Friday Freewrite Forty

 I am doing a 40-minute freewrite today. I usually do fifteen-minute ones, but I am taking more of the "Morning Pages" Julia Cameron method this morning. Those pages take about 40 minutes, but I don't like how much paper they consume. So I am doing it here. If anyone reads it, that's OK. My life IS an open book, and I don't mind others knowing. For some, it helps. I always write these thinking no one else will read until someone comes up to me and tells me how much what I wrote helped them. That was back when we left our old church 19 years ago, and the turmoil that was there. I journaled a lot back then. I haven't been doing it as much here as I used to. I don't know why. I did "Morning Pages" from January - September last year in my Kindle Scribe.

So as a refresher, a "freewrite" means you do no correct grammar or punctuation, and you just let the pen or pencil or fingers fly! That is always hard when you have Grammarly trying to improve you. I will do my best to ignore. 

The picture is where I sit as I type this freewrite. Yes, I left the plug in on the fire table on purpose because I am so excited I bought this fancy extension wheel that I can plug into the three pronged plug that used to be too far for my computer to allow me to sit here looking out over my yard. Before I would sit in the other chair facing the side of my house. The extension we have here is only a two prong plug. This one has three, three-pronged plugs and three USB plug-ins. So, I will be doing more work out here this summer. 

I am out here because I started out my morning really well, but it has gone downhill, and I find my soul in desolation. I want to get to the bottom of it by writing, asking for prayer (asked my bestie to pray just now), praying myself, and being outside listening to the birds sing (loud equipment is allowed is Corvallis after 9 am so I am living dangerously in that respect), and breathing the fresh air. 

I was great during my time with God. Jesus' words to ask whatever you wish (John 16), and me asking what I wish. Then an inkling that maybe I shouldn't observe my friend do deliverance with this person. I could do it, but my friend is so called to this, and I am called more to direction than deliverance. I see the need for it, but most of my directees are not in need of this. So, when I encountered this person, I wanted my friend, so gifted and called to it, to do it. She is amazing, and I have marveled at Jesus' love. Yet, I think my soul is heavy as a result. I will not go into the details, but I am going to leave it in my friend's hands and not go anymore, and the person receiving it agreed that I need not go anymore. It really is a matter of calling for me. Also, in talking to my bestie, she said she gets the same feeling after one of her clients, there is a heaviness. We are very similar, and I think it is our "absorb other people's stress" personality type that does it. My response is delayed, and it was probably prompted by getting a message from the person receiving the deliverance that she was distressed yesterday. I let go and am letting my friend continue.

So, the desolation is so weird after such a lovely time with Aki yesterday. She painted a picture called The Lion and the Lamb and she didn't even know that was in the Bible. It led to lunch and a good spiritual talk yesterday. I love her so much, and she kept saying, "This is such a good memory!" Such a consolation. So the desolation surprised me today.

I also took a risk and went to a prayer watch with my order. I have not been there since August, and it brought up some stuff that I had to deal with. Then I got into a conversation with one of the old-timers, and she was so gracious. I feel a bit disconnected there. I have moved on to other things that were more fulfilling for me and where my gifts and talents were more utilized. So, I don't regret the decision to scale back on my involvement with the Order, but it made me sad about somethings from the past. So, I think that also contributed to things.

One thing that I feel like I have an answer to is a local Spiritual Direction training. It is just not coming together. My bestie was going to do it and now she is not able to because she is doing a class for her career that will not end until next year. So, I prayed for a closed door yesterday. So, I will pursue online options, and I am open-handed about even that! God is so good.

I am talking to someone in fifteen minutes about a sticky situation with another directee. It is not her situation, but she has knowledge of a situation that is not good, and her employers don't have a policy for reporting, and I am seeing if my former employer does by talking to one of my former coworkers. I have put this off for two weeks. 

I think this writing is helping me immensely. 

Oh, and there is my reading. I have only two more books to select to reach my 2025 goal for the 1000 Books to Read List! It has been fun to do this, and I have liked most of the books I have read. I am reading several at one time, though. I know that is weird, but sometimes I get exhausted with fiction and switch to non-fiction and vice versa. 

Oh, and we got through not only the Downton Abbey series but the two movies as well because the new movie is coming! Woohoo! I will have to check when the new movie is coming out and whether it will be in the theatres or streaming. 

Well, I just got a message from someone who is going to send me an email ahead of the call we have at the top of the hour! It is about time for the end. Not quite, but close enough. 

This was helpful. 

It is a good decision, but my soul is still a bit heavy. I know that a walk or ride to campus plus a strenuous Pilates with bands class will be great for me. I need to get out of my HEART and into my BODY. Listen to those birds. Music to my soul. 

Interview with the Vampire (1000 Books to Read)

This was really engaging writing, but it was so creepy! I am glad I know Jesus, and He protects me from all evil. (I don't believe there are vampires, but I do believe there is evil in the world!)

I also kept thinking how any parent could allow their 11 year old child to even ACT in such a creepy movie. I would really like to know how Kristen Dunst feels about all of that now. Ewww! (But I don't think I could ever watch the movie to find out how it played out on screen!)

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Aug 1, 2018

Anne Rice has been wildly prolific in the decades since Interview with the Vampire, her 1976 debut novel, catapulted her to fame, but her first book is still her most intriguing. Subverting convention in many ways, notably by making the vampire in question fallibly human and by presenting his story in his own words, Rice’s tale also embraces the genre’s Gothic-erotic roots with relish. The result is one of the best vampire novels ever written.

Within This Wilderness (1000 Books to Read)

This is my favorite book of the year. I am a mother of two sons who are individuals in their own right. It spoke to me about motherhood and the love we have for our children.

I was also delighted because I spent a summer not far from the setting of the book, the wilderness in the Canadian Coastal Range. It is a wonderful read. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

The author’s son left home at sixteen and, by the time Feenie Ziner’s chronicle begins seven years later, he had settled into a solitary life in the untracked Canadian wilderness, three thousand miles from home. “Ben was on perfectly safe ground when he asked me to come out to British Columbia to see where he was living. Any kid who had gone to the trouble of putting a whole continent between himself and his family could count on their never showing up at his doorstep.” Any mother who would make the trip—a transcontinental flight, a six-hour bus ride to the end of the line, then a journey by bush plane into a densely forested nowhere—is clearly a force to be reckoned with, and the reckoning between parent and child that Within This Wilderness witnesses takes on, because of its remote setting, an archetypal resonance. Indeed, both the awesome natural charms of the surroundings and the hard manner of living that isolation dictates engage and even relax our attention, protecting us for a time from the climate of deep emotion in which the protagonists dwell. Ziner’s deft portrayal of the elaborate, often comic diplomacy of the relations between parents and grown children, her sensitivity to the alarming innocence of the toughest youth, and her splendid writing reward the reader throughout, and her unstinting appraisal of her own noble confusion—a spell of love, worry, wonder, guilt, loss, pride, anxiety, anger, obligation, yearning—is both moving and magnanimous. 

Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1000 Books to Read)

What a delightful read! It follows a Vermeer painting backward in time from the Present Day to 1672, when Vermeer painted it (it's not really one of his paintings, though). Vermeer is one of my favorite painters, so to say I was excited that the book was about one of his paintings is an understatement. It is very well-written, and I am excited to watch the movie, Brush with Fate, based on the book. 

I found this timeline was really helpful at the end of the book (don't want to spoil it by reading it before):

Girl in Hyacinth Blue--Timeline | Sutori

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

In this lovely and absorbing book, Susan Vreeland traces a putative Vermeer creation—Girl in Hyacinth Blue—backward in time through three centuries, from its theft by a Nazi officer through the hands of several owners to the studio of the artist himself. In a series of linked stories, Vreeland conveys the private lives and inscrutable emotions for which the mysterious, evocative figure of the painting stands as an emblem. Each story details a domestic drama in which “the momentous ordinary,” in the author’s phrase, is honored and ennobled, even as its characters—a family of Dutch Jews celebrating Passover the year before their deportation; a devoted couple consoled by the embrace of their long marriage; Vermeer’s daughter Magdalena, the model for the girl in the portrait—fall under the sway of history’s calamities and time’s indifference. Like the real paintings that are its inspirations, Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a quietly astonishing articulation of the evanescent emotions that convey enduring human truths. 

The Portable Dorothy Parker (1000 Books to Read)

I listened to this by a fabulous narrator! Why are literary people so sad? It is comic writing, but there was such sadness behind the words. There is also an upper-class snobbishness that she pokes fun at, but it is so obvious that she was a part of that world. I got a bit bored by the end...and sad! (Apparently, Hemingway did not like her, but he did not like many people.)

It is another book this year where I read about life in New York in the 1920s. 

Not everyone is so unhappy, Dorothy. I think she died alone. I haven't watched the documentary on her on YouTube yet. Let me watch it and see if that is the case. Yep, the YouTube documentary says it all. It is interesting. She was an alcoholic. :(

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Mrs. Parker, as she liked to be called, became one of the most quoted writers of her time because of her singular gift for sharpening truths into well-honed words; her barbed ability was unparalleled in her day and hasn’t been equaled since. In 1944, she selected and arranged this collection of her stories and poems for presentation in a single volume. It has since been expanded to include some of her later stories, as well as theater reviews and essays, and the complete archive of her terrific Constant Reader book column from The New Yorker. Spanning her career and containing the bulk of her work, this is truly a treasure trove.

Microbe Hunters (1000 Books to Read)

This was so fascinating. I loved it. I learned about the first simple microscope by Anton Van Leeuwenhoek and the exploits of Pasteur and Walter Reed (yes, the military hospital is named after him). This is a great book! (Many animals die in the writing of this book, but their sacrifices have saved millions of people.) 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Few books convey the romance of science—the intense excitement of close observation, the intuitive leaps that link phenomena, the disappointment of failed hypotheses, the triumphant clarity of successful experiment—better than this one. The enduring 1926 bestseller by bacteriologist-turned-writer Paul de Kruif is a colorful account of the careers and discoveries of the pioneers of the microscopic world. Presenting these scientific trailblazers as the “hunters,” “explorers,” and “fighters of death” that they truly were—including some “done to death by the immensely small assassins they were studying”—de Kruif infuses his profiles with an extra dose of drama that brings a page-turning pleasure to the real scientific history he imparts.

Memoirs of a Geisha

Ha! Ha! I thought this book was on the 1000 Books to Read List. But it is NOT! Why was it in my tagged group of audiobooks for 1000 Books? Oh well. 

That said, this book is often on lists of books to read and is very well-written. I am goal-oriented and have been on this quest since May 2019. I don't know if I will ever get to all 1000 books, but my intermediate goal this year is to get to the top of the List Challenge List, and this book will not get me there. Again, oh well. 

I am also so tired of reading books where women are abused by vile people. Why does AI say that Geishas are not prostitutes? Maybe they are not now (outlawed in 1956), but they were during the time this was written, and it was heartbreaking to see the abuse. They were high-class prostitutes taken advantage of by rich and powerful people. It broke my heart in places. 

Navigator of the Flood (1000 Books to Read)

He assumed a lot about what Noah was thinking and feeling. He nails how Noah might have felt as he built the ark, knowing that the people around him (minus his family) would perish in a big flood.

The whole drunkenness thing was pretty weird. But it did cause me to think about some things. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

In his lifetime, Mario Brelich published only three books, each a distinctive, imaginative exploration of a biblical theme, and each a discovery of the first order. In Navigator of the Flood, Brelich’s ingenuity is set to the task of explaining the drunkenness of Noah, the episode that concludes the ninth chapter of Genesis and stands as a peculiar coda to the story of the great flood. The result is a playful, trenchant, inspired, and funny meditation—a philosophical essay in the form of a novel—on the deep meanings we can still find hidden in the dusty folds of a familiar tale

Oblomov (1000 Books to Read)

I liked this book. It is about a Russian "couch potato"!

This Wikipedia article is so thorough in explaining it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblomov

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Goncharov’s novel, originally published serially, had such an effect in its time that it inspired a new Russian word: oblomovshchina, or “Oblomov-itis,” a fake clinical diagnosis of the paralysis of privilege. Although the book’s satire of Russian nobility is trenchant and funny, the author knows that his protagonist suffers from something more insidious than mere laziness, for Oblomov isn’t empty or corrupt: He’s intelligent, perceptive, and capable of deep friendship and passionate attachments. Indeed, the psychological inertia that Goncharov depicts, which seems to be strangely fostered by the very talents and advantages Oblomov possesses, retains its relevance today, and not just in terms of “couch potatoes.”

The Riddle of the Sands (1000 Books to Read)

This had everything that I love: adventure, mystery, even romance! I loved this quick read. I am going to watch the movie that is on Amazon Prime. It has Jenny Agutter who is on Call the Midwife. 

The only disadvantage is that I did not have the maps with me while I was listening to the audiobook on a walk. I came home and followed it on Google Maps for the last half of the book. I wish I had the illustrated version of this book!

While it did not initiate naval preparedness for Great Britain, it did help propel it. Germany did end up being a problem a few years later in World War I!

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

“A yachting story, with a purpose,” Erskine Childers wrote to a correspondent while he was composing The Riddle of the Sands at the beginning of the twentieth century. The purpose was political: to alert an unprepared England to the threat posed by German ambitions. It was by no means the only example of “invasion fiction” created by British writers at the time to stir their sleepy country to naval investment, but it was the most influential in promoting the cause of military readiness, and—more important for later generations of readers—it has proven the most enduring, for the simple reason that it is a rip-roaring good yarn.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (1000 Books to Read)

Lin-Manuel Miranda's narration was brilliant. 

The story is very engaging and deep. I can totally understand why it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008. The Wikipedia article contains a thorough analysis of this book and made me appreciate it even more! If you can get through the foul language, it is a worthy read. 

I loved learning about the Dominican Republic's history, but I think many of my friends would not like this because of the language and sexuality. It was a bit much for me, also. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

The first thing that strikes you is the prose: It’s fast and agile, unafraid to mix ingredients. English and Spanish and Spanglish combine to energize the sentences, which move easily between different modes of discourse—expository, conversational, professorial, confidential, ribald, tender, rambunctious—but never stray for long from speech rhythms. Now shouting, now murmuring, now explaining or exhorting, the voice of the narrator—a man named Yunior, as we will eventually discover—relates the life of his friend Oscar de Leon, an overweight, nerdy, sensitive boy possessed of—or more exactly by—what Díaz has called “outré interests.” Yunior’s narration also encompasses the times of Oscar’s family (including his sister, Lola, Yunior’s former love), immigrants to New Jersey from the Dominican Republic. The book’s style is powerful, and it needs to be, because it must treat several spheres of action and dimensions of experience, diverse in register and implication. Along the way, the story bounces back and forth between yearning and nostalgia, tenderness and violence, nerdiness and nobility, anguish and—not least, and almost inexplicably—joy.

Freewrite Fifteen

I have not had a freewrite on here in a while. I have been reading many short books and posting my reviews here. So, I have not been freewriting as much.

Today is the last day with the last group doing the Spiritual Exercises. I ended my other group yesterday at 10:30, and I cried. I loved the 34-week journey with them (Easter was later this year. So we had two extra weeks where they had an extra week to do a Yearly Examen and an entire week to compose a Beloved Charter. That was special. Next year's group will not have those two extra weeks.) I will continue to meet one-on-one with two of the three people. That will be great. 

The same is true for the other group I lead. This group has only been 14 weeks, but I will continue to meet with the two left. The other person was only able to make it three times out of the ten times because of health and family things. I bless her. This group has been great. This is the third time leading people through the shorter 18th annotation. I highly recommend the 19th though. It gives you time to settle in and linger longer by doing repetitions and looking at your "Blessed History" for an extra week. I like that.

I am going to go into my Zoom room early this morning to pray for one of the people in my 19th Annotation group who is speaking at 5:45 am Pacific time for 150 people at a school. I know she will do great, but I want to give extra prayer support.

I have enjoyed the reading that I have been doing. I have three more books until I pass up the person who is second in line on the List Challenge (they took off the person who said they had read all the books on the 1000 Books to Read Before You Die list - how could it be possible to read ALL of them unless you were the author of the book? They signed in as a guest. So, they took all the "guests" off the list.) The list is incomplete though. They have left off quite a few books, have the wrong books linked to it, and count a whole series as one book. All the people who made the list had to do was do the list in James Mustich's book, but I digress.) 

I am about halfway through my time. I have this 18th annotation group and a woman from another country. Then I have an hour break, and I have two friends coming from Seattle who are driving through on their way somewhere. We are going out for an early lunch. That will be so fun. I need to remind George that they are coming.

After that, I am free. I think I might read. It is always harder for me to read print books in the afternoon. My eyesight is not what it used to be, and some of these books have very small print, but I went to the eye doctor and am getting new lenses, not new frames, because I love these lightweight frames. So, I will be without my better corrected lenses for about a week. So, I think it will be audiobooks for the foreseeable future!

I am also doing great with my eating. I am on day 11 of recording. It has come easier than earlier in the year. I think I did about three weeks earlier in the year, but I am going for three months this time. We will see! 

I have to decide on when I am taking my 12-hour walk, if I should teach Pilates this summer, and where our family is going on vacation this year. 

I have the Boller Cohort next Tuesday and Wednesday, and my last Campfire for the 2HC on May 28th. Then I will be done with all the groups I lead. I will just have my final Pilates class and the final retreat for the 2HC, and everything will be done. 

I wonder what will be around the corner. I am embracing uncertainty. I love this. 

Memorial (1000 Books to Read)

I agree with James Mustich's assessment of this beautiful book. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Only 120 pages long, Memorial is a small book about a small life. Yet the reader who opens it will discover a story that is unforgettably moving in its sympathy, dignity, and desire to articulate the deepest human needs. Written by one of the most notable of Italy’s post-World War II writers, this enchanted autobiographical novel is steeped in the peasant culture of Camon’s native Veneto, an ageless and all-but-vanished way of life the author has left behind for the city and the twentieth century.

The Praise of Folly (1000 Books to Read)

This was very interesting. It is a work of satire and criticizes the Catholic Church. It is notoriously difficult to analyze. So I chose to simply enjoy it. Some have said it led to the Protestant Reformation.

I like that he was a dear friend of Sir Thomas More. There is much I liked about this book, and there is more I didn't really understand!

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Waspish, subversive, bitingly ironic, and endlessly entertaining, Praise of Folly has endured for five hundred years as a masterpiece of humanistic inquiry and opposition to dogmatism. The book begins as a straight satire. Folly, in the guise of a jester, speaks for herself in a parodic declamation, insisting she is the world’s greatest benefactor—desire, flattery, youth, and vitality all follow her lead, and Jupiter himself has to fall in behind her when he wants to father a child. When someone observes that no humans have ever built a house of worship for her, Folly first responds with a droll observation: “I cannot but wonder at the ingratitude.” Yet Praise of Folly soon pivots from this cheeky beginning, and the goddess becomes a mouthpiece through which the author propounds more serious themes. Half a millennium on, the power of Erasmus’s masterpiece has not waned; in fact, it’s both disturbingly and providentially relevant in our contemporary moment, when religious belief and humanistic scrutiny are often violently opposed. 

A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1000 Books to Read)

This 1967 book was about a country doctor, Dr. John Eskell (he is "Doctor Sassall" in the book). The village is St. Briavels in the Forest of Dean.

The video above is an interview with people from that area, 50+ years later. That was interesting.

Here is an article about the people from the area, many years later:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-47731653

It was philosophical in nature. I liked looking at the life of the doctor from his perspective. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

A Fortunate Man is one of several volumes Berger made in collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr. An assemblage of narrative episodes, passages of biographical profile, and both poetic and philosophical speculation on the labors of an English country doctor named John Sassall, its quiet power is amplified by Mohr’s black-and-white images of Sassall, his patients, and the landscape in which they dwell. A carefully observed attempt to take the measure of the doctor’s influence on an impoverished community’s experience, A Fortunate Man is a probing meditation on medicine and meaning, conscience and commitment, and other matters of life and death.

My Brilliant Friend (1000 Books to Read)

It took me a while to get into this book, but once I was in, I was hooked! It helped that one of my favorite reality shows, The Amazing Race, was in Naples when I was attempting to "get into" the book. It helped me visualize the novel! 

It is a coming-of-age story following two friends from childhood to adolescence in post-World War II Naples, Italy. I plan on reading the whole trilogy. I want to follow these women. Of course, there is mistreatment by men. Is spousal abuse common and accepted in this culture or just in certain segments of society? I am curious. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

“We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.” So Elena Greco, called Lenù by those who know her, describes the adventure that cements her friendship with Raffaella Cerullo, known familiarly as Lina or Lila, a friendship that Lenù will narrate across six decades in the novels of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. The first novel in the series, My Brilliant Friend, is devoted to the girls’ school days and teenage years. It begins with them playing with their dolls and ends—in cliff-hanging form—in the middle of Lila’s tumultuous wedding. The apprehensiveness of childhood—the uncanny allure of dark cellars, the liberating mischief of stone throwing or shouting in a tunnel—is perfectly drawn, as are the classroom rivalries of girls and boys that foreshadow relationships between them that will develop and transform as elementary learning is outweighed by the lure and luck of circumstance.

The Physiology of Taste (1000 Books to Read)

Surprisingly, I really liked this quirky little book! The whole time I was reading, I thought, "Those French and their food!" It is SO important to them, and if you ever get to go to France, you will be GLAD they take such care with their food. It is a delightful experience to eat there, and the most amazing meal I have ever had was eaten there at this restaurant:

Bayeux, France

So I was delighted as I read with warm memories of our time in France in June 2018 and November 2019 in the Alsace region. Both delightful gastronomical adventures!

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Composed in aphorisms, anecdotes, and brief topical essays, The Physiology of Taste can be picked up at any time and opened to any page; it is a browser’s delight, best sampled serendipitously. The thirty “meditations” that make up the meat of the book cover a wide range of gustatory subjects, from underlying matters such as taste, the senses, and the pleasures of the table to overriding concerns such as the end of the world, sleep, dreams, death, and digestion. Brillat-Savarin’s appetite is catholic; he tackles turkeys, truffles, chocolate, and coffee with equal gusto. His penchant for theorizing is as French as his fondness for food, and he applies it to subjects as diverse as frying, gourmandism, obesity, and restaurants. Imagine a postprandial conversation, fueled by fine wine and cognac, with a worldly and loquacious uncle whose store of anecdote and eloquence seems endless, and you’ll approach the pleasures that await you in this quirky masterpiece. It is unrivaled to this day as a compendium of food lore, culinary observations, and philosophical ruminations on the art of eating and the art of living. Fortunately, because of the labors and inspirations of M. F. K. Fisher, Anglophone readers lose nothing in translation [Note from Carol: I read the free translation] for Fisher’s version of Brillat-Savarin’s chef d’oeuvre is not only exquisitely translated, but made immeasurably richer by her amplification of the text in her own notes and glosses. It is guaranteed to bring hours of diversion and delight—and perhaps even a few minutes of the promised transcendence—to any food-loving reader.