www.purplecordspress.com/">www.purplecordspress.com</a><br />
A portion of each sale is donated to The Wesley Choices Cancer Support Service, Auchenflower. <br />
For further information contact: Meg Welchman at <a href="mailto:purplecordspress@gmail.com">purplecordspress@gmail.com</a><br />
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Purple Cords Press – Remarkable Books for Remarkable People <a href="http://www.purplecordspress.com/">www.purplecordspress.com</a><br />
Facebook: This Present Moment book <br />
Instagram: thispresentmoment<br />
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<br />Stephanie Dowrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17217351699603371102noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-23921436641280740262016-03-04T16:48:00.000+11:002016-03-04T17:21:19.504+11:00The Evolution of "Shards of Ice"We asked Minnie Biggs, author of <i>Shards of Ice</i>, and first-time author in her older age, to reflect on her creative process. Her words follow. But first, the dedication verses in <i>Shards</i>:<br />
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Those whom we love and lose</div>
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Are not where they were before</div>
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They are now wherever we are.</div>
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St John Chrysostom</div>
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In <i>Walden</i>, Henry David Thoreau urged us to "explore our inner selves, to be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within: is not our own interior white on the chart? Explore your own higher latitudes..." </div>
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<i> Minnie Biggs writes</i>: <br />
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Writing journals and diaries all my life led me to becoming a blogger before the word or the internet was invented. I would write up reports of travels or experiences and send them around to interested friends. Way back in the days of typewriter and carbon paper! Of course that first voyage to Antarctica was one of those accounts. By email.<br />
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Somehow that piece turned up at a writing workshop with [writing teacher] Joyce Kornblatt. She liked it and suggested I continue with it. One thing led to another. My writing about my husband Stephen - such a significant part of Shards - over a period of time, as well as this exploration of a new land and a new me, trickled on. Joyce just said, “Keep going.” And so I did. Checking in with her from time to time: “Keep going.” She would make suggestions, she would be supportive, she would praise my writing. “Keep going.” Maybe it would be a book? <br />
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It was never anything except writing for myself. As I became more absorbed in the study of Antarctic history and stories - I’d forgotten how much I liked researching and making notes - it expanded into that series of vignettes, snapshots. The writing was often challenging, always interesting and usually fun. Seldom real “work”. <br />
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The writing about, the remembering of Stephen, was poignant, sometimes funny and often painful, as images or memories surfaced. Sometimes it left me teary, yet it always felt healing. I was literally moving through my grief as I wrote. Not in any particular order. I would get up and leave it for periods of time and always be surprised when I came back. Oh, really? And move along with it.<br />
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Journal writing in its essence is honest and clear. Other essays that I have written, about food and place or spirituality, for example, have been in that same mode: what I like to call real. Real is important to me and comes out in Shards of Ice. It is an everlasting pursuit for me, the search for real.<br />
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I was bothered by the lack of a ‘narrative curve’ or narrative anything, and wondered about writing in those snippets or sections, yet could not see a way to transform it all into some “proper” format. Fortunately Joyce let me go with it - keep going - even as I added a section on the Red Centre and the Journal of Dying, separate sections in their own right. It would be fun if I could remember when it felt like it was actually a book, when I surrendered to it being the way it was, but I cannot! Like so much of the rest of it, it just was. <br />
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Then thoughts occurred that it might be helpful for other people. I met grieving people, people who were caring for loved ones, and I began to feel an urgency about my thoughts about dying: how important it is to communicate with each other, to face the end together. Perhaps these experiences of mine could be valuable for others? So the work became a little bigger than just my experience, my researching, my passions, my play. It might really be a book.<br />
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Something about endings felt difficult. How did I know it had ended? I did not. I could have kept going and going. But there was also a feeling of completion, I think. Still not sure as little shards continue to arise, in my memory or experience. How could I not have mentioned Stephen’s use of the phrase “Your blood’s worth bottling” which came out of my mouth the other day to a kind friend? But then if I had kept going, maybe there would not be a book at all.<br />
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When it was finished - what is finished? - I sent it to a friend, anthropologist Peter Sutton whom I like a lot and whose writing skills I admire. When he came back with a reply of heartfelt enthusiasm beautifully expressed I nearly fell over. It felt done. It had happened. It worked. There was a “message” and it was conveyed. That was enough. Some excitement to publish, but not really necessary. <br />
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Little did I know!<br />
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Publishing took longer than the writing. “We really like it…it should be published…but not by us..not now…” All those writers’ tales about rejection, they were all true. Somehow I shouldered on, not terribly hurt, partly because I wanted it published but did not feel invested in publishing. One other person read it with pleasure, so I felt all right. Kept going.<br />
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Finally came the email: “I’d like to publish your book.” It was Stephen Matthews at Ginninderra Press. Ginninderra means “throwing out little rays of light”. Easter Sunday, 2015.<br />
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Now it is out, and of course that is thrilling. Just the presence of it on the table, that beautiful book! And now friends are writing with their reactions and, to my delight, they are all different. Each person picks out another aspect she specially likes, he wants to pursue, another meaningful observation. It has done its work. Let it continue.<br />
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<br />Stephanie Dowrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17217351699603371102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-11746301687803700222016-01-04T17:07:00.000+11:002016-01-06T09:38:03.303+11:00Shards of Ice: a memoir of Antarctica, grief and survival<b>Joyce Kornblatt</b> is one of our most insightful reviewers, writers and teachers of writing. Here she shares particularly personal thoughts about a quite beautiful new book: <b>Minnie Biggs</b>' <i>Shards of Ice. </i>The themes are of profound interest: a long marriage, the loss of a beloved partner, "travel", inside and out - and deeply personal journal writing. As a delightful implicit bonus, Joyce also gives us a number of "kindred volumes".<i> </i>You are welcome to leave your comments below. They will certainly be passed to Joyce, and to this wonderfully talented new memoirist, <b>Minnie Biggs</b>.<i><br /></i><br />
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In a book of luminous, faceted and memorable fragments, <b>Minnie Biggs</b> embodies on the page the ice formations she discovers in Antarctica and in the Red Centre of Australia, voyages she makes following the death of Stephen, her architect husband of 47 years. A memoir of grief, travel, history, geology and the restorative act of writing itself, <i>SHARDS</i> (Ginninderra Press, 2015) takes us deep into the interior of a woman in her 70s who is our exceptional guide and becomes, by book’s end, our intimate friend.<br />
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Minnie Biggs actually <i>is</i> my friend, the evolution of a mentoring relationship of seven years. I met Minnie when Stephen was still alive and she was writing ‘little pieces’ about his illness, their marriage, the huge task of care-giving. From the start, I recognized the power of her writing gift: a poet’s compression, a novelist’s sense of telling detail and narrative pacing, a painter’s eye and heart. Though <i>SHARDS</i> is her first book, she has been keeping journals and writing articles throughout her life, and I discovered in this ‘novice’ a thoroughly-accomplished writer with a clear and compelling voice. As Australian social anthropologist/linguist Peter Sutton says on the book’s cover, “This book is finely crafted and just as finely felt. The light and dark patches ramp up and down orchestrally like a mighty Wurlitzer organ. She has mastered the wedding of form and feeling.”<br />
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When Minnie realized she could let go of a linear narrative structure, and allow her book to accrue in the way that geological formations and human lives do—layered, irregular, buffeted by weather, healed by rain and sun, formed as much by surprise and disaster as by any sort of conscious plan-- <i>SHARDS</i> found its form. Each vignette has its own integrity, and the ordering feels inevitable and true. We move through a mosaic of scenes: marriage; caregiving; grief; a ship’s voyage to the icy end of the Earth: the stories of Antarctic’s first brave explorers ; a pilgrimage to the Australian desert; kitchen and garden in Kurrojong.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Minnie Biggs</td></tr>
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Only a few books I know are able to meld, as Minnie Kent Biggs does, the personal with the geographic, the private with the impersonal. <i>SHARDS</i> will remind you of Robyn Davidson’s <i>TRACKS</i>, Annie Dillard’s <i>PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK</i>, Terry Tempest Williams’s REFUGE, Barry Lopez’s <i>ARCTIC DREAMS</i>. And there are also the recent works on widowhood—Joan Didion’s A <i>YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING</i> and Marion Coutts’s <i>THE ICEBERG</i> as memorable examples. Aside from Didion’s book, about which she writes, I don’t know how many of these Minnie has read. She has always been a prolific reader and likely has her own list of kindred volumes. She followed her own thread and trusted her own voice.<br />
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She realized she didn’t need to know the kind of book she was writing—grief memoir? travel book? spiritual inquiry?—but needed to be faithful to her own depth, and to trust in the coherence that would—that does—so beautifully emerge. This trust was her medicine, and becomes the reader’s, this faith that things do connect, that the centre holds, that life reveals its patternings when we feel all has been shattered and lost. Peter Sutton again: “The way she interweaves Stephen's dying, the Antarctic, and the Australian Red Centre, is brilliant. It gives the book internal contrasts that let it have three alternating faces in one.”<br />
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Here are Minnie’s words, a section from <i>SHARDS</i> in which that weaving happens with such elegance:<br />
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<i> Is anything larger than death and dying, larger than life itself? <br /> The living presence of Antarctica? On the human scale many people described Stephen as larger than life. In his soft mumbling way, he was. His points were made quietly, socratically. His conquests- men as well as many women- fell silently. His houses rose timber by brick by stone, orderly. The spaces he created, serene. The food and wine he consumed were prodigious. The air and sea miles he accumulated, before they were frequent flyer points, innumerable. The words he wrote, the fewest. The limericks he quoted, biblical. The variety of swear words he could get way with were unnoticed even by the prudish. The inspiration he spread immeasurable. Even as his body rots and the pine box starts its disintegration into the earth, even as Mr Henry carves the headstone of granite, even as we remember him with smiles and love, the Ross ice shelf mutters and groans. Ice breaks off, ice re-forms, ice recedes, ice expands. The winds blow, the snow flies, the penguins hover over their eggs, the snow petrel wings over. </i> <br />
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And later, the Australian desert offers itself as both counterpoint and twinned country, what one might imagine as irreconciliably different lands finding kinship in the writer’s wide inclusive imagination:<br />
<i>The smooth red sandstone cliffs, long vertical walls slicing into an angle, another geometry. Only the yellowy olive green of the vegetation above and below differentiates these shapes from an Antarctic ice shelf, glacier, berg. Gosses Bluff—Tnorala--is a tabular berg floating on the central Australian desert. Rising up from the flat, a straight sided monolith- it actually forms a circle- with a couple of vertical extrusions. A piece of landscape that connects these two places in my heart: red and white. Neither place really flat like deserts.</i><br />
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And of course, threaded throughout these outer journeys to place, the interior journey through marriage and illness and death and bereavement, all offered without the slightest jot of self-pity or sentimentality. In the stark beauty of Antartica, the ice-cold air, in a place where no humans ever settled, homely memories of Stephen continue to arise: <br />
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<i> Stephen also had that imperviousness to cold, or weather in general. I would urge him to take off his woolly as the day got warmer, or put on a jacket when the temperature dropped, but he would not be bothered. He simply did not feel it. Why, when I was shivering or sweating? A sort of inner discipline, long trained by strict upbringing, the Naval College and RAAF. He could cook, he could darn, sew and mend shoes with the best of them : strong skills of all explorers. He could go without food, and not worry. Much as he loved food, as the explorers did.</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEU3weneRefOg2mOkKdOvy2rqz2K_-JTN0_6RKdXePJHiLGuRsGD9xRgjyQcS2tAgvug5lhyphenhyphenXnicHjQM6yTc6_IcjTK0JOdeNKdI1vOPUklIjW3C6niuEY72vaeBd4spOpyaqmqnscpMCz/s1600/images-2.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEU3weneRefOg2mOkKdOvy2rqz2K_-JTN0_6RKdXePJHiLGuRsGD9xRgjyQcS2tAgvug5lhyphenhyphenXnicHjQM6yTc6_IcjTK0JOdeNKdI1vOPUklIjW3C6niuEY72vaeBd4spOpyaqmqnscpMCz/s400/images-2.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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Can you see what a pleasure it would have been to receive batches of pages from this beautiful book, as it was written?<br />
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I would add that Minnie Kent Biggs is an explorer herself: skilled, courageous, disciplined and at home in the wild, whether that be found in the ice or the desert or the regions of loss or a writer’s unknown territory-in-the-making. It’s a privilege and a joy to have the opportunity, here, to introduce <i>SHARDS</i> into the world out of which it has arisen.<br />
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<i>Shards of Ice</i> is available from Amazon, Book Depository and other online sellers in both print and ebook editions. <br />
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JOYCE KORNBLATT is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. For twenty years, she was Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Maryland in the U.S. Since moving to Australia, in 2003, she has been offering private writing workshops and mentoring (<a href="http://www.joycekornblatt.net/">www.joycekornblatt.net</a>). She is also a trained Hakomi psychotherapist and the founding teacher of Cloud Refuge, a Buddhist meditation community in the Blue Mountains, where she lives. (<a href="http://www.cloudrefuge.org/">www.cloudrefuge.org</a>).<br />
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MINNIE BIGGS wrote her first book at thirteen and has been writing ever since. Her marriage of 46 years ended with her husband's death and her widowhood began with the first of her journeys to Antarctica. Minnie was a founding participant and teacher at the International School of Spiritual Reading and Healing in Portugal. Born in New York, she now lives in Kurrajong, NSW. You can find her on Facebook as Minnie.Biggs.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJUEsRwSsbClGodM_L3hIwg9C_OtEOJm97eSGK4E_sjpR_X-GkC1WOqPR9zNoAccRRyhiY95HXAOLe3bU3NjuVtoNXC5tYMkVUyB5195sGYNDF7b_tFl3N7nr-rWMx_q4qe7cl_SKdQ7nc/s1600/12321286_10154371029009018_628002854685256491_n.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJUEsRwSsbClGodM_L3hIwg9C_OtEOJm97eSGK4E_sjpR_X-GkC1WOqPR9zNoAccRRyhiY95HXAOLe3bU3NjuVtoNXC5tYMkVUyB5195sGYNDF7b_tFl3N7nr-rWMx_q4qe7cl_SKdQ7nc/s400/12321286_10154371029009018_628002854685256491_n.jpg" width="400" /></a>Stephanie Dowrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17217351699603371102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-8502615832671790402015-12-17T10:18:00.000+11:002015-12-17T10:18:04.596+11:00Walter Mason on the books he'll be re-reading in 2016I recently read an article on the importance of re-reading, and I have always been an advocate of keeping your favourites on a permament rotation list. Indeed, one of the key elements in the creative writing program I teach is the re-reading of favourite books.<br />
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But I find that I only ever do this periodically - normally when I'm ill. When I'm down in the dumps the first thing I do is head for one of my old favourites and go straight to bed. I've never really read them as a corpus of formative influences, back to back.<br />
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So, first thing in 2016 I am going to do just that. Sit down and read my ... favourite books all in a row and see just what I discover about myself.<br />
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This is my selection, in no particular order:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKrEwztzQLOAP0RRneBrZcvDp9uy6IN1b3cHRqymRIs_MOidyzMLdR6quQqamQSSa3ni9kRXeST-qwPoLWswwBFWkUWIt3m0dBjdAnT_Y2HJtlmku-MfssjuAmFowNJtXqtne2PzVtJYAL/s1600/B_Pursuit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKrEwztzQLOAP0RRneBrZcvDp9uy6IN1b3cHRqymRIs_MOidyzMLdR6quQqamQSSa3ni9kRXeST-qwPoLWswwBFWkUWIt3m0dBjdAnT_Y2HJtlmku-MfssjuAmFowNJtXqtne2PzVtJYAL/s320/B_Pursuit.jpg" width="207" /></a></div>
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1. <a href="http://bagfullofbooks.com/2015/03/06/book-review-the-pursuit-of-love-by-nancy-mitford/" target="_blank"><i>The Pursuit of Love</i></a> by <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/contributors/6050/nancy-mitford" target="_blank">Nancy Mitford</a> - I have been an ardent Mitfordaphile since I was 14, but this is definitely the crowning glory of all the books. It always makes me laugh and feel happy.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHYea_Z7eK1KHIkAFcEuRfx6O1T74sfhDi3mcAmaVeJJ3dBX-xXYpLKbFTQmfil8EwsxalH3ECCWhfsu-c8QqxKLclq4BMU25daDzrzXF_yOl2OVOF5R-JvGQcSdqM3uHTQtqdVMScKASE/s1600/B_lucia_in_london_signet_1971.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHYea_Z7eK1KHIkAFcEuRfx6O1T74sfhDi3mcAmaVeJJ3dBX-xXYpLKbFTQmfil8EwsxalH3ECCWhfsu-c8QqxKLclq4BMU25daDzrzXF_yOl2OVOF5R-JvGQcSdqM3uHTQtqdVMScKASE/s320/B_lucia_in_london_signet_1971.jpg" width="194" /></a></div>
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2. <i>Lucia in London</i> by <a href="http://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/2013/07/25/e-f-benson-his-life-and-times-an-appreciation-by-walter-mason/" target="_blank">E. F. Benson</a> - Of course, the Lucia books influenced <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/products/9780141193922/letters-nancy-mitford-and-evelyn-waugh" target="_blank">Nancy Mitford</a> quite heavily, and it is because of her that I joined the cult of <a href="http://www.waltermason.com/2013/09/queen-lucia-by-e-f-benson.html" target="_blank">E. F. Benson</a>. I always think that this is the best of the novels.<br />
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3. <i>Oscar Wilde</i> by <a href="http://www.oscholars.com/TO/Specials/Ellmann/Ellmann.htm" target="_blank">Richard Ellmann</a> - This is the book that changed my life when I read it at 18. It's quite huge and takes up a lot of time, but it always offers up somjething new and fascinating with each read.<br />
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4. <i>The Quest for Corvo</i> by <a href="http://www.britishpathe.com/video/musical-boxes-2" target="_blank">A. J. A. Symons</a> - I find that I recommend this book to people more than any other, and I'm yet to meet someone who didn't love it. Literary mystery, biography and fabulous read.<br />
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5. <a href="https://www.beyondword.com/p/GentleArtOfBlessing/" target="_blank"><i>The Gentle Art of Blessing</i></a> by Pierre Pradervand - I was in <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/travel-writing/Destination-Cambodia-Walter-Mason-9781742376622" target="_blank">Cambodia writing a book</a> when I first read this, and I read it through three times in a row, it was so amazing. Utterly transforming, this has changed the course of my life in so many ways.<br />
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6. <i>Peace is Every Step</i> by Thich Nhat Hanh - I was spending a long period travelling around Thailand, having just spent some months in Vietnam staying at monasteries, when I first read this. It affected me so completely that I never really stopped reading it - it is kind of on constant rotation in my life, and I return to it on a weekly basis. It it will be good to read it cover-to-cover again.<br />
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7. <a href="https://marianne.com/a-return-to-love/" target="_blank"><i>A Return to Love</i></a> by <a href="http://marianne.com/" target="_blank">Marianne Williamson</a> - Oh, how many memories this brings back! I was young and terribly angry when I got this, but by the third page I was a changed man, and I will be forever grateful to <a href="https://twitter.com/marwilliamson" target="_blank">Marianne Williamson</a> for that. I haven't read it in years.<br />
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8. <a href="http://philipyancey.com/books/prayer-does-it-make-any-difference" target="_blank"><i>Prayer</i></a> by Philip Yancey - Unexpected, and completely engaging. Another book that changed the way I viewed the world and made me a more thoughtful, and contemplative, human being. Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-84177124849498756222015-10-28T23:08:00.000+11:002015-10-28T23:08:26.514+11:00Walter Mason suggests 11 introductory books on Buddhism <br />
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Have you ever wanted to learn more about Buddhism but don’t know where to begin?<br />
<br />Most people are shy, especially at first, to just head on down to their local <a href="http://www.universalheartbookclub.com/2012/10/walter-mason-reads-richard-c-morais.html" target="_blank">Buddhist temple</a> or centre and start asking questions. Google searches provide us with a bewildering array of choices and sometimes bizarre claims, and often the slickest websites represent the weirdest groups.<br />
<br />Probably the best thing to do is just dedicate some time to reading about <a href="http://spiritjourneythrough.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/young-spiritual-explorer.html" target="_blank">Buddhism</a>. Read across a few different schools and traditions to give yourself a real feel for the very diverse landscape of <a href="http://www.destination-saigon.com/2014/10/always-in-threes-significance-of-3-in.html" target="_blank">Buddhist thought </a>and practice. And always remember that you don’t have to accept anything just because someone tells you you should. Stay politely questioning, build up a bigger and broader understanding of Buddhism, and then move out into the real world and start exploring <a href="http://www.waltermason.com/2012/07/buddhist-maha-vihara-kuala-lumpur.html" target="_blank">Buddhist</a> practice with a community.<br />
<br />Here are some of the best introductory books to <a href="http://www.noodlies.com/2013/12/vietnam-faces-monk-thap-thap-temple-quy-nhon/" target="_blank">Buddhism</a>. It is a personal selection, and is based on years of bookselling, Buddhist practice and recommending books to friends and hearing their feedback.<br />
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<br />May you be blessed in your journey!<br /><br /><br />
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1. <i>Peace is Every Step</i> by <a href="http://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/" target="_blank">Thich Nhat Hanh</a> – A wonderfully inspiring read, this book is one that everyone would benefit from reading, Buddhist or not. In fact, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Nh%E1%BA%A5t_H%E1%BA%A1nh" target="_blank">Master Nhat Hanh</a> has had a profound influence on many non-Buddhist spiritual communities. Simple to read, practical and charming, this is a book that has changed many lives.<br />
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2. <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/pema-chodron/start-where-you-are-9781570628399.aspx" target="_blank"><i>Start Where You Are</i></a> by <a href="https://youtu.be/m7qFi52FX1Q" target="_blank">Pema Chodron</a> – This American nun in the Tibetan tradition has become such a beloved writer that I have even heard her name mentioned in mainstream sitcoms. <a href="https://youtu.be/CVRT-y2wTBY" target="_blank">Chodron</a> lead a full, relatively normal, life before she became a nun, and she draws on this as the basis for her teachings. Her books have had a profound effect on many people that I know and respect, and are a terrific read for anyone interested in the spiritual life.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCNoGOTGVJAcz48kUPQhpEq9AJbDu-OcL0HzQmMEwge5A6SI1prGDxdbLJ6Fc1GGkmUeXJ4I3c4aJBetFgidKXoPubXcdU0hbMPDzRJGds1D0FsQTpeE0W1EZyBPjroKaf1lgjS6P5snKq/s1600/B_Buddhist+Handbook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCNoGOTGVJAcz48kUPQhpEq9AJbDu-OcL0HzQmMEwge5A6SI1prGDxdbLJ6Fc1GGkmUeXJ4I3c4aJBetFgidKXoPubXcdU0hbMPDzRJGds1D0FsQTpeE0W1EZyBPjroKaf1lgjS6P5snKq/s320/B_Buddhist+Handbook.jpg" width="195" /></a></div>
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3. <i>The Buddhist Handbook</i> by John Snelling – This is practical, and the sort of thing you use as a reference rather than sit down and read. It is probably the book you have by your side as you are reading the other titles on this list. Nonetheless, it is certainly the best and most exhaustive guide to Buddhist ideas and culture. It has settled many an argument, and I still look at it a few times a year. Invaluable.<br />
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4. <i>In this Very Life</i> by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Pandita" target="_blank">Sayadaw U Pandita</a> – A brilliant and no-holds-barred guide to the Burmese meditation tradition, I found this book incredibly liberating when I first read it. It is also a tremendous kick up the bum – reminding us that we don’t have all that much time left on earth, so we’d best start improving ourselves now.<br />
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5. <i>Lovingkindness</i> by <a href="https://youtu.be/lMS6gjd5INg" target="_blank">Sharon Salzberg</a> – A tremendous, beautiful book that I have read many times. Though it comes from a Buddhist perspective (<a href="https://twitter.com/sharonsalzberg" target="_blank">Salzberg</a> is a teacher in the <a href="http://www.sharonsalzberg.com/about/" target="_blank">Insight tradition</a>) it has much broader appeal, and is a beautifully written and deeply meditative examination of the <a href="http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nanamoli/wheel007.html" target="_blank">Buddhist ideal of lovingkindess</a>. Again, it is one that has been read and loved by Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike and has gained the status of spiritual classic.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi30XWA9NSm-ob9DleYEM8WDKWTk2Xgetar59NYUf_vYWqHqX74jfWN6uj8tXg0kLxD3TOJy9qPtOLxNybAjwXTE9ohp9xmy7PD4ZF4mRQnR9muxARYmoWEAPswhUCeO31Ay6DOm0XvuLmT/s1600/B_discovering-kwan-yin-buddhist-goddess-of-compassion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi30XWA9NSm-ob9DleYEM8WDKWTk2Xgetar59NYUf_vYWqHqX74jfWN6uj8tXg0kLxD3TOJy9qPtOLxNybAjwXTE9ohp9xmy7PD4ZF4mRQnR9muxARYmoWEAPswhUCeO31Ay6DOm0XvuLmT/s1600/B_discovering-kwan-yin-buddhist-goddess-of-compassion.jpg" /></a></div>
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6. <i>Discovering Kwan Yin</i> by <a href="https://youtu.be/BtBVIBfP1Cg" target="_blank">Sandy Boucher</a> – Buddhist books in English are big on theory and meditative practise, but frequently make no mention of popular traditions of devotion. This can be bewildering for the book-learned Buddhist who travels to Asia and is suddenly confronted by deep levels of devotion that they were unprepared for. Boucher’s book is quite unique in that it discusses practical methods of devotion to Kwan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, one of the most popular figures in Buddhist Asia. It’s a great book and really very informative. I would also recommend John Blofeld’s older, but still very beautiful and fascinating, <i>The Bodhisattva of Compassion</i>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK-UQxbb8bQdh8HzjhYMUCxR-jWNDMv_Mppu2aFHbgXF5ubCLzW_n5RgCs1H3nP3TfuK0an-NZwyrmRPZtDulChD6OdOqOS9k_BYzboeC_yYInTz-IjvYQaD9gUTbkuG1ly5DGRXwSEgHy/s1600/The-Monks-and-Me.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK-UQxbb8bQdh8HzjhYMUCxR-jWNDMv_Mppu2aFHbgXF5ubCLzW_n5RgCs1H3nP3TfuK0an-NZwyrmRPZtDulChD6OdOqOS9k_BYzboeC_yYInTz-IjvYQaD9gUTbkuG1ly5DGRXwSEgHy/s400/The-Monks-and-Me.jpg" width="257" /></a></div>
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7. <a href="http://www.universalheartbookclub.com/2013/06/walter-mason-reads-mary-patersons-monks.html" target="_blank"><i>The Monks and Me</i></a> by Mary Paterson – A personal memoir of what it’s like to really embrace Buddhism and go away on a long spiritual retreat in a monastic setting. This is the real thing, very honest and very inspiring, It’s about what it’s like to live in a more compassionate way and deal with the cultural shifts that are involved when a Westerner begins exploring Buddhism. And it’s also just a really fun read.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS9nUU2A-f7BDeiIM_N0i-7u0wlQ8Brik32jawWr5MkSvblEv-jdzkkjs7s6zPIuv0owYqm2ZZl-9Bj4ybMxHPuWN9AYJaFsqvu-1SZH2JdiBT8BgB4AbmWle98y90f5STi2PT4m0X-lGv/s1600/B_Ground+we+share.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS9nUU2A-f7BDeiIM_N0i-7u0wlQ8Brik32jawWr5MkSvblEv-jdzkkjs7s6zPIuv0owYqm2ZZl-9Bj4ybMxHPuWN9AYJaFsqvu-1SZH2JdiBT8BgB4AbmWle98y90f5STi2PT4m0X-lGv/s320/B_Ground+we+share.JPG" width="207" /></a></div>
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8. <i>The Ground We Share</i> by Robert Aitken and <a href="http://blog.ted.com/want-to-be-happy-be-grateful-brother-david-steindl-rast-at-tedglobal-2013/" target="_blank">David Steindl-Rast</a> – If you have grown up with a Christian (particularly Catholic) background then you will find this book absolutely fascinating and deeply reassuring. A dialogue between a modern American Zen master (founder of the <a href="http://diamondsangha.org/" target="_blank">Diamond Sangha</a>) and a Benedictine monk, this is an examination of the points at which Buddhism and Christianity find common ground and share a mutual regard.<br />
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9. <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/dhammapada/" target="_blank"><i>The Dhammapada</i></a> – An official “holy book” of the Buddhist canon, <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/buddha/the-dhammapada-9780812977271.aspx" target="_blank"><i>The Dhammpada</i></a> reads more like what you’d expect religious literature to. It is, in fact, the most famous excerpt from the Pali Canon, the ancient library of Buddhist texts that serves as the beginning point for all of the schools of Buddhism. It is a concise explication of Buddhism, and normally seen as the best explanation of the religious philosophy. It is very brief, but there are some terrible, old-fashioned translations out there which are impossibly dull. Nonetheless, it is essential reading, and is the kind of thing that can be read slowly and meditatively, a passage at a time. These days, I turn to it constantly, and its brevity is really quite brilliant.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5FHsGzXiH7DhT-s11Ayagesrq_QEfccCnkA9aVzpebWvqHVz5hS8oeRb3LUX3gSUxc-H0iEsaZqmR_GMEgBqzbZLyhyphenhyphenGvX2q6CNcvQseoi68SoxlwCWDnE9DYhj8xxkJ4Q6TUmtkB7KJU/s1600/B_ajahn-tate-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5FHsGzXiH7DhT-s11Ayagesrq_QEfccCnkA9aVzpebWvqHVz5hS8oeRb3LUX3gSUxc-H0iEsaZqmR_GMEgBqzbZLyhyphenhyphenGvX2q6CNcvQseoi68SoxlwCWDnE9DYhj8xxkJ4Q6TUmtkB7KJU/s400/B_ajahn-tate-2.jpg" width="322" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ajahn Tate</td></tr>
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10. <i>The Autobiography of a Forest Monk</i> by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajahn_Thate" target="_blank">Venerable Ajahn Tate</a> – Reasonably obscure in English, it is a constantly fascinating account of what it was like to be a wandering Forest monk in Thailand in the early 20th century. It provides an excellent insight into popular Buddhist belief in the <a href="http://www.dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=Theravada_Buddhists_in_the_World" target="_blank">Theravada world</a>, and is a fantastic introduction to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_in_Thailand" target="_blank">popular Thai Buddhism</a>. It is also an engaging read all on its own.<br />
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11. <i>The Vision of the Buddha</i> by Tom Lowenstein – A gorgeous, gorgeous little book. Richly illustrated, it is out of print now but you can always find copies on abebooks.com I used to give copies of this as gifts to monks, and they always loved it. An illustrated guide to the Buddhist world, it is educational and, given its size, remarkably exhaustive. If you just read this book alone you would have an excellent idea of the richness and diversity of the Buddhist world and its various schools and philosophies. <br /><br />Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-63700766966285646322015-07-20T15:21:00.002+10:002015-07-20T15:21:49.886+10:00Understanding the mysterious country of Bhutan with Jamie Zeppa's Beyond the Sky and the Earth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcj4RyAi7swB3y5Z7qwaP0Rh6vfrLLn-lVh7WM5KlHutsFEEC5TJV66tHyPP6USQ5_BTL25xKyUNrBJcen8ebuPP6nvyoEYAD4c-Hd1TU91Jq8J6Cv5r0t3Qa69oCYNvKxIOuMWcg5xnAq/s1600/B_Beyond_the_Sky_and_Earth_front_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcj4RyAi7swB3y5Z7qwaP0Rh6vfrLLn-lVh7WM5KlHutsFEEC5TJV66tHyPP6USQ5_BTL25xKyUNrBJcen8ebuPP6nvyoEYAD4c-Hd1TU91Jq8J6Cv5r0t3Qa69oCYNvKxIOuMWcg5xnAq/s320/B_Beyond_the_Sky_and_Earth_front_cover.jpg" width="214" /></a></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><a href="https://www.clippings.me/akblunt" target="_blank">Ashley Kalagian Blunt</a> reviews one of the few books about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhutan" target="_blank">Kingdom of Bhutan</a>.</b></blockquote>
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Renowned as the “Last <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangri-La" target="_blank">Shangri-La</a>,” a reputation fuelled by its government’s creation and pursuit of <a href="http://epubs.scu.edu.au/bus_tourism_pubs/80/" target="_blank">Gross National Happiness</a>, <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/09/15/3318484.htm" target="_blank">Bhutan</a> has piqued international interest in recent years. The reality of this tiny Himalayan nation is far more complex than glib coverage of GNH can reveal, as <a href="http://www.jamiezeppa.com/" target="_blank">Jamie Zeppa</a>’s engaging but at times discomfiting <a href="http://www.jamiezeppa.com/books-beyond.html" target="_blank"><i>Beyond The Sky and The Earth: A Journey into Bhutan </i></a>shows. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.jamiezeppa.com/bio.html" target="_blank">Zeppa</a>’s memoir is a present-tense account of her two years as an expat teacher in Bhutan. From Toronto, Zeppa has experienced little outside metropolitan North America. Her knowledge of Bhutan comes from black and white photos found in library books – it’s the late 1980s, so her access to further information is limited. <br /><br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Sky_and_Earth" target="_blank">Zeppa</a> conveys a powerful sense of <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/bhutan27s-transition-to-the-modern-world/6429964" target="_blank">Bhutan</a>’s renowned beauty. At first, the mudslides, the remoteness of her posting, the lack of electricity and the potential for foodborne-illness slow her appreciation of her new home. She writes, “I have done nothing but worry since I arrived in <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-07/bhutan-look-to-australia-for-workforce-help/6451476" target="_blank">Bhutan</a>, two and a half months ago. … I live in a tiny cramped room of what-if.”<br /><br />As she connects with her students and neighbours, however, Zeppa begins down a path of deep transformation. The memoir’s most compelling story is her transition from secular Western urbanite to eager student of eastern thought and Buddhist practice. She discovers and practises mindfulness, teaching herself to overcome homesick feelings. She comes to understand that “<a href="http://www.kingdomofbhutan.com/kingdom/kingdom_2_.html" target="_blank">Buddhist</a> practice offers systematic tools for anyone to work out their own salvation. Here, the <a href="https://youtu.be/PgTlozxa7gk" target="_blank">Buddha</a> said, you’ve got your own mind, the source of all your problems, but also the source of your liberation. Use it. Look at your life. Figure it out.”<br />
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The narrative style eloquently traces her efforts to adjust to cultural quirks that at first she finds unfathomable – such as returning home to find a houseful of guests. Still, she struggles, particularly with the policy of beating students for punishment. “I remind myself that this is not my country, not my education system. … it is part of a bigger cultural system, it involves different values. You can only judge it from your perspective, from your own cultural background and upbringing, and even if you are right, what can you do about it? Back and forth I argue right-wrong, east-west, judgment is possible-impossible.”<br /><br />This difficulty is magnified when political problems ripple across <a href="https://youtu.be/Goq4F5-eVyw" target="_blank">Bhutan</a>. <a href="http://jamie-zeppa.blogspot.com.au/" target="_blank">Zeppa</a> happened to be in <a href="http://www.buddhistmonksbhutan.com/" target="_blank">Bhutan</a> as the issues between the ethnic-Bhutanese ruling class in the north and the settled Nepali migrant population in the south disintegrated. Eventually, nearly 100,000 ethnic Nepalis were forced out of Bhutan, an instance of ethnic cleansing that is rarely mentioned in news stories touting the Gross National Happiness model. <a href="http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/authors/34086/jamie-zeppa" target="_blank">Zeppa</a> describes the difficulty of understanding what is happening around her as the situation becomes more violent. <br /><br />Throughout the book, <a href="https://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/07/12/bhutan-an-interview-with-jamie-zeppa/" target="_blank">Zeppa</a>’s voice matures along with her understanding of <a href="http://wanderlustandlipstick.com/blogs/debbysdepartures/2012/03/24/buddha-dordenma-in-bhutan-everlasting-happiness-and-enlightenment/" target="_blank">Bhutan</a> both as a mythical Shangri-La and as a troubled nation beset by the same challenges of identity and belonging playing out around the world. Zeppa’s ability to interrogate both herself and the culture around her with curiosity and compassion make this book a memorable read. <br />
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Ashley Kalagian Blunt is a <a href="http://goo.gl/yqblY3" target="_blank">writer</a>, <a href="http://goo.gl/4Yaic8" target="_blank">reviewer</a> and <a href="http://goo.gl/35iCjl" target="_blank">trainer</a>. Originally from Canada, she now lives in Sydney where she is an enthusiastic member of that city's literary underworld. Ashley teaches creative writing, speaking and self-development. She has been published in <a href="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/settling-the-e-books-vs-direct-to-brain-digital-text-streaming-argument" target="_blank">McSweeney's</a> and the <a href="https://griffithreview.atavist.com/life-after-genocide" target="_blank">Griffith Review</a>. </blockquote>
Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-66073190396404410632015-07-01T22:29:00.000+10:002015-07-01T22:29:19.540+10:00Greater awareness from Irvin Yalom's classic account of psychotherapy in action, Love's Executioner<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<a href="http://www.jasminerae.com/" target="_blank">Jasmine Rae</a> reviews <a href="http://members.australiacounselling.com.au/podcasts/creatures-of-a-day-irvin-d-yalom/" target="_blank">Irvin D. Yalom</a>'s acclaimed examination of life's big topics. </blockquote>
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<b><i>Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy</i> by Irvin D Yalom</b><br />
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<br /><br /><br /><i>Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy</i> was recommended to me by a wonderful person, a counsellor who was offering some group grief counselling which I gratefully accepted after the loss of my beautiful Dad in 2012. I went out and purchased the book straight away but as life goes (at least for me) I didn't actually open it until 18 months later. From that moment I simply couldn't put it down. It felt like gold in my hands, like a portal to my innermost thoughts and fears and a connection to others who felt the same way. The words flowed so easily and somehow humorously across some big topics like life, purpose, relationships, our relationship with ourselves, and the inevitable end of life. It was nothing like I had imagined it to be. I laughed out loud in parts and was hanging on the edge of my seat most of the time. It was honest and in tune with what I had secretly always wanted to talk about, but would rarely allow myself to, for fear of seeming 'negative'.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Irvin D. Yalom</i></td></tr>
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Irvin D Yalom is a world renowned psychotherapist and author of both fiction and non fiction. <i>Love's Executioner</i> is a tale of 10 patients seeking therapy for similar reasons but at very different stages of life. I could identify with each of the 10 characters on a human level and when learning about their triumphs, I celebrated with them. When reading about their struggles, I cried with them and learned from them. It was also empowering to know that the man writing these discoveries was also very candid about his own struggles with what he labels "existential pain" and "death anxiety." I hope these labels don't scare you away from this book, they are spoken about so openly in these pages that it feels liberating to discuss them and it becomes apparent that nobody is a stranger to them. Knowing that even the most psychologically-equipped of us has their own journey in the same direction as everyone else was very comforting. <br /><br /><br />After reading <i>Love's Executioner </i>I was more solid in my belief that being aware of my own mortality doesn't make me a morbid person. For me, it makes every day and every lesson after every mistake so much sweeter. I won't get to be on this 'journey' we call life forever. I also won't always have the opportunity to possess this vessel (my little 4 ft 9 inch body) to get around in, to see things, to meet people, to READ, and create. So there's no better time to do the things I've always wanted to do… right now… while now is still mine for the taking. <br />
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<br /><b>About the reviewer:</b><br />
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<b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasmine_Rae" target="_blank">Jasmine Rae</a> is one of Australia's most acclaimed country music artists. She has toured all over Australia and overseas. She has had many #1 singles in the Australian country music charts and has been nominated for Aria and Golden Guitar awards. Her latest album is <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/au/album/heartbeat/id975125584" target="_blank"><i>Heartbeat</i></a>.</b></blockquote>
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<br /> Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-88194915998003869962015-05-31T22:30:00.000+10:002015-06-06T15:48:40.608+10:00Inspired by Julia Cameron's memoir of a writing year, The Creative Life<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Walter Mason reviews Julia Cameron's charming account of a year of creative frustration in New York City. </blockquote>
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<i><b>“I’m sixty-one years old, a veteran writer, I still get scared, and I am safe.”</b></i></blockquote>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Julia Cameron</td></tr>
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<a href="http://juliacameronlive.com/about-julia-cameron/" target="_blank">Julia Cameron</a> has become such a sage for so many writers that almost anything she writes about writing becomes an instant classic. The same goes for <a href="http://juliacameronlive.com/books-by-julia/the-creative-life/" target="_blank"><i>The Creative Life</i></a>, her 2010 diary of a year spent struggling with writing and meeting with and encouraging more creatively productive friends. There is something meta about the book in that she describes the process of writing the book you are reading and how it came to take its present form. It is a book about not being able to write a book, and this book is the finished product. And as such it is totally fascinating.<br />
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<a href="https://twitter.com/j_cameronlive" target="_blank">Cameron</a>’s life is filled with creative people doing amazing things, some famous and some less so. She writes enthusiastically, for example, about her brothers new CD and her pride in his musical accomplishments. She describes his humble pleasure in her praise, reminding us all that our encouragement of other creative people is always needed, though it might only be hastily noted. Though the recipient may be shy or embarrassed, one’s words of praise always have an effect. <br />
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I remember years ago reading about her idyllic life in <a href="http://www.thestarfish.com.au/us-road-trip-taos-new-mexico/" target="_blank">Taos</a>, New Mexico. But in this book it becomes clear that Taos was to become a place of sorrow for Cameron, the site of a creative and mental breakdown so serious that she feels she can never return there. An enthusiastic old friend comes to New York City and urges her to re-visit: <br />
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<i><b>“"Taos has become a writer’s mecca,” he tells me. He describes the new café and coffee bar that is ideal for writing. “You’d love it,” he concludes, knowing that I made a habit of writing in Dori’s bakery, now defunct.”</b></i></blockquote>
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Here we are in thorough Cameronian territory – going outside to write, being in the world and an observer of the world. This is what the whole of <a href="http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/books/reviews/view/20208" target="_blank"><i>The Creative Life</i></a> is about: turning one’s own life into “material.” She renders the quotidian delicately poignant, occasionally remarkable and always fascinating. This is what makes her such an extraordinary writer and not just another self-help guru with a couple of good ideas. And the ideas keep popping up in this book, though it is in no sense intended to be a practical manual of writing tips. They emerge through the course of her description, and are often attributed to other people (a hallmark of Cameron’s honesty, integrity and generosity). Having attended a wonderful concert of American song, her flatmate and composer friend says:<br />
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<i><b>“That is what I’m meant to be doing,” Emma whispers excitedly as we file out: “I think I should write ninety songs in ninety days again.”</b></i><br />
<i><b>“Maybe I’ll join you at that,” I respond.</b></i></blockquote>
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Ninety songs in ninety days! A wonderful idea, though I will probably never write a song, not having the skills. Still, it caused me to take up my notebook and scribble down the possible alternatives: ninety blog posts in ninety days, ninety essays in ninety days, ninety poems in ninety days or even, most ambitiously, ninety chapters in ninety days. It is the idea of such self-encapsulated, easily grasped projects that is so stimulating to the creative mind, and it is <a href="http://blog.kamersvol.com/2013/06/01/discover-your-creativity-with-the-artists-way/" target="_blank">Cameron</a>’s genius that she recognises this. Putting a time limit and quantity on something works like magic, just as the length and structure of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novena" target="_blank">novena</a> inspires those wanting to pray more. <br />
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The experience of ageing is, <a href="https://youtu.be/dfF3YQWnCHE" target="_blank">Cameron</a> suggests, is one that doesn’t diminish our creative capacities but instead increases them: <br />
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<i><b>“Plainly, Tracy doesn’t like “taking it easy.” I remember her cantering through the woods in Central Park. I remember her flying through traffic on her roller skates. It occurs to me that Tracey must hold similar images of me. I no longer own a horse, and I no longer roller-skate. Tracy and I hold each other’s daredevil history. Our adventures now are artistic, not physical.”</b></i></blockquote>
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<i>The Creative Life</i> is a terrific read, from beginning to end, and one of those rare books that I felt I always had to run back to in order to read just one more page. It is a book about friendship, eating, meeting others and looking for creative stimulation on the work of others. It is about the art of conversation and how more successful companions should be inspirations rather than sources of envy. It is a book about what inspires and how to allow yourself to be inspired, and a wonderful antidote to some of the cynicism of this occasionally confusing existence. <br />
<br />Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-16660867515246611912015-05-30T15:50:00.001+10:002015-05-31T08:33:09.132+10:00Discovering the brilliant novel, The Book of Salt by Monique Truong<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b> Dr Stephanie Dowrick reviews Monique Truong's </b></div>
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<b>quite brilliantly imagined novel, <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780618446889?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>The Book of Salt</i></a></b></div>
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How fortunate we are in this Book Club that we are not locked in to reviewing the "latest". Our freedom is to review what we are currently excited about and that certainly describes my response to Monique Truong's quite brilliantly imagined novel, <i>The Book of Salt</i>.<br />
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It was recommended to me some time ago by Walter Mason, my co-host here on this book club website, and I bought it immediately but then let it sit for some time on my shelves until I was traveling and could give it the attention he assured me it would deserve. And it does! Oh, indeed it does. The novel is enchanting and immensely skillful. It evokes a most fascinating time (Paris in the 1930s) with strongly evocative glimpses back to a Vietnam occupied by the French where our narrator, Binh (though that is not his real name), was never going to fit.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">1930s Vietnam</td></tr>
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Binh is, through the life of the novel, cook to surrealist writer Gertrude Stein and her companion-wife Alice B. Toklas. He is their cook. They are his "Mesdames". That famous pair emerge strongly here - much of the novel revolves around their Paris lives - but they emerge with unexpected weaknesses as well as vulnerabilities. Truong is masterful in how she lets little bits of their stories and especially the portrait of their relationship slip onto the page, like sand slipping through the cracks between fingers. The women's shared, passionate devotion to one another, and their unquestioning devotion to the genius of the one Binh calls GertrudeStein, is never over-played. There is distance here, and even a kind of forgiveness of the ignorance that allows the women flamboyantly to pet and spoil their obnoxious dogs while ignoring the pain of their talented, highly sensitive, exiled-from-home-and-family cook.<br />
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Many readers will be attracted to this novel to know more about the quite fascinating Stein and Toklas. They will get that in plenty. And they will be given and will "get" the uneasy decade that preceded the "impossible" Second World War. But what few readers will predict is the pitch-perfect portrait of Binh. Servants - like Binh - are valued, but always conditionally and highly superficially. If their work is not "up to scratch", they cease to exist as valued people. The images of exile flow through this novel like incoming tides. Binh is homosexual (long before anyone was "gay"). The risks of this, especially for an "Asiatique" who was neither wealthy nor valued for anything but his culinary talents, made him almost as vulnerable in Paris as he has been in Vietnam.<br />
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Truong writes like a poet but tells stories like a master. She never lets the reader go; she never abandons or sentimentalises Binh. In an <a href="http://www.lambdaliterary.org/interviews/08/26/monique-truong/" target="_blank">interview a few years</a> ago she was asked about how she builds character. Her reply:<br />
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<i>I begin with a character who fascinates me. I focus first on that character’s voice. Reading aloud is a large part of my writing process because I want to “hear” my characters. So far, I’ve written novels only in the first person voice. I don’t see that changing. I like the limitations of the first person voice. I like working within the restrictions of a particular character’s vocabulary and emotional range or lack thereof. I’m also a firm believer that for every story there are many other versions of that story that are not being told. The first person voice, for me, is all about highlighting that sharing and withholding.</i> <br />
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The story of Binh that Truong tells - no, brings fully to life - is a story rarely told. The creative playfulness of pitching this next to the story of Stein and Toklas - over-feted, over-valued, at least in literary terms - takes nothing from the seriousness of this writer's intent, nor from the immense satisfaction of reading her exquisite novel. The blurb for <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780618446889?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>The Book of Salt </i></a>also draws our attention to the walk-on roles of Paul Robeson and the very young Ho Chi Minh. But it's the life that Truong gives to the invisible Binh and to all the countless and uncounted other Binhs that moved me most. Brilliant? Yes.<br />
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<i>Dr Stephanie Dowrick co-hosts this book club and is herself a widely published writer. Please consider using our book store links to give a small returning % to us for admin. (All our reviews are voluntary.) The direct link for this book is <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780618446889?a=stpdow" target="_blank">HERE</a>. Your comments are welcome. You can find <a href="https://www.facebook.com/StephanieDowrick" target="_blank">Stephanie</a> and also Walter Mason on Facebook. They also both blog on their own websites and contribute widely to the media.</i></div>
<br />Stephanie Dowrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17217351699603371102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-8011875404749067502015-04-20T15:15:00.000+10:002015-05-30T15:57:38.295+10:00A fascinating slide between fact and fiction: Ashley Kalagian Blunt reviews HHhH<br />
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I started <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHhH" target="_blank"><i>HHhH</i></a> with skepticism. A publisher had recommended it to me, with an implied ‘if your work was more like this …’ An early rejection I’d received had likewise included a recommended title, but I’d found that one unreadable. <br />
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurent_Binet" target="_blank">Laurent Binet</a>’s debut novel, in contrast, compelled me to read straight through. In short, it’s the true story of the assassination attempt on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Heydrich" target="_blank">Reinhard Heydrich</a>, chief of the Nazi secret services, by two Czechoslovak resistance fighters in 1942. The book is marketed as a novel – as fiction – but aside from a few imagined scenes based on as much historical fact as could be acquired, it is very much non-fiction. Binet ensures readers are aware of that by writing himself into the story. He creates a parallel narrative in which he depicts the struggle to keep this history alive as it was. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Heydrich" target="_blank">Reinhard Heydrich</a></td></tr>
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As his story develops, he mentions other books about the same events – written as historical fiction, with imagined scenes and dialogue filling in the gaps, imagined thoughts filling the characters’ heads. Though well researched, <a href="https://youtu.be/9VPxu92-hEo" target="_blank">Binet </a>admits, these books make him uncomfortable. He dislikes the tactic of turning real people into characters and making them think in languages they didn’t even know.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Laurent Binet</td></tr>
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<a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/must-read-laurent-binets-hhhh/articleshow/40798702.cms" target="_blank">Binet</a> works to draw every scene, every bit of dialogue in <i>HHhH</i> from historical records. As narrator, he reveals his obsession for bringing history to life through passionate attention to minute detail – was the colour of <a href="https://www.private-prague-guide.com/article/assassination-of-reinhard-heydrich/" target="_blank">Heydrich</a>’s car black or dark green? And does this matter? – and he delivers all this with a keen sense of story. Binet weaves the threads of characters’ – peoples’ – lives with driving force. <br />
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So we have the story of Heydrich, the man who, of all those in the Nazi hierarchy, was the one to oversee the bureaucratic creation of ‘the Final Solution.’ We have the assassination attempt on Heydrich (and if don’t already know how it turned out, I won’t spoil it for you; Binet builds the assassination to a sharp climax). We also have the story of the narrator, the author, who has researched his heroes and villains with equal diligence and cheers on his heroes with admiration and affection. Binet compares the heroes of his book to fictional heroes, concluding they ‘are less scrupulous … because they are real people, both greater and more flawed than any fictional character.’<br />
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Throughout the book, Binet comments on his own writing – informing readers which details are wholly accurate, which ones he had to guess at, and why, if he had to guess, he felt they should be included. This style of writing might drive some readers crazy – they might wish to experience the story (historically accurate or not) without the author constantly interrupting. Perhaps it’s because I’ve battled some of these same issues in my own writing that I find Binet’s explanations, qualifications and hypotheses so fascinating. But I think I would appreciate Binet’s work regardless. It’s like being invited to watch a play from backstage, or to view the complex, mysterious innards of a jet engine. These inner workings make the experience more intimate. <br />
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The short chapters of <i>HHhH </i>help to create its fast pace. The 257 chapters are on average less than two pages each (which is likely why the book contains no page numbers, an inconvenient formatting style despite the short, numbered chapters). The narrator struggles to understand his book even as it is rushing forward. By chapter 205, he states, ‘I think I’m beginning to understand. What I’m writing is an infranovel’ – by which he seems to mean a novel that allows us to peer into the black hole of history. Note that these two sentences make up all of chapter 205 – and still, it’s not the shortest chapter. <br />
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Binet cares so deeply for his story, particularly for its heroes, that he occasionally slips into imagining himself alongside them, or even as them. As he says, for him this story is personal. He allows himself into his heroes’ narrative only momentarily, but works to bring us closer to the characters and Binet, as well as his struggle to represent them. In his dramatic final scene, when it’s clear the resistance fighters can’t escape the SS soldiers who come for them (and though Binet reveals this outcome in the early pages of the book, this climax is still full of drama), Binet pauses to imagine a different ending for them. It’s this complex relationship between Binet and his story that make <i>HHhH</i> a powerful book. <br />
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<i>About the reviewer</i><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFN-voGLYRGND6GtKlyLhpIDeqFQCymCuGJ4xEeem-ZBlnZemksucEWoNhnDmTUPrRbSflDPcoEZyXUxegTXJGbBFEYoLfQuQQQblPYNoTK1XEbn5WGZ2FAkQPeC3oZmaG6tyDnb5L1QrA/s1600/B_Ashley-headshot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFN-voGLYRGND6GtKlyLhpIDeqFQCymCuGJ4xEeem-ZBlnZemksucEWoNhnDmTUPrRbSflDPcoEZyXUxegTXJGbBFEYoLfQuQQQblPYNoTK1XEbn5WGZ2FAkQPeC3oZmaG6tyDnb5L1QrA/s1600/B_Ashley-headshot.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Robert Srjararian</td></tr>
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Ashley Kalagian Blunt is a Sydney resident originally from Canada. Her Armenia memoir, "The Pomegranate's Daughter" has just won a publisher
introduction fellowship through Varuna, the National Writers' House in the Blue Mountains near Sydney.<br />
<br />Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-77756720819618749842015-03-19T08:23:00.001+11:002015-04-13T16:26:54.064+10:00A liberating understanding of grief: Stephanie Dowrick on The Rules of Inheritance <br />
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Can there be anything more difficult to experience - or write about - than profound grief? I'd say not. It was the theme of my own first novel, <i>Running Backwards Over Sand</i>. It is also, and more directly, the theme of Claire Bidwell Smith's immensely accomplished memoir, <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781472214317?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>The Rules of Inheritance</i></a>. In this book she writes not just about the death of one parent, relatively early in life, but two. An only child of her parents' devoted marriage, her "aloneness" is overwhelming. It is the aloneness of loss; it is also the very specific gnawing isolation of seemingly everlasting grief.<br />
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Smith uses a non-linear but highly persuasive structure to tell her story of love, regret, shame, tenacity, foolishness, courage and insight. In less skilled hands, this could be distracting. Smith, though, is a natural story-teller. We can trust her as a writer in ways she clearly did not trust herself for many years. Her long, winding, patchy road to living fruitfully and positively is immensely recognizable in its very patchiness and her structure - which is totally within her command - supports this. Comprehension, awareness, an increase in consciousness: these all take time, commitment and a surrender to story in the deepest meaning of that word.<br />
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How do we contract, expand; construct, destruct; investigate, know? None of this is achieved through the conscious mind only which is in part why an account of grief as accomplished and as persistent as Smith's will be of such value to so many readers. "There isn't a right way to grieve," she writes. And, soon after, "But if you haven't been through a major loss, the the truth is that you just don't know what to say to someone who has." Grief takes one to a different country. Abandoned there - not least by the absence of the person or people you are grieving - many of us behave in ways that may later shame us. Recklessness is often part of a grief story, especially among the young. It was certainly part of my own story and in Smith's persistence with dangerously unhealthy relationships, and the depression that never cleared even while she studied, worked, lived and even loved, many readers will see themselves.<br />
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Here is a writer forced by the depth of her intelligence as well as her losses to understand not just her own grief, but grief itself. That understanding is of real service to us all, to all who are brave enough to love fully...to know and not avoid knowing that death is part of love as well as essential to physical existence.<br />
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I am filing this review from my iPad, with all the restrictions of this otherwise handy little tablet. I will add images when back at my desk (now done!). But my message is clear. I am moved by this book. I am deeply moved by the author's hard won insights and the depth of her commitment in bringing them to the page. My impulse to write this review before returning to my office in a couple of weeks is two-fold. Perhaps it is the very book that will be the companion you need; it is a companion. And also, and more personally, I have been thinking a great deal about my Writers' Workshop class of 2014, some of whom are newly engaged in deep memoir writing. There is, for them and other writers, much to gain and learn here about the "piecing" together of anyone's story. In that, and in so many other ways, The Rules of Inheritance opens up for us some of the...not rules, but experiences that enable healing, connection, understanding. It is always Claire's story; in its depth and breadth of emotion and enquiry, it is - in moments and parts enough - also ours.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Claire Bidwell Smith</td></tr>
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<i>About the reviewer</i><br />
Dr Stephanie Dowrick is the author of many books including <i><a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781743317501?a=stpdow" target="_blank">Seeking the Sacred</a> </i>and <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781760111106?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>Forgiveness and Other Acts of Love</i></a>. She teaches writing for the Faber Writing Academy in Sydney and co-hosts this Book Club. You can comment on her<a href="https://www.facebook.com/StephanieDowrick" target="_blank"> public Facebook page</a>, or follow her there for inspirational teachings. <i>The Rules of Inheritance</i> is available POSTAGE FREE from this <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781472214317?a=stpdow" target="_blank">LINK</a>.Stephanie Dowrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17217351699603371102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-26721630180229089612015-02-22T10:27:00.000+11:002015-02-22T10:47:07.410+11:00How to Stay Married: A deliciously honest look at travel, marriage and the romantic requirements of a new era<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This is a fascinating book, an at times alarmingly candid memoir of courtship and marriage in later life framed around a long and relationship-challenging holiday around the world. It begins with an open letter to all of those who have a desire to find a partner, and the author <a href="http://www.universalheartbookclub.com/2013/09/mary-lou-stephens-on-book-that-changed.html" target="_blank">Mary-Lou Stephens</a> wants you to know that once a man (or woman) is in the house, the really hard work is just beginning. “Relationships that last are not easy,” she counsels. “Getting to the place where you feel safe and happy is a journey.”<br />
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And <a href="http://maryloustephens.com.au/books/stay-married/" target="_blank"><i>How to Stay Married</i></a> is an account of one such journey. Many of you will know <a href="http://www.waltermason.com/2013/04/sex-drugs-and-meditation-could-you.html" target="_blank">Mary-Lou</a>’s work from her previous memoir, a truly exceptional account of spiritual awakening called <a href="http://maryloustephens.com.au/books/sex-drugs-and-meditation/" target="_blank"><i>Sex, Drugs and Meditation</i></a>. That is one of my very favourite books of recent years, and this follow up is a very satisfying work indeed for anyone who enjoys her confessional style and gentle, honest wisdom.<br />
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At the outset we are warned that this will be a book that pulls no punches in discussing the fallibility of human relationship, particularly when it is romantic and sexual in nature. <a href="http://youtu.be/uFEYMpVPdfk" target="_blank">Mary-Lou</a> confesses to being a rule follower but secret resenter, and this passive-aggressive capacity (one at which Australians, myself included, excel) is turned on her hapless husband who bungles travel arrangements and is too confident in his own abilities. It begins the round of revealing stories that need to be read occasionally rough one’s fingers – is she really saying that about her husband? Has he read the book? It makes for a compelling and utterly absorbing read. (And, for the record, he has read the book, and gave the author complete carte blanche to say whatever she wanted to about their relationship). <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mary-Lou Stephens</td></tr>
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Mary-Lou pulls no punches in depicting the unusual suite of anxieties we bring to our romantic endeavours in the 21st Century. How to refer to one’s relationship, for example. He hated to be “the boyfriend’ and she hated the ambiguity of “my partner,” and so marriage became a way to resolve linguistic worries. And then there’s the question of desire, or at least its direction. On first meeting her future husband she had mistakenly assumed he was gay, and so almost missed the opportunity to connect with her life partner. <br />
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At one point in this book the author and her husband go to spend some time at the famous <a href="http://news.stv.tv/north/201053-north-east-spiritual-community-celebrates-its-50th-anniversary/" target="_blank">Findhorn spiritual community</a> in Scotland. This place, famous for its nature spirits and giant cabbages, is brilliantly evoked by Stephens as she recounts the blandness of a communal setting, and the unexpected jealousies and annoyances that pop up just when she was hoping to be at her most spiritual. There’s a neurotic American woman flirting with her husband, for example, and neither of them can bear the bland vegetarian fare on offer. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Findhorn community, Scotland</td></tr>
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It is <a href="http://maryloustephens.com.au/blog/" target="_blank">Mary-Lou Stephens</a>’ eye for detail and her capacity to call out pretension that make her such a brilliant chronicler of modern living. And her-real-word dilemmas and contradictory calls remind us of ourselves as we read. Despite her general lack of enthusiasm, for example, about the realities of Findhorn, she finds herself fantasising about living there, and becoming a whole different kind of person. Anyone who has done a residential spiritual retreat will recognise these fantasies that spring forth in moments of enthusiasm, usually coupled with matching episodes of anger and contempt.<br />
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What makes <i>How to Stay Married</i> so special, and so very engaging, is its author’s ability to capture and really speak out loud the things that plague us about establishing a long-term partnership with another flawed human being. As more and more of us find ourselves single in our later years, we have to confront the awkwardness of learning to make new compromises long after we have settled into our own ways. Mary-Lou occasionally resents her husband’s wildly confident pronouncements on diverse subjects, for example. And occasionally she gets furious at his own spark of independence, along with his rather hopeless approach to personal finances. I defy anyone to read the book and not experience a twinge of recognition and guilt when she describes some unsatisfying example of her flawed but very real partnership. <br />
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Mary-Lou is good, too, at describing the simpler, almost primal comforts of being in the company of another person more or less constantly. Her new husband is physically unlike other men she has been with, and this new experience still occasionally surprises and delights her: <br />
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<i><b>“I’m also thankful for being the wife of a big man. Big in stature, in girth and in spirit. I am safe in the company of strangers, in a rough working class pub, with this man beside me.”</b></i></blockquote>
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Ultimately this exquisite book is a testament to the great folly of romantic engagement with another human being. Yes, such adventures are unequal, wildly frustrating and even, occasionally, soul-wounding. Our partner does become our mirror, in which we can begin to recognise those qualities, good and bad, that make us so unique. <i>How to Stay Married</i> is a book of great humanity, and it is unique in its willingness to speak the complete truth about the pressures of companionship. One to read for anyone who has ever been, or wanted to be, married. Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-21782942947519268492015-02-04T13:27:00.001+11:002015-02-04T13:29:44.551+11:00Sheridan Rogers walks in Rilke's footsteps<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ </i></div>
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<i>hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me </i></div>
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<i>suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed</i></div>
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<i> in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing</i></div>
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<i> but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, </i></div>
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<i>and we are so awed because it serenely disdains </i></div>
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<i> to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying. </i> </div>
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- The First Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell trs.)</div>
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<b>Sydney writer Sheridan Rogers reflects on a recent visit to Duino Castle, near Trieste, the very place that inspired the "Duino Elegies", arguably Rilke's greatest contribution to 20th-century poetry and life. She also reflects on her own relationship to this poet and his work.</b></div>
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<b>"Great art often communicates before it is understood..." </b></div>
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I had long been a fan of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and had purchased a book of his poems a few weeks before I separated from my husband. I’m not sure how he came to me for I knew no one who was reading him. Perhaps I had read about a new anthology of his poems in the book review section of a weekend newspaper or I’d heard a poem of his being read on the ABC. At the time I was searching deeply for answers, not just because of the break-up of my marriage but because I’d long struggled with the big questions: how to find meaning? what is my purpose? why am I here? As an adolescent, I had often felt a sense of despair and had wrestled with what French philosopher and writer, Albert Camus, identified as the elephant in the room: is there any point in doing anything? Is it worth going on with the whole endeavour? Yet of all the writers I turned to at this vulnerable time, Rilke was the very one who advised [in his <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780394741048?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>Letters to a Young Poet</i></a>]: <br />
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<i>“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. “Do not seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing, live alone some distant day into the answer.”</i></div>
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Inside the battered cover of <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780679722014?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke</i></a> (Picador 1980, edited & translated by Stephen Mitchell), I’d written my name and the date: “1st of Spring.” I’m surprised now to have inscribed it thus, for this was to be no springtime for me but a long period during which I descended, like Persephone, into the underworld. I remember taking this collection of his poems with me on many long walks around Sydney harbour. Often I would lie on the sand, holding it to my heart, while looking up at the wide blue sky or gazing along the honeycomb sandstone rocks as I paused and reflected on a poem I had just read. Sometimes I’d watch the clouds drift by or become spellbound by glints of sunlight on the water, striving to understand the meaning of a poem and to let the music of his poetry enter me. Great art often communicates before it is understood, and this was very true for me with Rilke. Given how elusive he could be, I was frequently overwhelmed by how visceral my response was to his words. It was as though he was speaking to me, and to me alone.<br />
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<i>Silent friend of many distances, feel </i></div>
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<i>how your breath enlarges all of space. </i></div>
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<i>Let your presence ring out like a bell </i></div>
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<i>into the night. What feeds upon your face <br />Grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered. </i></div>
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<i>Move through transformation, out and in. </i></div>
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<i>What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? </i></div>
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<i>If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine. </i> </div>
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- Sonnets to Orpheus 11, 29</div>
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At the time, it was hard for me to stand up and assert myself, even to feel I had the right to a voice of my own. All around me seemed oppositional. I felt I was drowning in a sea of voices and just wanted to dive into the deep blue water and never re-emerge. But here was Rilke whispering in my ear: <br />
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<i>For this suffering has lasted far too long; </i></div>
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<i> none of us can bear it; it is too heavy - </i></div>
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<i> this tangled suffering of spurious love </i></div>
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<i>which, building on convention like a habit, </i></div>
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<i>calls itself just, and fattens on injustice. </i></div>
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<i>Show me a man with the right to his possession. </i> <br />
- Requiem <br />
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Oh how I yearned for a soul mate like Rilke, someone with his depth and insight. And here he was, in Requiem, again speaking directly to me:<br />
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<i>Are you still here? Are you standing in some corner? - </i></div>
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<i>You knew so much of all this, you were able </i></div>
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<i> to do so much; you passed through life so open</i></div>
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<i> to all things, like an early morning.</i></div>
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At times, I would be swept away by his voice into a semi-hypnotic state. And yet this longing, this yearning to merge with the other is exactly what Rilke counsels against. <br />
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<i>For this is wrong, if anything is wrong:</i></div>
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<i> not to enlarge the freedom of a love</i></div>
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<i> with all the inner freedom one can summon. </i></div>
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<i>We need in love, to practice only this:</i></div>
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<i> letting each other go. For holding on </i></div>
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<i> comes easily; we do not need to learn it. </i> </div>
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- Requiem</div>
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In <i>Letters to a Young Poe</i>t, he writes: “Loving at first does not mean merger, surrender and uniting with another person. Love is a great, demanding claim on us, something that chooses us and calls us to vast distances.” But as I began to read more about Rilke’s life, I came to a glaring sticking point: his many love affairs and cavalier treatment of the women in his life, most particularly of his wife Clara Westhoff and their daughter, Ruth, which seemed so at odds with the respectful, idealistic way he portrays women in his poetry.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rainer Maria Rilke and Clara Westhoff</td></tr>
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It wasn’t until Stephanie Dowrick published her authoritative book <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781742371801?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>In The Company of Rilke</i></a> in 2009, that I realised I wasn’t alone in pondering these questions<i>. </i>Dowrick writes, “It is exhausting to read about these affairs: so many women and such little variation on the theme of Rilke’s compulsive, stylish, enchanting, needy calls; the women’s eager, flattered response; his rapid retreat into whispers, then silence (other than the scratching, sometimes the sublime searching of a pen); their confusion, disappointment and irritation but generally also, and sometimes amazingly, continuing interest and loyalty – as though each is thinking that he must not be judged by the standards of ordinary men. (he is a Poet.)” <br />
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Ah, I found myself asking, had he - the "Poet Rilke" - also cast his spell over me? Dowrick continues: “Rilke’s not-so-private life is certainly not above moral discussion. On the contrary, some critics have spun years of work out of exactly that. Yet anything but a glance in Rilke’s direction shows that the paradoxes around him are extreme.”<br />
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Dowrick quotes another poet, Galway Kinnell, from his book <i>The Essential Rilke</i>: “A number of readers and critics...reverse the conventional wisdom – that an artist’s human deficiencies, as well as any attendant human wreckage the artist might leave behind, are simply the price that must be paid for great art – and find that certain often-dismissed flaws in fact damage the art. These more sceptical readers see Rilke less as an authority on how to live than as a sufferer telling in brilliant confusion his own strange and gripping interpretation of what it is to be human.”<br />
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<i>How we squander our hours of pain. </i></div>
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<i>How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration</i></div>
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<i> to see if they have an end. Though they are really</i></div>
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<i> our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen, </i></div>
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<i>one season in our inner year --,not only a season</i></div>
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<i> in time--, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home. </i> </div>
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- The Tenth Elegy</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Duino Castle - "Who, if I cried out, would hear me...?"</td></tr>
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Entering the castle gate where the "Elegies" had begun - far from my Sydney home and on a glorious Sunday morning - I could feel my skin tingling. Could I really be walking in Rilke’s footsteps? Would being here, putting one foot in front of the other, help answer some of my own confusion about what it is to be human? Would it help quench my yearning for union, and my longing for transcendence? <br />
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The Castle is set on an imposing rock spur of the Carso high above the Gulf of Trieste, and the vivid contrast between the sheer brilliant white of the limestone cliffs and the deep cobalt blue of the Adriatic Sea left me gasping – as had the Elegies. After all these years, here he was calling to me again: <br />
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<i>Children, one earthly Thing</i></div>
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<i> truly experienced, even once, is enough for a lifetime. </i></div>
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<i>Don’t think that fate is more than the density of childhood;</i></div>
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<i> how often you outdistanced the man you loved, breathing, breathing</i></div>
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<i> after the blissful chase, and passed on into freedom.</i></div>
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<i><br /> </i>Truly<i> being here is glorious.</i> </div>
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- The Seventh Elegy </div>
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Ahead of us lay a slightly inclined roadway bordered by imposing white marble statues which led up to the actual castle. But it was the garden terraces, which spill down from the roadway to the sea, which I wanted to see first. Steep stone steps lead down to a series of winding paths, one of which leads to a terrace at the base of the castle, and others which lead further down towards the sea. As I descended, I came to a path which led to a dense shady wood of twisted black pine trees and holm oaks. From here I could see the old castle, built during the 10th-11th centuries, clinging to a white rocky cliff that seemed to have been carved by a sculptor. The path through the woods looked rocky and uneven but I couldn’t walk there as the iron gate was firmly shut. <br />
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The old castle is now a ruin and is famous for the legend of the <i>Dama Bianca</i> (the White Lady) because the white rock on which the castle sits is said to have the shape of a veiled woman.<br />
The legend tells of a White Lady thrown from the walls of an ancient castle by her wicked husband, but the sky felt pity for her and gave her a rock body before she fell, smashing onto the rocks. It is said her soul is still there on a cliff near the remains of the old castle and that some nights she comes to life again and wanders restlessly. <br />
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This path, I later discovered, is not to be confused with the <i>sentiero Rilke</i> (Rilke Path) where Rilke was inspired to write the first two Elegies. That path starts on the outskirts of Duino village outside the castle gates and ends in Sistiana, a seaside village about two kilometres away. It runs along a sheer rocky cliff, at 80 metres one of the highest in Italy, but it has also been closed due to insurance problems to do with the a number of suicides, a poignant reminder that Rilke was affirming both life and death in the Elegies.<br />
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<i> But if the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us, </i></div>
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<i> perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the bare</i></div>
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<i> branches of the hazel-trees, or </i></div>
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<i>would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in springtime. -- <br />And we, who have always thought of happiness as rising, would feel </i></div>
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<i>the emotion that almost overwhelms us</i></div>
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<i> whenever a happy thing </i>falls<i>.</i><br />
- The Tenth Elegy</div>
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It was while walking on the paths around the castle one stormy winter morning, as the waves crashed loudly against the cliffs, that Rilke believed he heard a voice. He turned around but saw no one. Those mysterious words floating in the air became the beginning of the first of his Elegies (<i>Who, if I cried out, would hear me</i>...?)..<br />
There was no tempest the day I visited. As I stood with the clear autumn sunshine on my back and looked through the dark woods to the old castle and out to the wide blue sea, I recalled his words:<br />
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<i>Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us. Our life </i></div>
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<i>passes in transformation. And the external </i></div>
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<i>shrinks into less and less.... </i></div>
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<i>Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance </i></div>
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<i>to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues: greater. </i> </div>
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- The Seventh Elegy </div>
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As critic Warwick McFadyen pointed out so concisely in The [Melbourne] Age a couple of years ago: “Rilke’s entire life was given over to the journey of becoming. He referred to it many times as a ripening — of soul, insight, love. His métier was to translate the unsayable into words, to give form to the invisible. It was a sacred vow to self. “To read the Elegies, which is where my inclination has taken me, has the feel of a pilgrimage about it – with no destination. The joy is in the journey, though it is unlike any other travelling in that one must wait – the path comes to you.” <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sheridan Rogers</td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.sheridanrogers.com.au/topics/journal/" target="_blank">Sheridan Rogers</a> is a Sydney writer currently living in Italy. You can contact her via her blog or also via <a href="https://www.facebook.com/sheridan.rogers.9?fref=ts" target="_blank">Facebook</a>. You can purchase the books mentioned POSTAGE FREE via the links provided or via the bookstore links above right. We have had several articles on Rilke over the years - not least because of Stephanie Dowrick's and also Mark S Burrows' interest and scholarship on the poet. Please put "Rilke" into our search button and find those treasures! Sheridan's Rilke extracts are from Stephen Mitchell's translations of Rilke's work. </div>
Stephanie Dowrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17217351699603371102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-86524479121316561932015-01-23T12:12:00.002+11:002015-01-24T21:50:18.464+11:00Iceberg: An exceptional memoir of death, dying, life, art and great love<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Stephanie Dowrick reviews below artist Marion Coutt's brilliant memoir of the last years in the life of her husband, British art critic and writer <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jan/16/tom-lubbock-appreciation-laura-cumming" target="_blank">Tom Lubbock</a>. </i><a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781782393504/the-iceberg/marion-coutts/" target="_blank">Iceberg</a><i> is also the story of her gift of a marriage, of her own inner passage through this devastating loss, and of the raising of their little son, Ev</i>.</div>
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There is really only one thing I must say about <i>Iceberg</i>: <b>read it</b>. Marion Coutts is primarily a visual artist but her skills as a writer are formidable. I have rarely read a memoir of this kind that is so deeply and openly <i>enquiring</i> at a primary, elemental level - possible to pull off only when all intellectual wheels are firing. There is no note of sentimentality here, always a danger when death and dying dominate a narrative. That danger also exists when courage is to the fore - as it is here, especially on Tom's part. His courage is awesome. But again, this is a work that neither defends against real feeling nor ever cheapens it. </div>
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This is - we are assured - Marion Coutts' first book. She has clearly emerged fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus: a writer to her bones.</div>
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Bluntly: it is the story of Coutts' beloved, hugely (and widely) admired husband Tom Lubbock's dying. Brain tumour. Operations. Chemo. Radio. Drugs. Hospitals. Doctors. Social workers. Nursery school. Parks. Play. Baby-to-boy. Work. Writing. Art. Marriage. Tumour returning. Tumour re-returning. Love. Loss (but never a loss of humour, curiosity or insight and, miraculously, seldom a loss of patience). Death.</div>
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Both Coutts and Lubbock are vivid here. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jan/16/tom-lubbock-appreciation-laura-cumming" target="_blank">Writing in the <i>Guardian</i></a> after Lubbock's death, Laura Cumming shared her admiration of the man:</div>
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<i>Tom was fearless, unstintingly candid and a stickler for saying only what could be claimed as true. His friendship was a liberation. … I see him now, rapidly casing the joint from first to last to check for surprises, before starting slowly again at the beginning of a show. His person matched his character: the fleet foot and blazing blue eyes, the invariable black cardie (upgraded to Nicole Farhi for his wedding day), the sceptical frown or rocketing eyebrows, occasionally intimidating, primarily comic. When he could no longer talk, towards the end, Tom still spoke with the corners of his eyes.</i></div>
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I loved getting to know Lubbock, and increasingly admired him not for his dazzling intellect only or his physical warmth and ebullient kindness, but also for his intense, focused and unwavering appreciation of life, Marion and Ev. Always Ev. Never failing Ev while there was breath and life in his body. But as I lost myself in these pages (not a word out of place), I also found myself, found myself equally engaged by Coutts: Marion of the raw, vast emotions, Marion who, in daring to love so much must also face the losses that only the bravely loving can even fathom. It was with Marion that I sank and rose through her constant resoration(s), through her terrifying knowledge that she would have to do something better than simply survive the unspeakable loss that hovers, imminent, throughout the book, while also living. Living. Now. Now. In the face of death, living.</div>
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Reading too fast, going back and reading again, I felt this keenly as the loss of a hugely loved partner and also of a rare marriage - in this case, a marriage that was authentically between minds as well as hearts. I also felt the loss of the shared parenting of a little boy, born when Marion was in her early 40s and Tom in his early 50s. In the fullness of the text, the losses were instructive. Now, now <i>matters</i>. Postponing does not do. </div>
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The losses for Ev, too, are vast, even in contemplation. How immense, then, that Marion has written this book, this wonderful book, so that, through his entire lifetime of "becoming", Ev will have this: not a simulacrum, and absolutely not a father, but a testimony to what they shared, and to what Marion allows us to glimpse and share. Her gift to Ev is beyond words...even while her gift for words created it, just as Tom's gifts for words and for deepest and most intelligent <i>looking</i> significantly created what they shared, and speaks of what they have lost. </div>
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As he was losing his life, Lubbock increasingly lost words. Finally, he has none. For a man of his intellect, this might have been harrowing; instead, he and Coutts plundered their creativity. There was so much <i>dazzle</i> in that. As there is so much dazzle in this reclaiming of a life (otherwise "lost") through words. The paradox is brilliant here, perhaps giving us the tip of the iceberg only. But what a tip.<br />
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Should I add that there are no conversations in <i>Iceberg</i> about an afterlife, not even to dismiss it? That's their business, Marion and Tom's. There is perhaps surprisingly little also about the effect of all this on their families of origin, especially Tom's mother who outlives him. The book does not work for me less well because of these choices. On every page, it gives so much. In fact, I feel compelled to say that any book that really moves me after 60-plus years of intense reading must add something fresh to my knowledge of the human condition, as well as to my
understanding of the particular "humans" in the spotlight. This does.<br />
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I am plainly honoured through the power of Coutts' writing to have participated in this intense, intimate story; to have learned more of what love is, and human spirit. So, I will end as I began: <b>read it</b>.</div>
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You can purchase this wonderful book postage free via this link: <i><a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781782393504/the-iceberg/marion-coutts/" target="_blank">ICEBERG</a></i>.</div>
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You can purchase Tom Lubbock's book postage free via this link: <i><a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781847085313/until-further-notice-i-am-alive/tom-lubbock/" target="_blank">Until Further Notice, I Am Alive</a></i></div>
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Using our bookstore links above right, you return a small % to this Book Club.</div>
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You can leave a comment below or comment on Stephanie Dowrick's public Facebook page.</div>
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Stephanie Dowrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17217351699603371102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-53839872258785827782015-01-21T08:27:00.001+11:002015-01-21T08:32:19.775+11:00Keen to improve your writing - and your life?<br />
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If you live in Sydney, or within reach, and if you are keen to "really write" in 2015, then make a start by coming to the Faber Writing Academy information night on 2 February to choose from three exceptionally supportive courses. <b>Stephanie Dowrick</b> is among the tutors and will again be presenting her "WRITERS' WORKSHOP". More information below. You can call 8425 0100 or email <a href="mailto:faberwritingacademy@allenandunwin.com"><b>faberwritingacademy@allenandunwin.com</b></a><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dr Stephanie Dowrick is a former publisher and editor, and a writing teacher of great experience, as well as being herself an accomplished writer. </td></tr>
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<i>'It was an exhilarating experience. In the process we began to observe more closely and think more deeply, read with more appreciation and feel more able to express ourselves in language.' Helen (The Writers' Workshop 2014)</i><br />
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<i><a href="http://faberwritingacademy.com.au/writers_workshop.html#.VL7Dhye5dHA" target="_blank">'The Writers' Workshop</a> stimulates you to write weekly, think freshly and build confidence in your work. Stephanie passes on her expert skills through three methods: the introduction of key ideas, focussed discussions on each individual's work and engaging with each student to set and achieve weekly goals. This results in the removal of mental blocks that prevent you from writing well and increasing your word count.' Sarah (The Writers' Workshop 2014)</i><br />
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<i> </i><b>The Writers' Workshop runs from 20 April to 27 June. It is made up of seven 3-hour Monday sessions and one all-day Saturday session. The writers meet at the offices of Allen & Unwin in Crows' Nest. The group is very small to allow for maximum attention for each participant. The course fee includes refreshments, and inspiring class notes from Stephanie Dowrick. </b><i><br /></i></div>
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<b>The Writers' Workshop</b>, made up of seven evening sessions plus a concluding full-day workshop, is intended to be an intensely rewarding time of writing and of "new thinking": about your work - and about yourself as a creative person and writer. The emphasis here is on you, the writer, as well as on your writing. As the meetings continue, you will write with increasing fluency and satisfaction and will discover what brings out your best intentions. Just as vitally, you will have time to consider in rare depth what a "writing life" means to you; what motivates and sustains you as a writer; what your goals are and how you can achieve them; what and how you read for pleasure, craft and inspiration.<br />
Through focused discussion of each individual's work and of writing and reading more generally, you will explore vital questions of craft, while also investigating and growing your vision of what you can discover and achieve through your writing. You will certainly increase the intrinsic rewards of your writer's life, whether or not the work you produce is yet shared publicly.<br />
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Throughout the course, you will be encouraged to <b>try new skills and to approach your writing with an enhanced sense of adventure</b>. Each meeting will offer a mix of teaching on the evening's topic along with discussion, exercises, and a rotating focus on participants' work, always involving the whole group in how to listen with interest and generosity, as well as how to meet craft and content challenges, self-edit and re-write.<br />
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<b>The Writers' Workshop</b> is best suited to people who are ready to write in a regular, committed way, who are eager to advance a substantial project, or to try out new forms. The group is likely to include creative writers of non-fiction as well as fiction and perhaps some poets. Whatever your current modality and experience, The Writers' Workshop will offer each participant greater choice, pleasure and freedom within and beyond their current writing repertoire. It will also offer the delights of an intensely supportive writing group and the stimulation and confidence that brings.<br />
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For complete details:visit this <a href="http://faberwritingacademy.com.au/writers_workshop.html#.VL7Dhye5dHA" target="_blank">LINK</a>.<br />
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<br />Stephanie Dowrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17217351699603371102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-34166514977485783182014-12-16T22:00:00.000+11:002014-12-16T22:02:26.928+11:00GIFT suggestions from the WRITERS' WORKSHOP<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Stephanie Dowrick offered a new course in 2014 for the <a href="http://www.faberwritingacademy.com.au/" target="_blank">Faber Writing Academy</a> in Sydney called "The Writers' Workshop". It was so successful that the class extended...and is now continuing independently and highly productively. (Stephanie will take a new Writers' Workshop in 2015, 20 April- 20 June.) Nine writers - including Stephanie - are offering suggestions here of truly terrific books they will give - or would like to receive - and not at Christmas only. <b>Book gifts are welcome at any time</b>. We know you will enjoy these prompts. And, when it comes to books, lavish gifts for "self" are totally acceptable! (Wherever possible we have given you POSTAGE FREE purchase links.)</i><br />
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<b>Juliette O'Brien</b><br />
<b>Just one</b> book that I’d like to give for Christmas? I can’t and won’t stop there. Harold Bloom’s <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780060540425/?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>The Best Poems of the English Language</i></a> for a friend of my father’s who lost his wife. Simon Schama’s colourful history of the French revolution, <i><a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780141017273/?a=stpdow" target="_blank">Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution</a></i>, for my non-fiction-loving papa. <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781876485177/?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>Romulus My Father</i></a>, by Raimond Gaita, for close friends who seem receptive to my emphatic recommendations. And, for myself, Bryce Courtenay’s <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780670078264/?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>The Silver Moon: Reflections on Life, Death and Writing</i></a>.
Oh, how I love to give books for Christmas. It’s a precious present
that reveals more about the relationship between giver and receiver than
most things that money can buy. But how generous is it of me to take
such delight? I meander through the bookstore and glance surreptitiously
left and right, before opening a book - any book - from its centre. I
lift it to my nose and draw in a deep breath. I buy it, and become a
little high as dopamine surges into my brain's reward centre. It is a
gloriously selfish exercise to buy books as gifts. Why would anyone give
just one?<br />
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<b>April Murdoch</b> of the Faber Writing Academy (Sydney)<b> </b><br />
<b>The book</b> I’d most like to give this Christmas is <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781846689666?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves</i></a>
by Karen Joy Fowler. I loved this book so much that I want to share the
pleasure it gave me with as many people as possible! The book was
published earlier this year to critical acclaim – and shortlisted for
the Booker Prize – and for me it lived up to the hype. I can’t tell you
much about what happens without giving away a major plot twist but I can
tell you that it’s about sibling loyalty, memory, parental deception,
animal rights and more. It’s highly original, a total page-turner and I
laughed (a lot) as well as cried. The ending was breathtaking. Other
writers share my opinion. Khaled Hosseini called it ‘Gripping and
surreptitiously intelligent’ and Ruth Ozeki said, ‘I wept, woke up the
next morning, reread the ending, and cried all over again.’ It was
definitely one of my favourite books of the year.<br />
<i>[It was also one of Stephanie Dowrick's absolute favourites this year - clever and poigant.]</i><br />
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<b>Penelope Ransby</b><br />
<b>My pick</b> both to give or to receive, so I could re-read (and re-read again), is <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780007580972?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories</i></a> by Hilary Mantel, published 2014. <br />
This is a collection of short stories with the eye-catching title being just one of them. Hilary Mantel is as superb at creating interesting and plausible characters in the space of a short story as she is in a major novel. Setting and location are vividly created. Sometimes the plot is almost incidental. The characters gradually evolve for the reader so that what happens seems entirely natural even though it is totally outside the reader's experience.<br />
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There is a wide and eclectic range of locations and occasions. One of the best stories is about a writer visiting a drab depressing English town. Another is about a couple on holiday in Greece,<i> </i>another about an expatriate corporate wife living in Saudi Arabia - and yet another is set in a prestigious Harley Street medical practice. The title story has a middle-aged woman living alone and a young man she assumes to be a plumber. And the punchline to the title story is brilliant.<br />
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A "must-read" for aspiring writers wanting to see how an accomplished story-teller creates unusual but believable characters.<br />
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<b> Jenny Levy</b><br />
<b>I would</b> dearly like to give as a present the latest book I’ve read: <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780733623158/?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>The Color of Water</i></a>. It’s subtitled "A black man’s tribute to his white mother" and is a beautiful memoir. The author, James McBride, gently unfolds his mother’s story, using her voice, while at the same time he layers his own tale. I can’t help but think the author is in search of longing, and in the first instance believed it could be found in his mothers lineage; she was originally an Orthodox Jew. His sense of self is revealed through discovering his mother over the eight-year process of writing the book. He reminds us the gift of mothering is a woman's imperfection. He demonstrates racial categories are designed to both separate and create belonging. And, with subtle care, he lets us know the answer is greater than us all. <b><br /></b><br />
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<b>Sarah Menary</b><br />
<b>The book</b> I’d most like to give this Christmas is <i>I Capture the Castle</i> by Dodie Smith (first published in 1948 and available today at all major online retailers, including via this postage free <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780099460879?a=stpdow" target="_blank">LINK</a>). My father gave it to me when I was thirteen and he had been given it when he was a teenager himself. I still love reading it now. It’s an idiosyncratic coming-of age-story. It was Dodie Smith’s first book after being a successful playwright and she struggled for nine years to finish it to her satisfaction. All that struggling produced a unique book. I admire the fine detail which makes the reader live in the story, the authenticity of the protagonist Cassandra and her contrasting sister; the comedy scene involving them, their inherited fur coats and a train carriage (which always makes me chuckle when I remember it), and the vivid depiction of 1930s London and East Anglia before the war changed so much. This book would appeal to anyone who is over twelve years old and a bit romantic in nature (in terms of the Romantic poets). It has one of the most quoted first lines ever written: "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."<br />
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<b>Sheridan Rogers</b></div>
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<b>The book</b> I’d like to give for Christmas - or at any time - to my heart friends is <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780679722014/?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke</i></a>, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell, a book I pulled from my bookshelf this year and re-read avidly after visiting Duino Castle in Italy, the inspiration for his magnificent <i>Duino Elegies</i>.<br />
Rilke’s poetry communicates to me at a visceral level. Even if, at times, I don’t fully understand the meaning of a poem, I am often swept up and transported elsewhere by the music of his poetry. Great art often communicates before it is understood and this is very true for me with Rilke. Often it’s as though he’s speaking to me, and to me alone, whispering in my ear.<br />
<i> Yes – the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled towards you out of the distant past, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?</i> - The First Elegy<br />
“Look at how he bores into us,” says Robert Hass in his insightful introduction. “That solitary voice seems to be speaking to the solitary walker in each of us who is moved by springtimes, stars, oceans, the sound of music... Then, with another question, he brings us to his intimacy with our deeper hunger...the huge nakedness and poverty of human longing.”<br />
Rilke’s is not an easy path, but one truly well worth traveling. </div>
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<b>Wendy Ashton</b></div>
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<b>My recommendation</b> for holiday reading is <a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/Tale-for-Time-Being-Ruth-Ozeki/9780857867971" target="_blank"><i>A Tale for the Time Being</i></a> <br />
by Ruth Ozeki. It was "un-put-downable" for me, at the same time being very beautifully written. It was published by Text in 2013 and nominated for the Booker Prize 2013 (short list). Ruth Ozeki is a<br />
Japanese American writer who lives on an island off the coast of western Canada. It is clearly a mixture of reality and fiction. The narrative moves between a teenage character in Japan and Ruth on her island. It is 432 pages, but doesn't seem the least bit long.</div>
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<b>Katy Morgan<i> </i></b><br />
<b>The book</b> I'd like to give is <a href="http://www.booktopia.com.au/love-over-hate-finding-life-by-the-wayside-reverend-graham-long/prod9780987500250.html" target="_blank"><i>Love Over Hate: Finding Life by the Wayside</i></a>. It is written by Graham Long, the pastor of <a href="https://www.thewaysidechapel.com/" target="_blank">The Wayside Chapel</a> in Kings Cross, Sydney. 'Part-memoir, part-philosophical journey, <i>Love Over Hate</i> is Graham's gift to humanity - a book about life's foibles and the joy of living.' One Saturday morning in October my book club met at The Wayside Chapel cafe to discuss <i>Love Over Hate</i>. Graham Long happened to pop into the cafe and proceeded to join our discussion and give us a tour of the Chapel. He is a master storyteller: very witty, wise and real. I have not been so moved by a book or a person in a long time. Long's stories made me laugh out loud as well as weep. In a community of suffering people living on the fringes, Long is a light as well as a source of comfort and grace. I admire his passion, generosity, love for others and courage despite his own journey through suffering following the death of his son James in 2009. <i>Love Over Hate</i> is a "must read", especially suited to those who wrestle with the big questions about life and faith and are inspired to live a life of love in a suffering world. <br />
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<b>Stephanie Dowrick</b><br />
<b>I'm going</b> to give multiple copies of a very thoughtful prayer/poetry anthology that's gloriously enriching to give not just at Christmas but at any time. It's the work of Ivan M Granger who hosts a wonderful spiritual poetry email list and website called Poetry Chaikhana. The link is <a href="http://poetry-chaikhana.com/">poetry-chaikhana.com</a>. I have enjoyed his emails for years and am hugely grateful for the insights and treasures they have brought me. His new book is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longing-Between-Sacred-Chaikhana-Anthology/dp/0985467932/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1418002681&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Longing+in+Between" target="_blank"><i>The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World</i></a>. What makes Ivan's work so special are the commentaries that accompany the poetry selections: he is a humble, insightful, very genuine universal spiritual teacher (who would probably think of himself more as "guide" than "teacher"). It's a very special book. And to receive? I plan to read two exceptionally highly praised Australian novels: Joan London's <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781741666441/?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>The Golden Age</i></a> and Richard Flanagan's Booker-prize winning <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780857980366/?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>The Narrow Road to the Far North</i></a>.<br />
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<i><b>We do urge you to support your local bookstores</b> - or support
this BOOK CLUB by using our links (above right). Local bookstores are an
endangered species. It is up to us to ensure that they will continue.
And that writers can keep writing! Your comments below are always welcome. Or you can comment on Stephanie Dowrick's public Facebook page.</i><i></i></div>
Stephanie Dowrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17217351699603371102noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-24130496827500713742014-12-16T21:55:00.001+11:002014-12-26T21:04:14.188+11:00Walter Mason suggests some fantastic fiction<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><i>Book Club co-host and writer <a href="http://www.universalheartbookclub.com/2013/10/walter-mason-wins-again-with.html" target="_blank">Walter Mason</a> suggests some short and long fiction: perfect gifts, but perfect also to be bought at any time
for your own or others' reading pleasure.</i></b></blockquote>
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For some reason I have found myself reading lots of fiction in 2014, more than I have for years and years. Perhaps it's the times, and perhaps it's the fact that so much really exceptional fiction is coming out of Australia recently. Some of the books I mention below have been big releases and award winners. Others have been more obscure. All are well worth reading, and would make perfect gifts for the other bookish people in your life. <br />
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<a href="https://twitter.com/felicitycastagn" target="_blank">Felicty Castagna</a>, <i>The Incredible Here and Now</i><br />
This book won the 2014 Prime Minister's Literature Award for Young Adult Fiction, and it is incredibly deserving of such recognition. <a href="http://www.nswwc.org.au/2013/05/felicity-castagna-talks-writing-a-sense-of-place/" target="_blank">Castagna</a> is a young writer whose fiction engages with contemporary themes of place, identity and cultural belonging. Largely set in Sydney's Western suburbs, <i>The Incredible Here and Now</i> is a collection of stories that describe an intensely real world that is instantly recognisable to anyone who knows the place. <a href="http://rochfordstreetreview.com/2013/12/13/grief-and-adolescent-angst-victoria-nugent-reviews-the-incredible-here-and-now-by-felicity-castagna/" target="_blank">Castagna</a>'s characters are alive with their sense of displacement and youthful unease, and exist in a haphazard world of unglamorous accidents and relationships that expose much larger truths. I was just blown away by the virtuosity and originality of this book, and how well it captures life for young people in the early part of the 21st century. It is an excellent gift for the young adult reader in your life, and they will be totally absorbed in its resonance.<br />
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<i>The Incredible Here and Now</i> is published by the artisanal publishing house <a href="http://www.giramondopublishing.com/" target="_blank">Giramondo</a>, so I'd like to mention here another of their fiction releases that captured my attention this year. <a href="http://www.nicholasjose.com.au/" target="_blank">Nicholas Jose</a>'s <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/review-bapo-20141115-11mru1.html" target="_blank"><i>Bapo</i></a> is the latest release from one of Australia's most interesting writers on Asia. <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandartsdaily/china-in-fiction/5849888" target="_blank">Jose</a> has enjoyed an illustrious literary career, characterised by his energetic pursuit of literary interest rather than career or commerce. His books are always deeply personal and eccentric forays into bookish obsessions (and I must mention here his simply brilliant family memoir <a href="http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/05/31/black-sheep-journey-to-borroloola-by-nicholas-jose/" target="_blank"><i>Black Sheep</i></a>), and <a href="https://radio.adelaide.edu.au/eight-broken/" target="_blank"><i>Bapo</i></a> is no different. It is a collection of short stories based around themes of luck, Australia and China. Each is an absolute gem, and the whole book is a belletristic delight. <br />
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<a href="http://vimeo.com/72625483" target="_blank">Laura Jean McKay</a>'s <i>Holiday in Cambodia</i> was always going to attract my attention, having published my own book about that most fascinating country. <a href="http://blogs.crikey.com.au/liticism/2013/07/05/laura-jean-mckays-holiday-in-cambodia/" target="_blank">McKay</a>'s engagement comes in the form of stories set in <a href="http://www.waltermason.com/2011/11/5-best-books-about-cambodia.html" target="_blank">Cambodia</a>, describing aspects of its culture and history largely through the eyes of visitors, all there for their own, complicated reasons. The travel-as-short-fiction genre seems to be an entirely Australian invention, having been done previously (and brilliantly) by the aforementioned <a href="http://singaporereviewofbooks.org/2012/07/27/small-indiscretions/" target="_blank">Felicity Castagna</a>. <a href="http://youtu.be/ciV5tc90M5A" target="_blank">McKay</a> is a thrilling writer, her gentle humour and subtly deep meditations on Asia, poverty and Western narratives about those things constantly engaging. Deeply original and thought provoking, a must for anyone who has travelled to Asia. <br />
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Short fiction seems to be making a real comeback, perhaps the result of our speeded-up lifestyles and the lack of time we all complain about. This year I was enthralled by a collection of short stories that wasn't simply another anthology. <a href="http://shortaustralianstories.com.au/products-page/gob-xmas-sale/cracking-the-spine/" target="_blank"><i>Cracking the Spine</i></a>, edited by Julie Chevalier and Bronwyn Mehan, is a collection of absorbing stories, but each story is followed by a short exegesis by that story’s author explaining how and why they wrote the story, and what inspired them. This is a brilliant idea, and makes for terrific reading, especially for other writers. <br />
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This anthology was published by the small Australian press Spineless Wonders, who also published this year a really intriguing collection of fiction about the future called <i>The World to Come</i>. Each of the stories is incredibly diverse, and engages with the idea of tomorrow in many different ways. I loved it, and loved the story-a-day adventure I decided to pursue. These books have re-invigorated my taste for short fiction, which I will be reading a lot more of in 2015 (I hope!). <br />
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Speaking of beautiful small things, I lost my heart to Hoa Pham's novella <a href="http://www.hoapham.net/books/the-other-shore/" target="_blank"><i>The Other Shore</i></a>, a perfect little book about spirits, politics and Vietnam which was one of the Seizure magazine's Viva La Novella award finalists. Hoa is a Melbourne writer and this haunting look at embodied spirituality and its real-life repercussions is utterly perfect. More people should know about it. <br />
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The novella, too, is having its moment, and perhaps the most unexpected fruit of this renaissance is Michelle De Kretser's latest release, a novella and ghost story called <a href="http://theclothesline.com.au/springtime-michelle-de-kretser-book-review/" target="_blank"><i>Springtime</i></a>. I was lucky enough to have a long chat with Michelle about the book, and she said that it sprang forth almost fully-formed and demanded its own, eccentric, size. It is a wonderful and seductive read, and is very handsomely published in a gorgeous hardcover with colour plates. A perfect gift, and just the sort of thing to read before bed on hot summer nights. <br />
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In 2014 I have re-discovered the escapist charm of Jane Austen, who I haven't read since the early 1990s and was trapped in Taipei with nothing else to read but her complete works (glorious rainy days!). The main reason I have picked her novels up again is the influence of Sydney literary historian Susannah Fullerton, a Janeite of the highest degree whose enthusiasm is catching. I have wickedly enjoyed Alexander McCall Smith's update of <a href="http://youtu.be/ITDdh1Woi9s" target="_blank"><i>Emma</i></a>, released just in time for the 200th anniversary of that great novel in 2015. Of course it's silly, but it's so much fun, and McCall Smith can enchant like no other writer. Wonderful beach reading, though it might infuriate those who are too much in love with the original.<br />
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Finally I'd like to recommend a quirky, gently funny and really quite touching novel from Australian writer and film producer Mark Lamprell, <i>The Full Ridiculous</i>. Based loosely on real life, it is the bittersweet account of family life (and torment) after a major accident. I shared the stage with Mark at the 2014 Sydney Writers' Festival, and saw that he embodied the bumbling good nature of his characters. <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-full-ridiculous" target="_blank"><i>The Full Ridiculous </i></a>should to be read by every Australian over the Christmas break, as it gives us all some perspective on our blessings and great gifts, and encourages not to be so picky with our loved ones. <br />
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<br />Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-84605387303954272362014-12-08T12:18:00.002+11:002014-12-09T16:48:03.826+11:00Stephanie Dowrick suggests memorable memoirs <div style="text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Any fine memoirs among them? </td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<b><i> Book Club co-host and writer Stephanie Dowrick suggests some memoir reading: perfect gifts, but perfect also to be bought at any time for your own or others' reading pleasure.</i></b></div>
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Frankly, and after decades of intense writing over several genres, I'm in awe of writers brave enough to tackle "memoir" as their chosen literary form. When it's well done, the outcome will be as gripping and rich as any novel could be. Perhaps more so, because rather than creating an imagined "real world", the writer is sharing one. Complications arise, though, because that "real world" - that continuing, dynamic, ever-changing world - is invariably shared with others and while the writer is absolutely entitled to his or her memories and interpretations, these won't always be pleasing to others. We each experience what we call "the world" in an emotionally-driven and highly subjective way: the singularity of that is amply demonstrated by memoir writers. We read similarly, too, judging other people's lives, insights, interpretations through the filter of our own lives. When we are jolted to reconsider some of our assumptions in a deep or lasting way, that's a good thing. It brings us more deeply into the human family, with all that we share and in all the ways that we differ. It can also alert us to our own presumptions and prejudices. It can give us a new sense of proportion about what we ourselves, perhaps quite unselfconsciously, over- or under-value. And, not least, isn't there something marvelous about entering someone's life and experience in the depth that only excellent writing allows? We get to share secrets, intimacies, heart-breaks and heart-mending in ways that even closest conversations can rarely express. <i>Memoir is sustained conversation</i>: deep, observant, intimate. And when it works, that is exhilarating. Here are my picks of this year's memoirs. I do hope you will seek out these books, enjoy them, give them, request them from your library and make them better known. The books deserve that. So do the writers.<br />
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<b>David Leser, <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781760110338/?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>To Begin to Know: Walking in the Shadow of My Father</i></a></b><br />
<b>This is</b> is a memoir by a brilliantly talented journalist and interviewer. The <i>project</i> - more than a book - has had a most fascinating history in that it began as an intimate biography of David Leser's father, the distinguished German-born, international publisher Bernard Leser (of Conde Nast fame). However, as the project grew – and stalled – over an entire decade David discovered that this was perhaps meant to be a book about himself as a son of Bernard, but no less about his emerging, changing, developing, complex "self": himself as writer, husband, father, unconventional Jew, and genuine investigator of the often-troubling, often-magnificent human condition. And investigate he does. I was interviewed some years ago by David.<br />
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It was a memorable experience and, in my case, wholly positive. So I know him at first-hand to be a deeply curious writer in a profession where that essential quality is often lacking. The central question of what we, as readers, have a right to know (or believe that we can know) about other people, either through the eyes of a journalist/biographer or through a writer's own eyes, is ceaselessly fascinating. Leser allows that question to emerge as part of his memoir. (Leser means, in German, “reader”. But the English echo of “laser” is just as apt. Here, Leser spares himself even less than he did in his many famous written portraits.) On virtually every page, he is exceptionally frank. But it felt very much to me as though he was in search of truth, on his own behalf certainly, but also for readers' sake. He is also exceptionally intelligent: willing to change his mind and to have his mind changed. The intensity of this memoir is very nicely relieved by a sense of humour that hovers even in his least-confident, darkest times. And let me rush to assure you that this allows for greater insight and truth, rather than the more usual use of humour as a sidestepping of deep and real feeling. Heart and mind are fully present in this book. As the humane and appropriately rich portrait of an adult son in and emerging from "the shadow" of a much-loved, greatly talented father, it is totally successful. Playwright David Williamson called it "revelatory". I found it absolutely absorbing.<br />
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<b>Mandy Sayer, <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781742373539/?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>The Poet's Wife:A Memoir of a Marriage</i></a></b></div>
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<b>Mandy Sayer</b> is a successful novelist but has made memoir her primary form of writing. This is where she truly has created a "place of her own". She is quite exceptionally gifted in her vividly detailed, highly sensual recall of events and the emotions that accompanied them, as well as in her expression - and containment - of those memories. Her latest book is called <i>The Poet’s Wife:A Memoir of a Marriage</i> and in it she herself demonstrates a highly poetic, subtle and insightful sensibility, as well as a strong command of story-telling. This is in so many ways an immensely accomplished book. It is as gripping as any novel could be but its subject matter - revealing Sayer's vulnerability - must surely have taken every ounce of her skill and tenacity. What Sayer is recording here is a complex marriage to an extremely complex man: American poet, Pulitzer prize-winning Yusef Komunyakaa. When the two met Yusuf was almost twice Mandy's age. He was and is black; she was and is white. The differences between them were so many – race, age, nationality and culture just the most obvious. But what they shared, and what emerges most hopefully through this book, is that each was in the process of becoming the writer they needed to be. Each had also emerged from incredibly demanding, unpromising beginnings. </div>
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But this is not primarily a tale of literary triumph. What emerges here is the raw emotional abuse experienced by Mandy as her husband repeatedly withdrew his love, fidelity, even his affection. We may wonder why she tolerated this for what seems to be far too long. But her life had always been one of great uncertainty, demanding matching courage, and the intimacy of a memoir as rich as this one brings into question all kinds of presumptions. Reading it though, it felt good to me to know that this highly intelligent woman who has led such a courageous and unpredictable life is now living in far happier circumstances then those she describes here. And I certainly don't want you to have the impression that this book is entirely bleak. Far from it. There are many richly loving moments and certainly great evidence of a commitment to writing and to all that writing can bring and allow that is dynamic and encouraging.</div>
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Stephanie Dowrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17217351699603371102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-7738122671288724402014-10-23T16:05:00.001+11:002015-01-22T21:12:33.180+11:00A minimum of 500 books: Wayne Dyer on libraries, reading and self-education <blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><b>"I'm merely acting on my inner vision to prepare myself for university study."</b></i></blockquote>
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When <a href="http://www.drwaynedyer.com/" target="_blank">Wayne Dyer</a> was a young man in the US Navy he soon realised that the regimented life was not for him. Despite extremely difficult childhood circumstances (an absent, alcoholic father, a broken family and abandonment in an orphanage), <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Dyer" target="_blank">Dyer</a> managed to conceive a passion for self-improvement and this really blossomed when he was stationed at a US Navy base in Guam. Here there was not all that much to do, and he had access to a humble but helpful library. He decided to make the most of his circumstances and, instead of drinking and carousing like his buddies, he would set about reading as much as he possibly could. He determined to read a "minimum of 500 books" while he was in Guam, and to record the titles he read and his impressions of them. He filled his little room up with books, and the books almost became talismans, symbols of a greater and more meaningful life he was beginning to imagine for himself. Describing this new self-conception he writes: <i>I see myself as a teacher, a college professor, and I am acting on that inner vision every day. </i><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiArWfmKPM4LUJLpUj86SN_7ZUPE0ljS-d10TC1nffC3p0bTN_fMbaRygKBaun3HTPA8c2nfGkxX0ubei-cFlsGtezlL8_tvx-E9CFiISa47tgqcuuPQ0cjbG8_3z6rdEfk0-sDfYxFiTr/s1600/B_DrWayneDyer_SeeClearly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiArWfmKPM4LUJLpUj86SN_7ZUPE0ljS-d10TC1nffC3p0bTN_fMbaRygKBaun3HTPA8c2nfGkxX0ubei-cFlsGtezlL8_tvx-E9CFiISa47tgqcuuPQ0cjbG8_3z6rdEfk0-sDfYxFiTr/s1600/B_DrWayneDyer_SeeClearly.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dr. Wayne W. Dyer</td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/wayne_dyer.html" target="_blank">Dyer</a>'s love of books is constantly explored in his engaging and very inspiring memoir <a href="http://www.hayhouse.com/i-can-see-clearly-now-hardcover" target="_blank"><i>I Can See Clearly Now</i></a>. From his childhood discovery of <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/thoreau/henry_david/" target="_blank">Thoreau</a>'s <i>Walden</i>, through his absorption in <a href="http://youtu.be/Mi88P7KfaMA" target="_blank"><i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i></a> while avoiding duties on a navy ship to his late-life study of the <a href="http://youtu.be/B5HuzJjIRoc" target="_blank"><i>Tao Te Ching</i></a>, Dyer's autobiography is, like so many bookish people's, easily marked by important books he has read and how he has incorporated them into his life.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pages from the Tao Te Ching</td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.drwaynedyer.com/blog/i-can-see-clearly-now-book-review/" target="_blank">Dyer</a>'s beautifully romantic vision of the universe is always the merest step away from magical (an analysis I don't think he would object to), and the place of books and writers in his life reflect these magical possibilities. In the late 70s he meets Dr. Victor Frankl and reads his immensely influential book <i>Man's Search for Meaning</i>. Of this experience he writes:<br />
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<i><b>When I first read the accounts of Dr. Frankl's maltreatment at Auschwitz, Dachau, and Theresienstadt in Bohemia, the suffering overwhelmed the words I was reading, and I knew I would one day visit those hideous places. In some mysterious way I felt I would meet this man who spoke so persuasively about the innate capacity humans have to transcend evil and to discover meaning, when madness screams out from every angle.</b></i> </blockquote>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dr. Victor Frankl</td></tr>
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Despite repeated re-readings of Ken Keyes' landmark 1970s book <i>Handbook to Higher Consciousness</i>, Dyer hadn't known about that author's disability (he was a quadriplegic). After hosting Keyes in a visit to his home, Dyer writes how his outlook was fundamentally changed (and it is to Dyer's credit that he is so open to learning from other people and acknowledging their influence):<br />
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<i><b>After Penny and Ken drove away, I took some notes on what we discussed. I detailed four keys to higher awareness that came out of our intense and inspiring conversation that evening. I made a mental note to include these four keys on my lectures, and maybe one day write about them. They were: </b></i><b>banish the doubt, cultivate the witness, sgut down the inner dialogue</b><i><b> and </b></i><b>free the higher self from the ego</b><i><b>. I spent the next decade making these ideas the centerpiece of my presentations.</b></i></blockquote>
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Part of Dyer's great charm, and a clue to his incredible success and prolific output, is his ability to put to use everything he reads and hears. Nothing is wasted in Dyer's universe, it is all in service to his art and to his sense of purpose. He recognises that books lead the way out of his dificult past, and remain the key to his future happiness. <i>I Can See Clearly Now</i> is a wonderful read, and offers a great reading list in personal development. It is memoir as self-help, a grand tradition that dates back to Benjamin Franklin. See if you can make the most of it. <br />
<br />Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-38550440768362568062014-09-20T16:28:00.001+10:002014-10-05T10:12:57.788+11:00Walter Mason reads Gary Lachman's superb biography of Madame Blavatsky <blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><b>“While questions about whether or not <a href="http://www.readthespirit.com/explore/madame-hp-blavatsky-dawn-of-interfaith-exploration/" target="_blank">HPB</a> [Helena Petrovna Blavatsky] was ever in Tibet, ever met the “real” Masters, ever learned Senzar, and dozens of others will no doubt trouble all who take her seriously, in the end what is important now are the writings she left behind, and what we can understand about her life.” </b></i></blockquote>
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One of the greatest characters of the Nineteenth Century was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky" target="_blank">Madame Blavatsky</a>. Not only that, I will <br />
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always assert that she was one of the most influential. Derided in her time as a fraud and a crank, her interests, enthusiasms and visions of the world went on to shape generations of religious seekers. She was a hippy, a New Ager and a self-help freak long before those things existed. She is one of my great heroines, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Lachman" target="_blank">Gary Lachman</a>’s excellent biography of her is one I think everyone would enjoy reading.<br />
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The problem with writing about <a href="http://secretdoctrine.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/master-k-h-on-the-one-life-the-one-law-the-one-element/" target="_blank">Blavatsky</a> is that you will, almost from the first page, be insulting someone. She remains a polarising figure, and Lachman (also known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Valentine" target="_blank">Gary Valentine</a>, bassist from the legendary pop band Blondie) does his level best to tread a kind of middle ground. His admiration for <a href="http://www.blavatskyarchives.com/goodrickclarke.htm" target="_blank">Blavatsky</a> is palpable, but he also records fairly those parts of her story that are more open to criticism. On balance I think he is probably a little too reverent, and plays down some of the outrageous campery of Blavatsky’s Victorian mysticism. But <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781585428632?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality</i></a> is still a fun read, and will be a revelation to anyone who has<i> </i>yet to discover more<i> </i>of Blavatsky’s life.<br />
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<a href="http://aryasangha.org/rampaism2.htm" target="_blank">H. P. Blavatsky</a> was, of course, the founder of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophical_Society" target="_blank">Theosophical Society</a> and the author of two tremendous compendiums of esoterica: the enormous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis_Unveiled" target="_blank"><i>Isis Unveiled</i></a> and the even more enormous <a href="http://youtu.be/6ZWtN6AkDXo" target="_blank"><i>The Secret Doctrine</i></a>. Both books are almost unreadable now (though <a href="http://garylachman.co.uk/" target="_blank">Lachman </a>is enthusiastic about them, while still conceding that they are best read in short bites for inspiration and stimulation), but in their day they were literary sensations, engaging the criticism and comment of some of the greatest intellectuals and thinkers of the time. <br />
<br />
Blavatsky was herself a mysterious Russian émigré, a chain-smoking, world-travelling prophetess who exerted a tremendous charisma and eventually attracted into her orbit an American journalist and Civil War hero, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. Together they formed the <a href="http://youtu.be/bueOQUDN5Jo" target="_blank">Theosophical Society</a>, which would go on to become one of the most influential and energetic religious movements of the late nineteenth century (and, incidentally, a very important and powerful group in Sydney up until the late 1930s).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Madame Blavatsky</td></tr>
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<br />
Lachman tells us of the problems with<a href="http://blavatskytheosophy.com/blavatsky-and-buddhism/" target="_blank"> Blavatsky’s “Buddhism”</a> in a globalised age in which we now have a very real understanding of Tibetan Buddhism and can see little of it in <a href="http://www.tricycle.com/blog/blavatskys-buddhism" target="_blank">Blavatsky’s work</a>. And while the early Theosophists posited themselves as Buddhists, <a href="http://secretdoctrine.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/blavatsky-on-buddha-the-hindu-trinity-yoga-the-upanishads/" target="_blank">Blavatsky</a> herself was too much of a spiritual tourist to linger for too long with this appellation. Though she and Olcott took refuge as Buddhists in a formal ceremony in Ceylon, Blavatsky always saw her teachings as wider-ranging and more mystical. Olcott, however, became quite a <a href="http://youtu.be/vVBNlvMan9k" target="_blank">serious Buddhist</a>, designed the <a href="http://www.buddhistcouncilofqueensland.org/node/143" target="_blank">Buddhist flag</a> that is used today and is still revered in Sri Lanka as one of the great revivers of the Sri Lankan Buddhist tradition. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://garylachman.co.uk/about-gary-lachman/" target="_blank">Lachma</a>n writes:<br />
<blockquote>
<i><b>“Although HPB’s “Buddhism” was sui generis, the Gelugpa school, which demands strict celibacy, is the form of Tibetan Buddhism with which her own practice is most often related, and one occasion a Buddhist scholar is said to have remarked that HPB was a reincarnation of <a href="http://stanford.library.usyd.edu.au/archives/spr2014/entries/tsongkhapa/" target="_blank">Tsong Khapa</a> himself.”</b></i></blockquote>
Blavatsky’s personal magnetism was never in doubt, and throughout her life she attracted fervent followers and disciples, in spite of her eccentric appearance and habits and her inclination to bossiness and impatience. The book describes how she would make fun of less-than-intelligent visitors in their hearing, and would dismiss voluble acolytes as “flapdoodles.” She didn’t suffer fools gladly and was wounded when the popular press cast her as a fraud and intriguer – sometimes even a Russian spy. Her magical powers, aided and abetted by the mysterious Masters she spoke of, became legendary:<br />
<blockquote>
<i><b>“…once, while camping in the desert, she expressed the wish for a café au lait, made in the fashion of the Café de la Paix in Paris. Serapis Bey (or possibly his “son,” Tuitit Bey, another Master) drew some water from their supply and handed the cup to HPB. It was steaming hot café, just as she ordered it.”</b></i></blockquote>
She also managed to materialise letters, cups, telegrams and all manner of things. Such phenomena attracted the wrong sort of attention, and eventually the <a href="http://www.austheos.org.au/" target="_blank">Theosophical Society</a> – and <a href="http://www.earthsongbooksandgifts.com/blavatsky-st.germain-kuthumi-el-morya.html" target="_blank">Blavatsky</a> in particular – were investigated and found fraudulent. This caused Blavatsky a great deal of heartache, and still remains a controversial fact to this day. Some have claimed to have resurrected her and her reputation by examining the original investigation and found it wanting. Others don’t accept this revision. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.dailygrail.com/blogs/Gary-Lachman" target="_blank">Lachman</a> reminds us that, although she is forever associated with the great mania for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritualism" target="_blank">Spiritualism</a> in the Victorian era and is often mistakenly referred to as a <a href="http://www.vsu.org.au/spiritualism" target="_blank">Spiritualist</a>, <a href="http://jszimhart.com/book_reviews/blavatsky_by_g_lachman" target="_blank">Blavatsky</a> was in fact hostile to mediumship and <a href="http://youtu.be/Y08FT76x3LY" target="_blank">spirit channelling</a> and condemned the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/spiritualism/" target="_blank">Spiritualist movement</a>. <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/panmankey/2014/05/20-questions-with-gary-lachman/" target="_blank">Lachman</a> says that <a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/310/000033211/" target="_blank">HPB</a> saw the practise of <a href="http://www.whispersfrombeyond.com.au/spirit-guides-the-intimate-connection.html" target="_blank">working with spirit guides</a> as unsophisticated and even dangerous: <br />
<i><b><br /></b></i>
<br />
<blockquote>
<i><b>“For Blavatsky, who had learned to master her own powers in Tibet, this was an abdication of one’s own freedom and responsibility, a kind of psychic slavery, especially as the spirits involved were often of a low type, the “larvae” of the astral realm, as she called them, borrowing from <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/bulwer-lytton/edward/" target="_blank">Bulwer-Lytton</a>.” </b></i></blockquote>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Madame Blavatsky with her friend and collaborator Col. Olcott </td></tr>
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<br />
Nonetheless, <a href="http://blavatskytheosophy.com/words-from-the-masters-about-h-p-blavatsky/" target="_blank">Blavatsky</a>’s claimed occult capacities were impressive, and her followers were all in awe of her superior powers in this regard. Almost nothing that she did – be it dressing, eating or engaging socially – was normal, and she seemed blessed with an innate theatricality that would turn anyone into a legend. In the course of composing her own enormous books, thick as they were with references, quotations and throwaway asides and citations of important literary works, she was often completely un-troubled by any kind of reference library. All she needed was her pencil, her paper and her psychic powers:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><b>“Yet if her sheer volume of words was impressive, even more so was <a href="http://blavatskytheosophy.com/blavatsky-on-swedenborg/" target="_blank">Blavatsky</a>’s apparent ability to quote long passages from works neither she nor the professor possessed, and which Corson suspected were not even available in America at the time. Blavatsky explained that she saw the passages “on another plane of objective existence” and simply wrote them down – if need be, translating them from whatever language they were in into English” </b></i></blockquote>
<a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781585428632?a=stpdow" target="_blank">This biography</a> is superb, and immense fun from beginning to end. Reading it, you are constantly reminded how hugely influential <a href="http://www.dailygrail.com/Religion-and-Spirituality/2013/1/Expanding-Mind-Gary-Lachman" target="_blank">Blavatsky</a> has been on our own time, and pleased at her sheer outrageousness and joie de vivre. Reading Gary Lachman’s book left me aching for more lives lived with such daring, such drama and such pleasure.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Read <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-lachman/why-jung-is-important_b_2664409.html" target="_blank">Gary Lachman in the Huffington Post writing about why Jung is important</a>.</i><br />
To purchase <b><i>Madame Blavatsky</i></b> postage free, please use this <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781585428632?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><b>LINK</b></a> - you will also support this Book Club. For other books, or if you are buying from outside Australia, we have links to your upper right. They all return a tiny % of your purchase to us to support this entirely voluntary website. We also welcome your comments! Comments' box below.<br />
<br />Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-66158468185930658992014-09-16T18:40:00.000+10:002014-10-05T10:13:52.641+11:00P. M. Newton on writing, Buddhism and trauma<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>This is an edited version of the talk Australian crime novelist <a href="http://www.penguin.com.au/contributors/6325/pm-newton" target="_blank">P. M. Newton</a> gave at the <a href="http://asaliterature.com/" target="_blank">Association for the Study of Australian Literature</a> conference in 2014. The theme of the conference was Worlds Within, and <a href="http://www.pmnewton.com/" target="_blank">Newton</a> was one of four novelist invited to respond to the theme. <a href="http://www.pmnewton.com/p/pm-newton.html" target="_blank">P. M. Newton</a> is an award-winning novelist whose novels set in South-Western Sydney have been widely acclaimed. More about her after the essay:</i></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
To talk about the Worlds Within in respect of your writing is one of those invitations that probably should come with the warning, ‘beyond here there be dragons’ – because the more I thought about it, the stranger and more layered those worlds seemed to become.<br />
<br />
Snippets of other people’s words about their worlds started pinging around, hints at their worlds within were lodged in my brain, their sources and their contexts long forgotten. Phrases like “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_%28demon%29" target="_blank">My name is Legion: for we are many</a>” eventually sent me scrambling to nail down its source, only to find it was a new testament description of a exorcism, and this was how the afflicted one – probably someone with multiple personality disorder – had introduced himself.<br />
<br />
The idea of writing (and re-writing and re-drafting and editing and re-editing) is probably not a bad analogy to a lengthy exorcism of the multiple personalities one creates, nurtures and introduces to the world in the course of writing a novel.<br />
<br />
Then my brain, flipped through its random access memory and came up with, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Myself" target="_blank">I am large, I contain multitudes</a>” which flickered back into my consciousness – confused somewhat with the first quote – I’d imagined them to be from the same source, to be different expressions of the same thing. But this was <a href="http://gwentuinman.com/2014/09/09/seeking-inspiration-walt-whitman-part-1/" target="_blank">Walt Whitman</a>’s conception of the self and identity in all its rich and varied contradictions. <br />
<br />
It was starting to get a bit noisy – because almost simultaneously as I was re-hearing the bible and mixing it up with <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/nov/01/williams-james-part-three" target="_blank">Whitman</a>, a <a href="http://youtu.be/J9gKyRmic20" target="_blank">Crowded House</a> earworm from '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Seasons_in_One_Day" target="_blank">Four Seasons in One Day</a>', took root - which I now share with you and defy you to shake loose ….<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Worlds above and worlds below</blockquote>
<br />
Along – importantly - with the line that follows it<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The sun shines on the black clouds hanging over the domain</blockquote>
<br />
And it’s those black clouds that I recognised. Because belatedly I realise that they have been hanging very much over my writing, particularly the process of writing my last book, <a href="http://theaimn.com/book-review-beams-falling-p-m-newton/" target="_blank"><i>Beams Falling</i></a>, and I think they’re still out there, hovering on the horizon, ready to roll on over me, and over the next one, whatever it may be.<br />
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It would be easy to imagine that this sense of imminent darkness is because of the genre I write in – crime fiction. It’s a genre that’s produced and consumed for the most part as entertainment – but for me, it’s a serious topic. I’m actually more confused when it isn’t dealt with as such. <br />
<br />
After all, the subject mater is usually violent death, murder. The ultimate exercise of power over another – the power of taking a life; power which is often deeply rooted in other forms of power and powerlessness that are historical, cultural, social, political in nature. <br />
<br />
And each murder, each one, is a unique tragedy. And the ripples of grief extend out from the victim, changing lives forever. A grief that is, at its heart, insoluble – because as American crime author George Pelecanos so beautifully put it -<br />
<br />
‘There is no solving murders, you know. Not unless the dead are going to rise up out of the earth. Once somebody is killed, it's forever for their loved ones and their family and the community. “<br />
<br />
I did not set out to be a fiction writer. When I left the police it was to find a better life, a happier life, a new world in fact: to travel, to take photos, to write about music, to study Buddhism.<br />
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When I did start to write fiction it was in a kind of mad catharsis triggered by a <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/murder-monastery-172992" target="_blank">triple murder</a> when I was living in <a href="http://youtu.be/HDNsSDGZrXQ" target="_blank">Dharamsala</a> – three Tibetan monks were stabbed to death one night about 100 yards away from where I was living; their murderers - five other monks who were engaged in an internecine war over esoteric questions about deity worship. <br />
<br />
A world within <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/09/dalai-lama-successor_n_5790572.html" target="_blank">Tibetan Buddhism</a> that I hadn’t known existed suddenly ruptured into my world and it felt somehow that all the darkness I’d experienced in 13 years in the police world - and thought I had quietly sealed up while I <a href="http://www.pmnewton.com/p/writing-about-music-and-mali_08.html" target="_blank">wrote about West African music</a> and studied Buddhist philosophy – that world was back and felt real and I can’t tell you why, but it felt like the only way to try and understand this world of violent murderous monks was to fictionalise it and relocate it back to Australia – to build a new world and to create a character who would come and investigate it on my behalf.<br />
<br />
The story I wrote as a result of that was unfinished, I didn’t know what I was doing, but the character I created, my Detective Nhu ‘Ned’ Kelly, remains with me today and is the central figure in my two novels. It was, I suppose, unavoidable that I ended up bringing to my writing my own experience as a copper, most of it spent as a detective. <br />
<br />
Crime novels are generally about the world of cops - and I bring to it my personal understanding of that world. And that is, that it’s not just one world, it’s worlds within worlds, the cops – the longer you stay in, the further you go, the more those worlds, the layers between those worlds unpeel and you penetrate deeper. You join the cops and you join a new world. At first it’s the world of the uniform cop, but then, like me, there’s another world, the world of the detectives, then if you are good at that there’s another layer, the world of the squads – and within each of the worlds there are layers and layers of secrets.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">P.M. Newton as a police officer</td></tr>
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As a cop, I always felt like an insider /outsider. To the world you’re a cop. End of story. But within that world, you’re a woman, and in the 80s and early 90s, that made you somewhat suspect – there were layers of the world you could not penetrate. And that’s the core aspect of my character, Ned, an Australian Vietnamese young woman, starting out in the cops in the early 1990s, a new detective, slowly moving through the worlds within, but always slightly outside them as well, doubly suspicious to her colleagues as a woman and a non-Anglo Australian.<br />
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<br />
She comes out of the first book, <i>The Old School</i>, wounded, emotionally, physically and mentally. The second book, <i>Beams Falling</i>, picks up immediately after those events and deals with her movement through new worlds – physically it’s a new place, <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/popasia/blog/2014/09/09/photos-cabramatta-moon-festival-2014" target="_blank">Cabramatta</a>, early 1993. The world of the <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/programs/onceuponatimein/seasons/cabramatta" target="_blank"><i>ra choi</i></a>, Vietnamese kids who went out to play joined street gangs to sell drugs, the kids of refugees, leaving homes and families scarred by war. <br />
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But emotionally this book was about the world of trauma, the world of the traumatised, those damaged by violence – Ned by the violence of her work, the community by the refugee experience, by conflict, by war, by drugs.<br />
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It meant researching and wading into the reality of PTSD, the symptoms of which include hyper- vigilance, emotional numbing, paranoia, inability to form new relationships or maintain old ones, hair trigger anger, fear, panic attacks, blackouts, flashbacks – it meant creating something described by therapists as “trauma world” because that’s where my characters were living. <br />
<br />
People suffering from trauma are caught between trauma world – where being suspicious of everyone makes perfect sense because everyone is a threat, where being hyper vigilant is the only way to survive - and the “real world” where you exhaust yourself with mood swings, you alienate everyone around you, you don’t trust others or yourself, you’re incapable of love or being loved, and you pose a risk to yourself and others.<br />
<br />
Which brings me back to those opening lines that I remembered when I saw the title of this conference<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“My name is Legion: for we are many.”<br />
<br />
“I am large, I contain multitudes”</blockquote>
<br />
When it’s going well a book is like a kind of madness – the voices in your head, of characters, imaginary friends, foes, threats, enemies, victims, betrayers, all those worlds within that you create and that before you even put them on the page begin to colonise you and as they become more convincing, you live there, in their world, with them. <br />
<br />
Trauma world was for me the world within <i>Beams Falling</i>. It was hard to create it, to get it to a liveable stage, and then when it was, it became hard to live in it, and almost impossible to live outside it. During my research into trauma world I discovered that patients suffering PTSD are asked to write or read their trauma narratives, and then to re-write, re-read, and re-listen to it again and again in the hope that the re-exposure will eventually give them distance, so that they no longer live in trauma world. It struck me how very like novel writing this is. We all know what that last pass at page proof stage feels like, yeah?<br />
<br />
According to behavioural therapy experts, “<a href="http://www.crvp.org/seminar/05-seminar/rosemary%20winslow.htm" target="_blank">traumatized individuals crave metaphor and imagery . . . to make sense of their worlds</a>.” <br />
<br />
Is this not what we are trying to do when we write novels? <br />
<br />
I’ll finish with a quote from the poet Alicia Ostriker that for me encapsulates why we pursue this special madness of creating a world within, living in it, and trying to write it down so that others may also experience it - <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“<a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=kXbs6E9K--8C&pg=PA400&lpg=PA400&dq=%E2%80%9CA+metaphor+gives+us+at+least+a+fighting+chance+of+saying+something+real.+%E2%80%9C&source=bl&ots=bQ_-5UEwi3&sig=inPhMoctuB_hL5E1Vc6ufdfzppc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2dYWVLz8IsytogSUq4H4Bg&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CA%20metaphor%20gives%20us%20at%20least%20a%20fighting%20chance%20of%20saying%20something%20real.%20%E2%80%9C&f=false" target="_blank">A metaphor gives us at least a fighting chance of saying something real.</a> “</blockquote>
*<br />
<i>We would love you to consider the bookstore links above right. They return a tiny % to us to support this voluntary Book Club. Books purchased from QBD or Book Despository come to you postage free. We also welcome your comments. </i>Walter Masonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10780247928442366936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-62732360065489173562014-09-14T18:26:00.000+10:002014-09-16T18:46:52.403+10:00Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh on Mindfulness and its essence for non-violent livingWith this article we continue our efforts to bring you the life-saving choices offered by a non-violent view and commitment. This is, indeed, the essential work of a "universal heart". <b><a href="http://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/" target="_blank">Thich Nhat Hanh</a></b> is known to many of you as a profound spiritual teacher of "Engaged Buddhism" that extends its broad, generous vision to include all. I (Stephanie Dowrick) believe him to be a vital teacher for these times. Below, we include some words from Thich Nhat Hanh, first shared by Trevor Carolan, of Shambhala Sun, and then some more recent words from this beautiful peacemaker himself. We cannot urge you strongly enough also to find his books, and follow - literally - in his footsteps of mindful, peace-giving living. Could anything matter more?<br />
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<b>"Non-violence does not mean non-action.</b> It means we act with love
and compassion, living in such a way that a future will be possible for
our children and their children." </div>
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<i>A small man garbed in the drab brown robes of his Order, Thich Nhat Hanh spoke quietly, plaintively, in good English with occasional French inflections. His words and speech were restful, like a balm to the ears and conscience. Most everything about Thich Nhat Hanh was marked by calmness, a soft yin-ness that goes beyond simple stillness. When he spoke, it was with great mindfulness—a word, an action to which he is especially devoted.</i></div>
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Thich Nhat Hanh began with a story. "One day I was practi<u>s</u>ing mindful movement in a wood with the people of our community," he said softly. "Everyday we practice this, walking slowly, mindfully, to enjoy every step; then we sit down.<br />
<br />
"One day, I suddenly realized that the tree standing in front of me allowed my movement to be possible. I saw very clearly that I was able to breathe in because of its presence in front of me. It was standing there for me, and I was breathing in and out for the tree. I saw this connection very profoundly.<br />
<br />
"In my tradition we speak of 'interbeing.' We cannot 'be' by ourself alone; we must be with everything else," he continued. "So, for example, we 'inter-are' with a tree: if it is not there, we are not there either.<br />
<br />
"In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha advises us to consider four notions: the notions of self, of humanity, of living beings, and of life span. He also advises that the practice of removing these notions from mind is not difficult; anyone can do it."<br />
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<i>And later</i>:</div>
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"Intellect alone is not enough to guide us. To shape the future of the twenty-first century, we need something else. </div>
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Without peace and happiness we cannot take care of ourselves; we cannot take care of other species and we cannot take care of the world.</h4>
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"That is why it is important for us to live in such a way that every moment we are there deeply with our true presence, always alive and nourishing the insight of Interbeing.<br />
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"To me, mindfulness is very much like the Holy Spirit. All of us have the seed of the Holy Spirit in us; the capacity of healing, transforming and loving. Where there is suffering, mindfulness responds with the energy of compassion and understanding. Compassion is where the rivers of Christianity and Buddhism meet.<br />
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"In the Christian and Jewish traditions, we learn to live in the presence of God," he affirmed. "Our Buddhist equivalent is the practice of cultivating mindfulness, of living deeply every moment with the energy of the Holy Spirit. If we change our daily lives—the way we think, speak and act—we begin to change the world.<br />
<br />
"This is what I discussed with Dr. Martin Luther King many years ago; that the practice of mindfulness is not just for hours of silent meditation, but for every moment of the day. Other teachers, like St. Basil, have said it is possible to pray as we work, and in Vietnam, we invented 'Engaged Buddhism' so we could continue our contemplative life in the midst of helping the victims of war. We worked to relieve the suffering while trying to maintain our own mindfulness.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The young Thich Nhat Hanh with Dr Martin Luther King</td></tr>
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"So to conclude, the practice of looking deeply does not mean being inactive. We become very active with our understanding. <b>Non-violence does not mean non-action.</b> It means we act with love and compassion, living in such a way that a future will be possible for our children and their children. "<br />
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<br />
And now, more words from Thich Nhat Hanh<br />
<br />
"Many years ago when I visited Italy, I met a Catholic priest who organized a <br />
public talk for me. We had time to talk with each other, and I asked him this <br />
question: 'My friend, what is the Holy Spirit to you?' And he said that the Holy <br />
Spirit is the energy of God, sent by God to us. I thought that expression is <br />
beautiful, and as a Buddhist practitioner I can accept it very easily.<br />
<br />
"The Holy Spirit is the kind of energy that helps you to be compassionate, to <br />
be healed of your ill being. I think Catholics and Protestants would agree about <br />
that: the Holy Spirit is the agent of healing, of transformation, of joy, of <br />
being there.<br />
<br />
"In Buddhist circles, we say very much the same thing to describe mindfulness. <br />
To us, mindfulness is the energy that can help us to be there, in the here and <br />
the now. Mindfulness helps us to be alive, and since we are there, we are <br />
capable of touching life deeply, of understanding, of accepting, of loving. If <br />
we continue to develop that energy of understanding and loving, then we will get <br />
the healing and transformation that we need. That is why the Holy Spirit is <br />
exactly what we call the energy of mindfulness.<br />
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<br />
"I can say that a Buddha or a bodhisattva is someone who is made of the energy <br />
of mindfulness. Each of us has a seed of mindfulness within ourselves. If we <br />
practice walking, sitting, smiling, breathing, eating, doing things every day <br />
with mindfulness, we help that seed of mindfulness in us to grow, and it will <br />
generate that energy of mindfulness that helps us to be alive, fully present in <br />
the here and the now, helping us to understand, to accept, forgive, and to love, <br />
to be healed. That is why it is correct to say that the energy of mindfulness is <br />
the energy of a Buddha, of a bodhisattva.<br />
<br />
"We have that energy in ourselves, and if we know how to practice, we can <br />
generate that energy from within. To me, the expressions 'Holy Spirit' and <br />
'Mindfulness' both point to the same thing—something that is very concrete, that <br />
is available us in the here and the now, and not just an idea, a notion."<br />
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<i>We would be delighted to have your comments. We also invite you to support the voluntary work of the Book Club by choosing to purchase your books through our bookstore links, above right. They return a tiny but helpful % to us from any book orders made via this website. Going to "Search" you will also find other article on this website about Thich Nhat Hanh. Meanwhile, and all the while, we wish you peace in your hearts, and in our world.</i></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Madeleine's flower, blooming in the sweet air of deep appreciation.</td></tr>
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<br />Stephanie Dowrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17217351699603371102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7195277115340782565.post-70302589888534892262014-08-19T17:13:00.000+10:002014-08-20T10:25:01.029+10:00Thomas Merton and the Wisdom of Non-Violence<div style="text-align: right;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Merton and the young 14th (current) Dalai Lama</td></tr>
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Peace activist <b><a href="http://www.fatherjohndear.org/" target="_blank">Father John Dear </a></b>wrote the powerful article that follows for Hiroshima Day, 2005, reflecting on the peace-making activism of monk and writer <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780385032926?a=stpdow" target="_blank">Thomas Merton</a> (who died in 1968) - and the “Wisdom of Nonviolence”. Through the marvels of web researching, I (Stephanie Dowrick) “fell upon it” while looking for a more general Merton reference. It's an article I regard as essential reading for us all. Almost ten years later, John Dear continues his peace activism work and you can learn more about it at his <b><a href="http://www.fatherjohndear.org/" target="_blank">website</a></b>. We thank him for his permission to reproduce the article here.<br />
If you agree that this article is worth your time and thought, please consider how you can use social and other media to circulate it, not because you need to agree with every point raised, or every point that Merton himself made, as a man of his time, but because this article richly contributes to one of the most fundamental and urgent discussions of our time. <br />
Peace is, I believe, our greatest challenge as a human family. </div>
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If we fail to create the necessary changes in our personal and collective thinking about how best to live alongside one another in peace and safety and with mutual respect, we will fail in everything. We will fail ourselves; we will certainly fail the generations to come. </div>
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We can, we must think intelligently and deeply together about alternatives to the delusion that war is an arguable “solution” to human problems, that increased conflict is an acceptable path to peace, or that we can achieve personal happiness while so many in our world suffer conflict and its vast attendant miseries, including homelessness, starvation and despair. </div>
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We need to release ourselves from the pessimism that runs deep in our culture, whispering to us that there will always be wars (in our homes, on our streets, between tribes and nations). </div>
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Merton calls us - whatever our faith, culture, “beliefs” - to become “contemplatives, students, teachers, apostles, visionaries, instruments, prophets of non-violence”. I hear that as a call to love far more and far less conditionally; to be far bolder in our hopes for our world and one another; to achieve the safety, wellbeing and peace we are, now, daring to imagine. Could anything matter more?<br />
<i>God of peace</i>, writes John Dear, <i>we are blind. Give us the vision of peace to see every human being on the planet as our sister and brother, to love our neighbors and our enemies, to learn like Merton, that in the end, we are all one in you.</i> Amen, we say. And again, Amen.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Merton</td></tr>
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<h3 style="text-align: center;">
John Dear: Thomas Merton and the Wisdom of Nonviolence</h3>
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San Diego, California<br />
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Like all of you, Thomas Merton has been one of my teachers, and it's a blessing to reflect on his exemplary life and astonishing witness.<br />
I'm 45, have been in the Jesuits almost 25 years now, went to college at Duke University, decided one day that I really did believe in God and that I wanted to give my whole life to God, and the next thing you know, I was entering the Jesuits. I'm still trying to figure out how that happened! Before I entered the Jesuits, I decided I better go see where Jesus lived, so I decided to make a walking pilgrimage through Israel, to see the physical lay of the land, only the day I left for Israel in June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and I found myself walking through a war zone.<br />
By the end of my two-month pilgrimage, I was camping around the Sea of Galilee, and visited the Church of the Beatitudes, where I read on the walls: "Blessed are the poor, the mournful, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for justice, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those persecuted for the sake of justice, and love your enemies." I was stunned. I walked out to the balcony, looking out over the Sea of Galilee, and asked out loud, "Are you trying to tell me something? Okay, I promise here and now to dedicate my life to the Sermon on the Mount, to promoting peace and justice, on one condition: if you give me a sign." Just then, several Israeli jets fell from the sky breaking the sound barrier, setting off a series of sonic booms, coming right toward me. After they flew over me, I look backed up at heaven, and pledged to live out the Sermon on the Mount and never ask for a sign again!<br />
When I entered the Jesuits three weeks later, I was on fire with a desire to pursue the life of peace and justice. I started to study the writings of the great peacemakers, such as Gandhi, Dr. King, Dorothy Day, the Berrigans and, from day one, Thomas Merton. Like you, I've been reading Merton ever since. I think I've read everything he's published, and I'm amazed how he still speaks to me. In contrast to the culture, to the TV, to the President, even the whole world, Merton remains a voice of sanity and reason and faith and clarity and hope, and I can't put him down.<br />
I don't know if you heard what the great theologian David Tracy recently said when he was asked what the future of theology in the U.S. would look like. He answered spontaneously, "For the next 200 years, we'll be trying to catch up with Merton."<br />
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In 1989, I visited the Abbey of Gethsemani for the first time, and became friends with Br. Patrick Hart. Later, when I was in prison for nearly a year for a Plowshares disarmament action, Brother Patrick, wrote that Gethsemani wanted to support me, and he offered to let me stay for a while in Merton's hermitage, which was one of the great experiences of my life. I later published my journal from my retreat there called, <a href="http://www.fatherjohndear.org/books/sounds_of_listening_republished.html" target="_blank"><i>The Sound of Listening</i></a>. Later, again, I went back for another long stay. It was one of the greatest blessings of my life to live and pray in Merton's hermitage.<br />
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Over the years, Merton has helped me not only in my work for peace but in keeping me in religious life and the church because whenever I get in trouble for working for peace and justice, or whenever I get discouraged about the church or religious life, I recall how much trouble Merton was in for writing about war, racism, nuclear weapons and monasticism, how he stayed put, remained faithful, did what he could, said his prayers and carried on, so I take heart from Merton because he endured it all with love, with a good heart, and now we see how his life and sufferings and fidelity have born great fruit. I think we can all find new strength and courage from him to carry on and be faithful in our service to the God of peace.<br />
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When I think of Merton's "Revelation of Justice and Revolution of Love" (the theme of our conference) and what Merton has taught me, I return once again to the wisdom of nonviolence. So I would like to share five simple callings that I have learned from Thomas Merton.<br />
<i>First, Merton invites us to become contemplatives, mystics, of nonviolence.</i><br />
Merton's whole life was based on prayer, contemplation and mysticism, but it was not so that we could go and hurt others, or bomb others, or dominate the world, but so that we could commune with the living God. I spent my first ten years as a Jesuit praying by telling God what to do, yelling at God for not making the world a better place, until finally, a wise spiritual director said, "John, that is not the way we speak to someone we love." A light went on in my mind: prayer is about a relationship with someone I love, with the God of love and peace. So my prayer changed to a silent listening, a being with God, which is what contemplative nonviolence is all about.<br />
Merton knew that prayer, contemplation, meditation, adoration and communion mean entering into the presence of the God of peace, dwelling in the nonviolence of Jesus, that, in other words, the spiritual life begins with contemplative nonviolence, that every one of us is called to be a mystic of nonviolence.<br />
So, in prayer, we turn to the God of peace, we enter the presence of the One who loves us and who disarms our hearts of our inner violence and transforms us into people of Gospel nonviolence and then sends us on a mission of disarming love and creative nonviolence.<br />
Through contemplative nonviolence, we learn to give God our inner violence and resentments, to grant clemency and forgiveness to everyone who hurts us; to move from anger and revenge and violence to compassion, mercy and nonviolence so that we radiate personally the peace we seek politically.<br />
In the end, as Merton knew, peace is a gift from God. If we are addicted to violence, as the Twelve- Step model teaches, we need to turn to our Higher Power, confess our violence, support one another through communities of nonviolence, and become sober people of nonviolence. "The chief difference between violence and nonviolence," Merton writes, "is that violence depends entirely on its own calculations. Nonviolence depends entirely on God and God's word." ("Blessed are the Meek," in <a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/Nonviolent-Alternative-Thomas-Merton/9780374515751" target="_blank"><b><i>The Nonviolent Alternative</i></b></a>, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 1971.)<br />
When Jesus calls us to love our enemies, he said we should do so because God does so. God lets the sun shine on the just and the unjust and the rain fall on the good and the bad. God is compassionate to everyone, and we should be, too. <i>This is the heart of contemplative nonviolence.</i> Then we are able to see everyone as a human being, and to see God and become like God.<br />
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As we pursue contemplative peace like Merton, we learn, contrary to what the Pentagon tells us, that our God is not a god of war, but the God of peace; not a god of injustice, but the God of justice; not a god of vengeance and retaliation, but the God of compassion and mercy; not a god of violence, but the God of nonviolence; not a god of death, but the living God of life.<br />
We discover a new image of God. As we begin to imagine the peace and nonviolence of God, we learn to worship the God of peace and nonviolence and, in the process, become people of peace and nonviolence.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">"The great problem is this inner change," Merton writes. "We all have the great duty to realize the deep need for purity of soul that is to say, the deep need to be possessed by the Holy Spirit."</span></h3>
On his way to Asia, Merton told David Stendl-Rast that, "The only way beyond the traps of Catholicism is Buddhism." In other words, every Catholic has to become a good Buddhist, to become as compassionate as possible, he said. "I am going to become the best Buddhist I can, so I can become a good Catholic."<br />
That is the wisdom of Merton's contemplative life, to become like Buddhists, people of profound compassion, deep contemplative nonviolence.<br />
That is what he discovered with his experience in Polonnaruwa when he wrote: "Everything is emptiness and everything is compassion."This is what Merton meant when he wrote about Gandhi: "Gandhi's nonviolence was not simply a political tactic which was supremely useful and efficacious in liberating his people. On the contrary, the spirit of nonviolence sprang from an inner realization of spiritual unity in himself. The whole Gandhian concept of nonviolent action and satyagraha is incomprehensible if it is thought to be a means of achieving unity rather than as the fruit of inner unity already achieved." (<i>Gandhi on Nonviolence</i>, New Directions, New York, 1964).<br />
So Merton calls us to be contemplatives and mystics of nonviolence, instruments of the God of peace.<br />
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<i>Second, Merton teaches us to become students and teachers of nonviolence.</i><br />
Merton was not just a great teacher, but the eternal student. He was always studying, always learning, always searching for the truth. So when he started reading Gandhi in the 1950s and then meeting peacemakers like Daniel Berrigan and the folks from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Catholic Worker, he became a student and teacher of Gospel nonviolence, and I think that's what each one of us has to do: to study, learn, practise and teach the Holy Wisdom of nonviolence.<br />
The lesson starts off with the basic truth: Violence doesn't work. War doesn't work. Violence in response to violence always leads to further violence. As Jesus said, "Those who live by the sword, will die by the sword. Those who live by the bomb, the gun, the nuclear weapon, will die by bombs, guns and nuclear weapons." You reap what you sow. The means are the ends. What goes around comes around.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">War cannot stop terrorism because war <i>is</i> terrorism. War only sows the seeds for future wars. War can never lead to lasting peace or true security or a better world or overcome evil or teach us how to be human or as Merton insists, deepen the spiritual life.</span></h3>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Merton with the young Thich Nhat Hanh</td></tr>
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Underneath this culture of war and injustice is a sophisticated spirituality of violence, a spirituality of war, a spirituality of empire, a spirituality of injustice that has nothing to do with the living God or the Gospel of Jesus. In this false spirituality, we believe violence saves us, war brings peace, might makes right, nuclear weapons are our only security, God blesses wars, we seek not forgiveness and reconciliation but victory and domination, and the good news is not the love of enemies but the elimination of enemies. It's heresy, blasphemy and idolatry. The empire always tries to instruct the church on sin and morality, telling us that certain personal behavior is sinful or immoral, while saying nothing about the murder of 130,000 Iraqis, in recent years [John Dear is writing in 2005; the situation has worsened since], as if that were not sinful or immoral.<br />
In a spirituality of violence, the church rejects Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount as impractical, takes up the empire's just war theory, launches crusades and blesses Trident submarines and remains silent while Los Alamos churns out nuclear weapons and enjoys the comforts of the culture of war and injustice rather than taking up the cross of Gospel nonviolence. We have a private relationship with God, fulfill our obligations and go right along with the mass murder of our sisters and brothers around the world.<br />
The empire wants the church to be indifferent and passive; to be divided and fighting and silent, even to bless wars and injustice.<br />
Unless we speak out and teach the wisdom of peace and nonviolence, the church will become like Hazel Motes' church in Flannery O'Connor's book [of short stories] <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780571245789?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>Wise Blood</i></a>, the "Church Without Christ", where the lame don't walk, the blind don't see, the deaf don't hear, and the dead stay dead. That's what Merton learned.<br />
The wisdom of nonviolence teaches that: War is not the will of God. War is never justified. War is never blessed by God. War is not endorsed by any religion. War is the very definition of mortal sin. War is demonic, evil, anti-human, anti-life, anti-God, anti-Christ. For Christians, war is not the way to follow Jesus. "The God of peace is never glorified by human violence," Merton wrote. In other words, peaceful means are the only way to a peaceful future and the God of peace.<br />
So like Merton, we have to study nonviolence, define it, talk about and think about how each one of us can become more nonviolent, and how we can create a church of nonviolence, even a new world of nonviolence. So Merton studies it and concludes: "What is important in nonviolence is the contemplative truth that is not seen. The radical truth of reality is that we are all one."(Blessed are the Meek)<br />
Merton's nonviolence begins with the vision of a reconciled humanity, the truth that all life is sacred, that we are all equal sisters and brothers, all children of the God of peace, already reconciled, all already united, and so, we could never hurt or kill another human being, much less remain silent while our country wages war, builds nuclear weapons, and allows others to starve.<br />
So nonviolence is much more than a tactic or a strategy; it is a way of life. We renounce violence and vow never to hurt anyone again. It is not passive but active love and truth that seeks justice and peace for the whole human race, and resists systemic evil, and persistently reconciles with everyone, and insists that there is no cause however noble for which we support the killing of any human being; and instead of killing others, we are willing to undergo being killed in the struggle for justice and peace; instead of inflicting violence on others, we accept and undergo suffering without even the desire to retaliate as we pursue justice and peace for all people.<br />
Nonviolence is active, creative, provocative, and challenging. Through his study of Gandhi, Merton agreed that nonviolence is a life force more powerful than all the weapons of the world, that when harnessed, becomes contagious and disarms nations. So nonviolence begins in our hearts, where we renounce the violence within us, and then moves out with active nonviolence to our families, communities, churches, cities, our nation and the world. When organized on a large national or global level, active nonviolence can transform the world, as Gandhi demonstrated in India's revolution, or as Dr. King and the civil rights movement showed.<br />
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I worked for several years as executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which I think through John Heidbrink, helped to bring Merton and the Berrigans into the work for peace in 1960 and 1961. I learned like Merton through FOR [Fellowship of Reconciliation] that all the major religions are rooted in nonviolence. Islam means peace. Judaism upholds the magnificent vision of shalom, where people beat swords into plow shares and study war no more. Gandhi exemplified Hinduism as active nonviolence. Buddhism is all about compassion toward all living beings. Brace yourselves, Merton teaches, even Christianity is rooted in nonviolence.<br />
The one thing we can say for sure about Jesus is that he practiced active, public, creative nonviolence. He called us to love our neighbors; to show compassion toward everyone; to seek justice for the poor; to forgive everyone; to put down the sword; to take up the cross in the struggle for justice and peace; to lay down our lives, to risk our lives if necessary, in love for all humanity, and most of all, to love our enemies. His last words to the community, to the church, to us, as the soldiers dragged him away, could not be clearer or more to the point: "Put down the sword."<br />
Now you might say this is the one moment where violence is justified. Peter was right to take up a sword, to kill to protect our guy, the Holy One. But Jesus issues a new commandment: "Put down the sword." That's it. We are not allowed to kill. That's why they run away; they realize he is serious about nonviolence, that we follow a martyr.<br />
Jesus dies on the cross saying, "The violence stops here in my body, which is given for you. You are forgiven, but from now on, you are not allowed to kill." And God raises him from the dead, and he says, "Peace be with you." Then he sends us forth into the culture of violence on the mission of creative nonviolence.<br />
I like how in one of his journals, in the early 1960s, Merton calls himself "a professor of nonviolence," determined to teach the church, even the world, the wisdom of nonviolence. We too need to teach nonviolence, and to call the church to practice the nonviolence of Jesus, and to help it reject the just war theory and accept the risen Christ's gift of peace.<br />
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<i>Third, Merton invites us to become apostles of nonviolence</i>.<br />
We remember Merton's famous article for Dorothy Day and <i>The Catholic Worker</i>, where he wrote: "The duty of the Christian in this time of crisis is to strive with all our power and intelligence, with our faith and hope in Christ, and love for God and humanity, to do the one task which God has imposed upon us in the world today. That task is to work for the total abolition of war. There can be no question that unless war is abolished the world will remain constantly in a state of madness and desperation in which, because of the immense destructive power of modern weapons, the danger of catastrophe will be imminent and probable at every moment everywhere. The church must lead the way on the road to the nonviolent settlement of difficulties and toward the gradual abolition of war as the way of settling international or civil disputes. Christians must become active in every possible way, mobilizing all their resources for the fight against war. Peace is to be preached and nonviolence is to be explained and practiced. We may never succeed in this campaign but whether we succeed or not, the duty is evident."<br />
Today [in 2005] there are 35 wars currently being fought with our country involved in every one of them. According to the United Nations, some 50,000 people die every day of starvation. Nearly two billion people suffer in poverty and misery. We live in the midst of structured, systemic, institutionalization of violence which kills people through war and poverty.<br />
From this global system comes a litany of violence--from executions, sexism, racism, violence against children, violence against women, guns, abortion, and the destruction of environment, including the ozone layer, the rain forests, and our oceans. Since 2003, we have killed over 135,000 Iraqis. But on August 6, 1945, we crossed the line in this addiction to violence and vaporized 130,000 people in Hiroshima and another 70,000 people, three days later in Nagasaki.<br />
Today, we have some 25,000 nuclear weapons with no movement toward dismantling them; instead, we increase our budget for killing and send nuclear weapons and radioactive materials into outer space. We put missile shields around the planet, and plan even greater nukes.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">I think we are called to be activists for peace like Thomas Merton. Jim Douglass told me that Merton, alone in his hermitage in the woods, did more for peace than most peace activists. I think that whatever we do, wherever we are, we have to be involved in the movements for peace and justice. None of us can do everything, but all of us can do something, like Merton, whether through our prayer vigils, marching, leafleting, protests or civil disobedience.</span></h3>
So I urge you to join Pax Christi, the international Catholic peace movement, or the Fellowship of Reconciliation; to be part of the ONE campaign working to lift the third world debt; and the ongoing campaign to close the School of the Americas.<br />
On August 6th, the 60th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, hundreds of us from Pax Christi will go to Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb, and in a spirit of prayerful, active nonviolence, we will put on sackcloth and ashes to repent of the sin of war and nuclear weapons and pray for the gift of nuclear disarmament. I hope you will join us, or you own local peace vigil.<br />
On the first page of his book, <i>Peace in the Post Christian Era</i> - which was suppressed until its publication by Orbis Books - Merton writes: "Never was opposition to war more urgent and more necessary than now. Never was religious protest so badly needed." (<i>Peace in the Post Christian Era</i>, Orbis Books, 2005.)<br />
<i>Fourth, Merton invites us to become visionaries of nonviolence</i>.<br />
One of the many casualties of the culture of war is the imagination. People can no longer imagine a world without war or nuclear weapons or violence or poverty. They can't even imagine it, because the culture has robbed us of our imaginations.<br />
We live in a time of terrible blindness, moral blindness, spiritual blindness, the blindness that will lead us over the brink of global destruction.<br />
Our mission is to uphold the vision of nonviolence, like Merton, to point the way forward, the way out of our madness, to lift up the light, to lead us away from the brink.<br />
We need to be the community of faith and conscience and nonviolence that lifts up the vision of peace, to help others imagine a world without war or nuclear weapons, the vision that teaches us to resist our country's wars and nuclear arsenal.<br />
All my life, I've been trying to uphold a vision of a world without war, by serving the poor and homeless, visiting the war zones of the world, organizing protests and getting arrested 75 times, engaging in a Plowshares action, and working at the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Now I live way out in the desert of New Mexico where until recently I've been serving as the pastor of several churches among the very poor. It's like being a desert father on the margins. New Mexico is a land of great spirituality, but it's also the poorest state in the US, the birthplace of the bomb, and number one in nuclear weapons spending, and these days I'm in a lot of hot water for calling for the closing of Los Alamos. But I remember that Merton visited New Mexico twice before leaving for Asia and was impressed by its land and people and life on the margins. He knew that this was a special place with the potential of becoming a land of nonviolence.<br />
You may have heard what happened to me recently. I had been living in a small desert town in northeaster New Mexico, serving five parishes, and speaking out against the war, when one morning, on November 20, 2003, the day after it was announced that the local unit of the National Guard was going to Iraq, at 6 a.m., 75 soldiers came marching down the street in front of my rectory and church, shouting battle slogans. They marched passed the church for an hour, then the shouting got real loud and I looked out the window and discovered that they were standing right in front of my house, filling up the street, shouting out, "Kill, kill, kill!" So I went out and gave them a speech, saying, "In the name of God, I order you to quit the military, not to go to Iraq, not to kill anyone or be killed, and to follow the nonviolence of Jesus because God does not support war, God does not bless war, God does not want you to wage war." They looked at me with their mouths hanging open, and then broke up laughing. So now, I'm totally notorious.<br />
But I've been telling my peace movement friends that after you become completely notorious, I no longer have to go to demonstrations. From now on, the soldiers come to me!<br />
Like Merton, we all need to become new abolitionists who imagine a world without war, poverty or nuclear weapons.<br />
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<i>Fifth, Merton invites us to become prophets of nonviolence</i>.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Here is one of my favorite Merton quotes: "It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection of, a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny which threaten to destroy the whole human race and the whole world. By my monastic life and vows I am saying NO to all the concentration camps, the bombardments, the staged political trials, the murders, the racial injustices, the violence and nuclear weapons. If I say NO to all these forces, I also say YES to all that is good in the world and in humanity."</span></h3>
I think that just as Merton learned to make his life a rejection of war by speaking out for peace, we must do the same thing and make our entire lives a rejection, a protest against the crimes and injustices and wars and nuclear weapons of our country and so become prophets of nonviolence to the culture of violence.<br />
Merton teaches us to break through the culture of war and denounce the false spirituality of violence and speak the truth of peace and nonviolence. Remember how he wrote to Jean LeClerc, that the work of the monastery is "not survival but prophecy," in the biblical sense, to speak truth to power, to speak God's word of peace to the world of war, to speak of God's reign of nonviolence, to the anti-reign of violence. I think that's our task too--not survival, but prophecy.<br />
Merton wrote to Daniel Berrigan in 1962, "If one reads the prophets with ears and eyes open then you cannot help recognizing our obligation to shout very loud about God's will, God's truth, and God's justice."<br />
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I'm sure Merton would have something to say about everything that is happening the world today, in this whole culture of war. So like Merton the prophet, our job is to call for an end to war, starvation, violence and nuclear weapons, to say, bring the troops home, end the U.S. occupation of Iraq, cut off all military aid to the Middle East and help the U.N. pursue nonviolent alternatives to this crisis.<br />
In March 1999, I led an FOR delegation of Nobel peace prize winners to Baghdad. We met with religious leaders, like the Papal nuncio and Imans, United Nations' officials, non-governmental organizations, and even government representatives. But, most importantly, we met with hundreds of dying children and saw with our own eyes the reality of suffering inflicted by the sanctions, because we have systematically destroyed Iraq's infrastructure by our bombs. Everywhere we went, the suffering people asked us right up front: Why are you trying to kill us?<br />
Just as Merton condemned the Vietnam war and nuclear weapons and racism, I believe he would condemn the U.S. bombings, sanctions, and occupation of Iraq as a total disaster, a spiritual defeat. Iraq is not a liberated country. It is an occupied country, and we are the imperial, military occupiers. There is no representative democracy in Iraq, nor do we intend to create one, and if we are going to take the example and teachings of Merton seriously, then we have to do what he did and speak out against this horrific war. We're not cloistered monks or hermits, so we don't have any excuse.<br />
The occupation of Iraq is not about September 11 or stopping their weapons of mass destruction, since they were destroyed. It's not about concern for democracy or disarmament or the Kurds or the Iraqi people.<br />
If we cared about democracy, we would have asked them how to bring democracy, as we did on our delegation. To a person, they said, "Don't bomb us. Give us food and medicine and fund nonviolent democratic movements." Instead, we responded militarily with sanctions and bombs.<br />
If we cared about the possibility of Iraq having one part of a weapon of mass destruction, we would dismantle our 20,000 weapons of mass destruction. As I said in a recent protest in Santa Fe, if President Bush was looking for weapons of mass destruction, we found them: they're right here in our backyard. He does not need to bomb New Mexico; just dismantle our entire nuclear arsenal!<br />
This war is all about Bush and Cheney's goal to control Iraq's oil fields, at any price, to gain financial control of the world economy. We bombed every single major building in Baghdad except for the Ministry of Oil. We have an imperial economy based entirely on oil and weapons, and to maintain this empire, we have to wage war and wars require the blood of children, the blood of Christ. You and I have to become, like Merton, the voice of the voiceless, the voice of sanity and peace.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">"I am on the side of the people who are being burned, bombed, cut to pieces, tortured, held as hostages, gassed, ruined and destroyed," Merton wrote in the 1960s. "They are the victims of both sides. To take sides with massive power is to take sides against the innocent. The side I take is the side of the people who are sick of war and who want peace, who want to rebuild their lives and their countries and the world."</span></h3>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Father John Dear. Peace activist.</b></td></tr>
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Like Merton, I think we too have to take sides. We have to side with the poor and the children, with the innocent, with our enemies, and be like Christ, who took sides when he said: "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me."<br />
"It is absolutely necessary to take a serious and articulate stand on the question of nuclear war, and I mean against nuclear war," Merton wrote in the 1960s to his friend Etta Gullick. "The passivity, the apparent indifference, the incoherence of so many Christians on this issue, and worse still the active belligerency of some religious spokesmen is rapidly becoming one of the most frightful scandals in the history of Christendom."<br />
If we are to be prophets of nonviolence like Merton, we have to speak out for an end to the occupation; call for the immediate return of our own troops; and call for the U.N. to resolve the crisis nonviolently and heal our Iraqi brothers and sisters.<br />
We also need to call for an immediate end to all U.S. military aid to Israel and the occupation of the Palestinians, and instead fund nonviolent Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers, and say we're not anti-Semitic nor do we support suicide bombers, but that we want the Jewish vision of shalom. We support human rights for Palestinian children.<br />
We must also demand that our country stop bombing and sending military aid to Colombia and the Philippines; close our own terrorist training camps, like the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, as well as the CIA, NSA, and the Pentagon; and lift the entire third world debt.<br />
We must demand that we cut our military budget; end the Star Wars missile shield program; dismantle every nuclear weapon and weapon of mass destruction, and undertake international treaties for nuclear disarmament; join the World Court and uphold international law; and then, redirect those billions of dollars toward the hard work for a lasting peace through international cooperation for nonviolent alternatives; to feed every starving child and refugee on the planet, end poverty, show compassion to everyone and protect the earth itself.<br />
Merton teaches us, like Ezekiel and all the prophets, that whether we are heard or not, whether our message is accepted or not, our vocation is to speak the truth of peace, to become prophets of nonviolence, a prophetic people who speak for the God of peace.<br />
Merton concludes his great essay, "Blessed are the Meek", on the roots of Christian nonviolence, by talking about hope, saying our work for peace and justice is not based on the hope for results or the delusions of violence or the false security of this world, but in Christ. Our hope is in the God of peace, in the resurrection.<br />
Merton gives me hope: hope to become a contemplative and mystic of nonviolence and commune with the God of peace; hope to teach the wisdom of nonviolence to a culture of violence; hope to practice active nonviolence in a world of indifference; hope to speak out prophetically for peace in a world of war and nuclear weapons; hope to uphold the vision of peace, a world without war in a land of blindness and despair.<br />
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I looked up Merton's concluding advice to Daniel Berrigan in one of Merton's letters, and thought we could all take heart from Merton's encouragement: "You are going to do a great deal of good simply stating facts quietly and telling the truth," Merton wrote to Dan. "The real job is to lay the groundwork for a deep change of heart on the part of the whole nation so that one day it can really go through the metanoia we need for a peaceful world. So do not be discouraged. Do not let yourself get frustrated. The Holy Spirit is not asleep. Keep your chin up."<br />
So I urge you not to be discouraged, not to despair, not to be afraid, not to give in to apathy, not to give up, but instead, to become contemplatives, teachers, apostles, prophets, and visionaries of Gospel nonviolence: to take up where Merton left off, to go as deep as Merton did, to stand on Merton's shoulders, to transform the church and the world into the community of Gospel nonviolence, so that we might do God's will, and announce like Merton, with Merton, the revelation of justice, the good news of the revolution of love.<br />
<i>So let us pray:</i><br />
<i>God of peace, make us contemplatives of nonviolence, prophets of nonviolence, teachers of nonviolence, apostles of nonviolence, and visionaries of peace like Thomas Merton. Help us to announce the Revelation of Justice and the Revolution of Love, that we may all welcome your reign of peace. Amen.</i><br />
<i>God of peace, give us courage and strength and faith to say NO, like Merton, to the evils of violence, war, greed, poverty, and nuclear weapons, and to say YES, like Merton, to Jesus' reign of nonviolence, love, justice and peace. Amen.<br />God of peace, we are blind. Give us the vision of peace to see every human being on the planet as our sister and brother, to love our neighbors and our enemies, to learn like Merton, that in the end, we are all one in you. Disarm our hearts and send us forth into a world of war and nuclear weapons, like Merton, like Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr, and Mahatma Gandhi, that we too may be instruments of your peace. Amen.</i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">His Holiness the Dalai Lama visits the grave of Thomas Merton.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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A heart-filled thank you to spiritual activist <b>John Dear</b> for this article and for his unstinting work as a peace-maker. You are welcome to visit his <a href="http://www.fatherjohndear.org/" target="_blank"><b>website</b></a>. There you will find links to more articles, talks and current public appearances - as well as to his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Life-John-Dear/dp/0966978323/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408493443&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Non-Violent+Life" target="_blank"><b><i>The Nonviolent Life</i></b></a>. You can also find and follow him on on <a href="https://twitter.com/frjohndear" target="_blank">Twitter</a>.<br />
We welcome your views. You are hugely welcome to leave comments on this page (below) or on Stephanie Dowrick's public <a href="https://www.facebook.com/StephanieDowrick" target="_blank">Facebook</a> page. You will support this entirely voluntary Book Club by using the bookstore links above right - and by sharing the link to this or any other article which contributes to a more peaceful world.<br />
We would particularly recommend that you explore further writings from Thomas Merton. We would suggest <i>A Thomas Merton Reader</i>, available postage free in Australia from this <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9780385032926?a=stpdow" target="_blank">LINK</a>. (Postage free from the Book Depository link above right for those outside Australia.)<br />
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You may also appreciate Stephanie Dowrick's book, <a href="https://www.qbd.com.au/product/9781743317501?a=stpdow" target="_blank"><i>Seeking the Sacred</i></a> (separately published in the US by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Seeking-Sacred-Transforming-Ourselves-Another/dp/1585428663/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408493213&sr=1-1&keywords=Seeking+the+Sacred" target="_blank">Tarcher/Penguin</a>), and - here at the Book Club - her recent <a href="http://www.universalheartbookclub.com/2014/07/stephanie-dowrick-challenges-humanitys.html" target="_blank">assessment of James Hillman's A Terrible Love of War</a> . You can visit <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/interfaithinsydney" target="_blank">InterfaithinSydney's YouTube</a> channel to hear Stephanie Dowrick speak on peace, as well as other topics. Not least, those of you in or visiting Sydney are invited to join us for unifying sacred services each 3rd Sunday of the month, 3pm, at Pitt Street Uniting Church, Sydney, led by Reverend Dr Stephanie Dowrick.Stephanie Dowrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17217351699603371102noreply@blogger.com0