Saturday Seventeen Freewrite

I have not had a FREEWRITE since March 9th. Say what? 

I don't think I have been overly busy, but my days are full. So I don't know if this person in the picture is really me. I like the picture though.

I have my non-negotiable things like Centering Prayer, and I think that addition has made it so that I don't end up like the person in the picture above, but I am still trying to figure some things out.

I don't know how many directees is too many. April ended up being a month that was not as busy in direction as it usually is. Part of it was that many of them were at a major conference in Europe and traveling from there, and so many of my people did not meet with me. I liked it in some ways.

I have been having so much fun. I finished The Reservoir devotional, and that was so rich and fun. I read a lot. I am also reading through the Bible Book Club again after not going through the last cycle. I am reading the blog I made starting 15 years ago, and what a difference 15 years can make in my heart and soul. It is encouraging. 

My life is full and rich and meaningful. I love what I am doing. I am finishing up my second "Campfire" group with the 2nd Half Collaborative, and I have LOVED this group. They are so open and vulnerable, and the discussions are so rich and meaningful. I have loved leading with my partner D. I pretty much have facilitated all the group times (other than when I was on the Camino in October), and he has been very supportive and encouraging. I think I have done well with the group. The group is smaller than last year. So it has been so much easier to get through everyone sharing, and most of the time, D or I have been able to share what we learned. We look at INTERIORITY. Then we look at COMMUNITY. Then we look at CONTRIBUTION/MINISTRY. It is really about the Communion/Community/Commission that Henri Nouwen talks about in the message I just linked. 

I love leading the group of new spiritual director. Each month, we go through one to two of their Contemplative Reflection Forms. This is a dialogue between then and their directee. The goal is not to correct how they asked questions, but it is to look at how they felt about themselves as they did direction. I also have two directees who are not in my group who are also spiritual directors. One of them has said that her supervisor is much more "punitive" in how she supervises. ACK! I cannot imagine being this way. The people I am supervising are, no joke, really GOOD at doing direction. So, I cannot imagine being punitive with them. They are the greatest group of people! I feel really blessed by them. 

The other group I lead is a Contemplative Cohort. It is sort of my "guinea pig" group. I am developing a curriculum that would be like a 1st Half Collaborative. It is teaching interiority and doing their ministry out of identity in him. They are not as committed as the above two groups, and I realized that I need a group more committed than this group of women. Some are, and some are not. So, I am evaluating. 

Now, I am still tentatively going to train new directors with Mary and Sandy as an intern for two years. This is a HUGE commitment. I have said yes. I think training directors is in my gifting. My desire is to train directors who will do direction with international workers. 

That is all the time I have. Time to listen to my book, The History of Tom Jones. 

Sweetest Memory of My Week

This picture is holding a place for the sweetest memory of the week. I baked challah bread for our recently widowed neighbor on Friday. When we went to deliver it, we heard beautiful piano music that stopped with our knock. I looked at George and said, “Was he playing?”

He answered the door, grateful for the bread, and said, “Would you like to come in for tea?” (He is a “Cockney” from Central London.)

We spent the most delightful tea time with him. He told us how he met his Cornwall bride of 64 years and how they came to Corvallis USA. He spoke so lovingly of his beloved, Janie. Then, he summed up his 80+ years of life and the choices he has made by quoting “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost (the whole thing).

If that wasn’t enough to make our day, he said, “Would you like to hear a song?” We gladly replied, “Yes,” and he ushered us into his tiny living room that held a beautiful grand piano and played “I Love You Just the Way You Are” by Billy Joel without any music. He didn’t even know the name of the song. He had just heard it and learned to play it by ear.

We left speechless and in awe.

I did not bring my camera. Perhaps that was better to savor every moment of that song.

This picture is to hold this day in my memory forever. It was blessed.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Oh, I have such mixed emotions about this book! 

First, great compassion for this woman. What a life! YIKES! I do hope she has gotten OODLES of therapy. 

Second, was her dad really a "closeted gay"? I would say he was a pedophile. Sick man. Mom should have gotten them OUT OF THAT HOUSE and that town.

Interesting note, I keyed in that he was head of the "Clinton County Historical Society," and realized it was MY ANCESTORS Clinton County, Pennsylvania. So, the author grew up less than an hour away from the town my grandmother grew up in and got out of (some of my relatives still live there). 

I am intrigued that there was a musical done on this!

WARNING: Some of the cartoons are sexually inappropriate and could have been left out! 

Right after reading this, I saw on the news that this book is in an elementary school! NOOOOOOO!!! It is not appropriate for children. 

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

One might expect a graphic narrative to be lean, wry, linear. Yet the pioneering triumph of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is that it’s resonantly rich in thought and theme, nuanced in its framing and feeling, and contrapuntal in its treatment of chronology, character, and incident. Bechdel imbues her story with an expressive pulse that moves from words to pictures and back again like an intricate melody passed between the instruments of a string quartet. The memoir is the story of a pre-adolescent girl with two brothers who comes to certain realizations about herself and her family. A labyrinthine web of literary echoes and mythological invocations captures the emerging complexity of her intelligence, and you have to read her images with as much attention as her allusive, probing, and alert prose. More than metaphorically, it’s a handmade book, and lived time is layered into every panel. 

Laughing in the Hills

This is another book I never would have picked up if it weren't on my list. He is a good writer, and he incorporates history into the whole thing. I cannot say it is a favorite book, but it was OK. 

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

Author Bill Barich started playing the horses out of the desperation bred by his mother’s battle with cancer. Other family sadnesses followed, and to escape their shadow, he decided to spend a season at Golden Gate Fields, a thoroughbred racetrack outside San Francisco. Barich’s attentive, anecdotal account of track life is keenly observed and placed in intriguingly wider contexts by his off-track learning; you’ll discover a good deal in these pages about the city of Florence and its Renaissance culture, for instance, and the author is ingenious enough to place his reading in conversation with the racing life around him. It is the kind of book that, once you’ve finished it, will make you long to be asked, “Read anything good lately?” You don’t need to love horse racing to fall in love with this book. 

American Pastoral

What a masterpiece! It is on every list for American fiction. It has some brief unsavory sexual parts, but overall, it is such a reflective historical novel. The main character was born in New Jersey the same year my mother was born in Chicago. So, I could have been the daughter in this story, but thank the Lord I was not. I think it should be on the list. 

"An unexamined existence no longer serves his needs. He wants something recorded." Chapter 1

Another significant quote:

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

The meaning of the title that is quoted toward the end of the book:

“And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff--no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people--one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion of the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

What Wikipedia says about the title and conclusion of the main character: 

Seymour sadly concludes that everyone he knows may have a veneer of respectability, but each engages in subversive behavior and that he cannot understand the truth about anyone based upon the conduct they outwardly display. He is forced to see the truth about the chaos and discord rumbling beneath the "American pastoral", which has brought about profound personal and societal changes he no longer can ignore. Simultaneously, the dinner party underscores the fact that no one ever truly understands the hearts of other people.

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

James Mustich

It’s easy to begin talking about American Pastoral by noting its central place in the Zuckerman Saga, a series of nine novels that follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist who shares an awful lot of characteristics with his creator (make that ten fictions if you count The Facts, from 1988, an ostensible autobiography that opens with a letter from Roth to Zuckerman and closes with one from Zuckerman to Roth). But what’s most memorable about this 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner is the way the author engages the subject of America with a fervor few novelists have dared since World War II. Passages of American Pastoral, especially those describing what was destroyed in the 1967 Newark riots, have a fierce and grieving majesty seldom matched in our literature. In telling the Swede’s story, albeit in the voice of Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth embraces his past with an almost penitential reverence, honoring the world that made him—and is now forever gone—with nostalgic, rueful, angry tenderness.

Lonesome Dove

The writing is so rich, and the character development is excellent. I had heard about this because the 1989 mini-series won numerous Emmy Awards. My husband and I are watching it now.

I agree with Mustich! See below. 

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

James Mustich

Men of action require a field to work, and few fields have proven as fertile in this regard—in life and in the imagination—as the American West. Larry McMurtry’s 1985 epic, Lonesome Dove, may be its richest literary harvest. Set in the late 1870s, it tells the story of a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana, led by two former Texas Rangers, Augustus (Gus) McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, who have been friends for three decades. Along the way, McMurtry enlists all the familiar elements of Western lore: a hero capable and wise, yet easygoing (Gus), and another stoic, reticent, and duty-driven (Call); a whore with a heart, if not of gold, then glittering with allure; rogues disguised as friends; hostile Indians and bands of renegades; sheriffs in relentless pursuit and women both passionate and profoundly pragmatic; and a young cowboy who will inherit the dusty dreams of his elders. For all its cowboy grit and glory, Lonesome Dove is more than just a celebration of the Western ethos.