The Great Good Thing (1000 Books to Read)

This book was hard for me to get into, but between when I checked it out in February on a Kindle and today, the library purchased an audiobook (I think I requested it). It was so much easier for me to get through in an audiobook. The concept was initially confusing, but I eventually understood it. 

"Write your own story"....That is the personal message I derived from it, as I am embarking on a "write your own story" kind of change starting in June. 

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

We first meet Sylvie, the princess heroine of the book-within-this-book, as she is rushing back to page three, summoned by the attention of the first reader to crack the covers of her fairy tale in a very long time. Didn’t you know that the life of storybook characters goes on even once their books are closed? Well, as we learn in this ingenious novel, such characters are just as surprised to find out that readers have a life apart from their reading. “You mean you don’t know how your own story turns out?” Sylvie asks Claire, the young girl who becomes entranced by Sylvie’s tale, then rescues the princess and her fellow characters when the volume they have inhabited for eight decades—since Claire’s grandmother possessed it as a child—is threatened by fire. As the resourceful Sylvie escapes the borders of her book to enter Claire’s dreams and take up sometimes perilous residence in the girl’s imagination, real young readers—and their parents, if they’re lucky—are bound to become lost in one of the most inventive and exhilarating narratives they’ll ever discover. Filled with surprise and magnanimous wisdom, The Great Good Thing is a marvelous invocation of the power of books to transcend time and pass enchantments across generations.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1000 Books to Read)

I started reading this book last year! I got it on long-term loan last year from the OSU library, but I never got around to reading it. I also had it on my Kindle several times and could never get into it!

Finally, I just FORCED myself to read it. I had read her other book, The Second Sex. I wish I had read this before. It is her life story. 

She had a 50 year relationship with Sartre. She doesn't even get to know him until the last 20 pages of the book! Here are her first thoughts and final thoughts on Sartre in the book:

 Page 309 · Only Sartre’s little band , which included Nizan and Herbaud , remained closed to me ;

Page 310 · Sartre wasn’t bad to look at , but it was rumoured that he was the worst of the lot , and he was even accused of drinking .

Page 345 - Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream - companion I had longed for since I was fifteen : he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence . I should always be able to share everything with him . When I left him at the beginning of August , I knew that he would never go out of my life again.

More quotes are below:

Page 103 · Location 2146

I didn’t know a single grown - up who appeared to enjoy life on earth very much :

Page 104 · Location 2158

often declared , ‘ you have no dowries ; you’ll have to work for a living . ’

Page 107 · Location 2207

As long as he approved of me , I could be sure of myself .

Book Three

Page 260 · Location 4946

His tranquillity offended me .

Page 275 · Location 5220

out what was underneath that rebarbative

Book Four

Page 307 · Location 5805

‘ There is within me I know not what yearning – maybe a monstrous lust – ever - present , for noise , fighting , savage violence , and above all for the gutter . .

Page 307 · Location 5810

I feel an avid curiosity ; I desperately want to burn myself away , more brightly than any other person , and no matter with what kind of a flame . ’

Page 308 · Location 5817

never for a moment did I contemplate sexual indulgence .

She was a smart, unhappy person who discarded God in her youth. She was quite the intellectual, and she influenced the modern feminist movement. 
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

“The ability to pass over in silence events which I felt so keenly is one of the things which strike me most when I remember my childhood,” writes Beauvoir early in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; the length and density of her four volumes of autobiography make it clear that this youthful ability is one she would later abandon with a vengeance. Her affections and friendships, uncertainties and confidences, infatuations and intense attachments to ideas as well as people—including her nascent relationship with her brilliant fellow student Sartre—are lushly remembered and related with a decidedly literary complexion. Just as her most famous novel, The Mandarins, a roman à clef of her and Sartre’s postwar circle, is fiction laced with reality, so her autobiography is fact that leverages the ways and means of fiction, a deliberate construction that allows her—with true existentialist agency—to create a portrait of the person she has chosen to be.

The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom by Shari Franke

What a brave young woman! She tells this story so beautifully and with such conviction. I could not put it down.

Her mother and the brainwasher of her mother were horrible. I hope these kids get good therapy and the rest of the family can heal after such a horrible ordeal. 

Here is the 20/20 Episode about what happened.

There is also a Hulu documentary called "Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke." Here is the trailer:

For Love of Country

I knew very little about but watched a long podcast interview that made me more curious about her life. I had never heard of this podcaster, but he was suggested to me by YouTube. So I watched the whole interview and was enlightened. She spoke of her book. So, I read it.

Here is the podcast:

The book was interesting. I don't want to make any political statements on this blog, but many people are bailing on the democrat party, and she was someone who ran for president on their ticket. So, I wanted to learn more about her switch, and I got an earful! 

The Invention of Nature (1000 Books to Read)

Wow! I loved this book. I learned about the "Father of Environmentalism"!  He was way ahead of his time - late 1700s, early 1800s!

I like to follow journeys in books. Wikipedia was helpful for this. 

I knew that there was a county and city in California named Humboldt, and they were named after him!

Quotes:

Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’. This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world.  (p. 87)

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

James Mustich

As Andrea Wulf makes clear in this marvelous biography, Alexander von Humboldt’s holistic view of nature “as a network of forces and interrelationships” played a significant role in advancing ecological thinking and thereby gave rise to modern conceptions of the environment. Detailing with verve and erudition Humboldt’s exploits as an explorer in far-flung corners of the world, Wulf also reveals the extraordinary extent of his reputation in his own lifetime. In his day (born in 1769, he died ninety years later), he was the most famous scientist in the world and an international celebrity. This long, rich, information-packed biography repays leisurely attention at the same time as it stimulates one’s thinking about fundamental issues. “Humboldt was not so much interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them,” Wulf writes. A reader can thankfully say the same of the author of this delightful book.

Back to ME (Carol Ann) - I am adding some popular highlights quite a while later (sorry about the narrow margin - I don't know how to fix it!) 

Humboldt gave us our concept of nature itself. The irony is that Humboldt’s views have become so self-evident that we have largely forgotten the man behind them. (p. 8). 

It was here, at Lake Valencia, that Humboldt developed his idea of human-induced climate change. (p. 57)

Timber was the oil of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and any shortages created similar anxieties about fuel, manufacturing and transport, as threats to oil production do today. (p. 58)

Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’. This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world.   (p. 87)

Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. (p. 105)

As long as there were scientists and artists, Haeckel believed, there was no need for priests and cathedrals.  (p. 314)

7 Days with Teilhard de Chardin: A Mystical Retreat Donald Goergen O.P. Ph.D.

I loved this! Such an edifying thing to listen to as I took late winter walks!

My favorite Teilhard quote from this recording is in the book Hymn of the Universe (p. 31):

[p.31]

Lord Jesus, now that beneath those world-forces you have become truly and physically everything for me, everything about me, I shall gather into a single prayer both my delight in what I have and my thirst for what I lack; and following the lead of your great servant I shall repeat those enflamed words in which, I firmly believe, the christianity of tomorrow will find its increasingly clear portrayal:

‘Lord, lock me up in the deepest depths of your heart; and then, holding me there, 

burn me, purify me, set me on fire, sublimate me, until I become utterly what 

you would have me be, through the utter annihilation of my ego.’

Swallows and Amazons (1000 Books to Read)

After reading a sad but good book (From Here to the Great Unknown) and a terrible book (Something Happened), reading a sweet, wholesome, imaginative Children's Classic that I had never heard of before was refreshing!

It reminded me of my brother and me pretending that the weird concrete island at the end of our street was a ship. It also made me think of the adorable 12, 10, 8, and 5-year-olds I did spiritual direction with from August to December! Most of them are the same age as the characters in the book. 

Sometimes a light and fun read is just what the doctor ordered!

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

James Mustich

Swallows and Amazons is the first in Arthur Ransome’s classic series of books about the children of the Walker family. In their initial appearance, the Walkers—John (the oldest, at twelve), Susan (ten), Titty (eight), and Roger (seven)—are summering with their mother in England’s Lake District, and the lakeland setting seems alive with the anticipation of a holiday. Adventure ensues when their friends' uncle's boat is burgled, but all comes right in the end, setting the stage for ten delightful sequels that similarly celebrate the resourcefulness of young people allowed to get their hands dirty as they master real skills—boating, camping, fishing, and the like—in a delightfully imagined but recognizable natural world.

Something Happened (1000 Books to Read)

I think this might be my LEAST favorite book at the end of the year. 

YUK! I did not like it. "My wife is unhappy. My daughter is unhappy. My son has difficulties. Now, my son does not talk to me." In the meantime, he is having adulterous affairs with the women in his office, paying for the abortion of one of them. It is the DUMBEST book.

Don't read it. 

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

The product of thirteen years’ gestation, Something Happened is an anatomy of middle-aged disenchantments that is both wildly funny and suffused with a desperate sorrow. Its narrator, Bob Slocum, is an office worker on the wearying escalator of a senseless though sometimes vicious corporate track; a husband whose marriage resides in a different dimension from his heart; a father terrified by the opacity, vulnerability, and willfulness of his children; an individual whose once eager innocence has been tarnished by the indefinable something that so surely happened to set him in his hopeless ways. Although Slocum’s narration embodies his banal life, Heller’s almost surreal focus on its very banality transforms it, by an astonishing act of literary sleight of hand, into something mesmerizing.

From Here to the Great Unknown.

Heartwarming and so heart-breaking too. I loved this book. I remember where I was when I heard Elvis died in 1977. (Working at the Pacifica Hotel in Culver City, CA). My boss was undone and played Elvis songs all day. The nation was in mourning. This book gives the perspective of his little girl.

I read this after seeing a great podcast interview with Riley Keough. 

It was excellent:

Or listen on Apple Podcast:

The Haunting of Hill House (1000 Books to Read)

Ok, but nothing to rave about. 

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

Shirley Jackson’s penultimate novel, The Haunting of Hill House, constitutes a masterpiece of psychosexual anxiety. Her wickedly disturbing passion play, enacted by the four (later, six) individuals gathered at the cursed mansion known as Hill House, perfectly equates the interior state of the spinsterish protagonist, Eleanor Vance, with the confusing, calamitous rooms and the surrounding acreage of the titular dwelling. Besides serving as a quietly horrifying testament to one woman’s disintegration, Jackson’s mordant 1959 book also brings a fresh sophistication to the horror genre through its characters’ recognition of what the plot will demand of them. By their conversation when they first meet, they make clear that they know they’re enacting clichéd roles from myriad films and novels. But their ultra-modern awareness fails to forestall the actual terror, and this is perhaps Jackson’s scariest assertion: The intellect is no real bulwark against the darkness. 

Stoner (1000 Books to Read)

This is the story of a life. So well-written. This line stuck out to me: 

"His life was nearly what he thought it should be." 

It is sad...and beautiful. 

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

A summary of what happens in Stoner might well prompt even the most devoted book lover to consider a movie instead. A young farm boy named William Stoner goes off to an agricultural college where he develops a passion for poetry. He embarks on an undistinguished career as an assistant professor of English; his colleagues hold him in no particular esteem. He marries and has a daughter, but his home life becomes a long estrangement from his wife, and fatherhood is fraught with hesitations and mistakes. The hope he discovers in an affair with a colleague is scuttled by university politics. Stoner is “about work, the hard unyielding work of the farms; the work of living within a destructive marriage and bringing up a daughter with patient mutability in a poisoned household; the work of teaching literature to mostly unresponsive students,” writes Irish novelist John McGahern in an introduction to its 2006 reissue. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound inviting. The unexpected power of this unassuming tale is rooted in the way in which the author depicts the concentration of Stoner’s inner being despite the diffusion of his outer life. The cumulative effect of Williams’s unflinching attention to Stoner’s ordinary life is strangely exhilarating—breathtaking, really—in its recognition that our inward selves embrace so much more than our outward lives appear to hold. 

Friday Freewrite Fifteen

I have not had a Freewrite in quite a while. So I am going for it and not lifting my fingers from the keyboard. 

I went to the Pastors Prayer Summit. It is for pastors and leaders in the Mid-Willamette Valley. It was lovely. It is hard to believe that I have not been there for 10 years (I worked on MW for TTH from 2015-2022 and couldn't go in 23 or 24). I don't think I would have gone had it not been for Kai who wanted someone to go with.

I don't fit into a nice neat "position" for the Church of the Valley, but I told people I "freelance for Jesus" and invest in leaders locally, but most of my ministry is with people outside the walls of the church.

I liked it. Even though I do not fit in neatly, I felt really comfortable there, and Mel (who organizes the rooms) gave me a HUGE room on the other side of the street. I didn't get an ocean view, but I loved how big it was and how I could dance in it because it was so big. I got up at 2 am the first morning and 4 am the second morning. It was so fun to read through my journal from the Pastor's Prayer Summit 10 years earlier!

In fact, I read what I wrote at a prayer time I had at the Trappist Monastery in LaFayette, and I soaked in Mark 6:31 about "coming apart" to a lonely place to pray, and then the meditation for the whole group was Mark 6! I loved it and realized how relaxed I was there at the Summit and how much less effort I put into everything these days. I put less effort into relating to people at the OSU Women's Basketball Alumni Reunion and being nervous about speaking and getting up in front of the crowd the weekend before the Summit, and I wasn't stressed at all driving to and from the Summit in the SNOW!

What has happened to me? I was in a Triad with sweet Jennifer, who I remember from the Summit 10 years ago, and Kai asked me to be in the same one. I felt so comfortable sharing, and it was lovely. I think that was my favorite part of the Summit too. 

The women are lovely. Three of the leaders are women who I did two years of a meditation group with. They are entrenched in this Church of the Valley life, and it is good. I was able to see them 10 years later and know that was when I was still trying to find out the best place for me, and it is definitely Spiritual Direction.

I had a great time with Kai on the way home and almost was overwhelmed with an avalanche of snow in the passing lane that had not been plowed, but I did well. It was nice. She is a good listener too. I pray she becomes a spiritual director someday.

So, I came home to the lovely BELOVED CHARTERS of the three people I am leading through the 19th Annotation of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius. It is such a life-giving group. I love them and know that is where I belong.

Finally, I met Bonnie, who is looking for a spiritual direction supervisor, and Pam, who has been through the Exercises of Ignatius! WOW! I sat right between them and thought, "This is a God thing!"

So, I think it has been fifteen minutes, but I will keep on typing until the alarm goes off. 

I also loved interviewing a new directee who is going through the Order of the Mustard Seed Year of Preparation. This is how I will give to the OMS this year. I have three people in the Year of Preparation. 

I also start the 18th Annotation with three people. It is unknown how that will turn out. I pray it goes well. Our first meeting is Feb 20. That is in 13 days. I am praying.

Oh, one more person I met along the way was a woman who had been through a similar spiritual abuse situation that I went through 19 years ago. It is so hard to believe that that was in 2006, and here I am - so healed and whole and thankful for what God taught me through the situation. She is only seven years out and still healing from it. 

Mutiny on the Bounty (1000 Books to Read)

Maybe this year will be reading books about high-seas voyages! With Kon-Tiki earlier this month and Mutiny on the Bounty now, it would seem that way.

I loved this book! I had read the book Bounty in 2005. This is what I wrote about it on this blog:

8. The Bounty: The True Story Behind Mutiny on the Bounty by (Book Club) 7

Four hundred ten pages of LOTS of detail about the true story behind what happened on The Bounty. Mutiny on the Bounty didn’t get it right. So, it was fascinating to read how the story got all twisted. Got on the internet and looked up Pitcarin Island, and I had a blast. I even emailed a descendant of one of the mutineers! I love it when books become history lessons.

I have no memory of the email with the descendant of the mutineer! I wonder if I can find it in my emails. 2005 was a LONG time ago.

Well, even if this book "got it wrong," it was a good read! 

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

James Mustich

Aug 1, 2018

The daunting open sea voyage of Captain William Bligh and his men aboard the HMS Bounty, and the ultimate disposition of the case in the British courts, have captivated writers, filmmakers, and audiences for generations. Of the numerous accounts—documentary, historical, speculative, and fictional—that have been written, the best and most popular is the novelization by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Published in 1932, Mutiny on the Bounty imagines the voyage out, the months in Tahiti, and the eventual uprising. Although this telling may not be the most historically accurate, it is the perfect introduction to an endless shelf of reading about a historical event. One of the great seafaring tales of all time, the story, like Shackleton’s Endurance voyage, has assumed the aura of a modern myth.

The Narrow Path by Rich Villodas (Renovare Book Club)

I finished this last month, but I forgot to put it in my 2024 books. Since it is the Winter 2025 read for Renovare Book Club, I will just put it on my list for this year. I will lead a discussion with it on February 24th. 

I love Rich Villodas, but this book did not take me deeper. It is a very general look at the Sermon on the Mount. 

Zoom Away and Zoom Upstream (1000 Books to Read)

Mustich has the whole Zoom Trilogy on the list, but my library only bought the first book (at my request) back in 2019. I didn't want to invest the money, but I certainly wanted to FINISH all the children's books on the 1000 Books to Read Before You Die List. The other day, I got this bright idea: why not see if it is read on YouTube, and it was!

So, I have closure! It is a sweet trilogy. 

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

Tucked away deep in the folds of a reader’s earliest memories, the imaginative magic of beloved picture books can shape and color all that he or she will come to learn—especially when the books in question are as wonderful as the three Zoom tales of Tim Wynne-Jones and Eric Beddows, which relate the adventures of a cat in search of his mysterious, seafaring Uncle Roy. Zoom’s search leads him to his uncle’s friend Maria, a woman whose house holds not only the ocean (as we discover in Zoom at Sea), but also—up near the attic—the North Pole (Zoom Away), and—behind the books in the library—Egypt and the Nile (Zoom Upstream). With a gentle mix of wisdom and whimsy, the author and the illustrator take us by the hand and lead us, easily and gracefully, into the heady atmosphere of imagination’s chamber. If you ever find better picture books to share— and share again, and again—with your children, you’re a lucky family indeed.

Kon-Tiki (1000 Books to Read)

What an adventure. I found this story so engaging and fascinating. I ended up watching the documentary on the expedition and a movie made about it. The movie changed quite a few things, but it was still interesting. 

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

Part of this book’s immediate and enduring appeal, no doubt, can be traced to its romantic portrayal of scientific investigation: A maverick thinker conceives a theory at odds with accepted wisdom and sets out on a task demanding enormous courage to prove it. Was Polynesia in fact settled by voyagers from the east, as Heyerdahl contended? Heyerdahl himself was always careful to claim no proof for his larger theory in the wake of the Kon-Tiki expedition; what his journey across the Pacific sought to establish, rather, was the possibility that balsa rafts constructed by Stone Age seafarers could have weathered the trip. In dramatizing that possibility through 101 days of difficult, dangerous, and exhilarating journeying, the author and his colleagues won the hearts and minds of countless readers.

2024 Reading Wrap Up

I have participated in reading 52 Books in 52 Weeks again. Here are answers to the Wrap Up questions:

How was your reading year? 

I liked it. I didn't like some of the 1000 Books to Read List books. Mustich is scraping the bottom of the barrel on some of these books. Why did he include them on the list?

I read 8,000 fewer pages than last year! I was busy. I finished some certifications: Restorative Pilates, EMDR, and Spiritual Accompaniment of Children. There was a lot of online reading with all three, but those don't count as "books"!

Did you follow a plan or go with the flow?

I am continuing to work through the 1000 Books to Read Before You Die List (read 21, about 1/2 of last year). I also had Renovare Book Club Books, and spiritual direction books that I am reading to decide if I would include them in the curriculum I am writing for the training I am starting in the fall of 2025.

Did you stick to tried and true authors or genres or explore outside your comfort zone?

Many books on the 1000 Book to Read List are outside of my comfort zone. So, I tend to read new authors all the time! I read one Science Fiction this year. It still isn't my favorite, but it is on the list. 

Where did your adventure take you? Outside of time and into space? 

I went to England (The French Lieutenant's Woman, Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman),  India (Midnight's Children), Michigan (The Virgin Suicides), Birmingham (Why We Can't Wait), the Sahara desert (The Sheltering Sky) Swiss Alps (The Magic Mountain), New York (The Bell Jar), Chicago (Sister Carrie),  France (The Day of the Jackal, Germinal), Space (Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey), 

There are more places, but that is enough.

Which stories made your heart sing or cry or laugh or fly. Do you want to hug the author or country or city or state?

CRY:  

A Well-Trained Wife

I know the author, and I have hugged her. To read all the details was devasting for me. I was a wreck for a week. I highly recommend the reading of this book. 

I loved Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr. I think everyone should read this book. It shows how far Black Lives Matter has strayed from this man's amazing vision. 

I liked every single memoir/autobiography I read. It is one of my favorite genres (because I am a people person and love to see what makes people tick). 

I also loved the books I read on "neurotheology" and the influence of brain science on spirituality: Practice the Pause. 

Which stories made you want to throw it across the room in disgust?

I didn't have any ones that disgusted me this year. Some I couldn't wait to finish, but none that disgusted. 

Which authors did you add to your "I want to read more or again pile"?

Practice the Pause (I learned so much from it.) 

This was my favorite cover:

Next year, I plan to read Jean-Pierre de Caussade's Abandonment to Divine Providence, the last Renovare Book Club book, and continue on my journey with the 1000 Books to Read Before You Die List (I am 35 books away from first on the List Challenge List and 43 away from 500 books. I will stop after that because I do not like the remaining books and sometimes really question why they are on the list in the first place. Sometimes, I find a gem on the list though.)

3 - Freewrite: FACE

So much for thinking I would freewrite here every day in 2025. I have been doing it in my Kindle Scribe though. 

Here is my FACE Report:

My report for the Week of January January 5-11

F: Future/Flying - I completed the Certified Journal Therapy Coach course. It was easy to get through, and I enjoyed it. I will incorporate it into my Spiritual Direction practice (I am not a coach). I had a good "flying" time with my directees, especially my 19th Annotation Group of the Spiritual Exercises. One directee is new and awkward about sharing. All the rest love to talk. I also updated my spiritual direction training overview and sent it to S. We will see who comes.

A: Avocations (used to be "Academic" but this means: " An activity taken up in addition to one's regular work or profession, usually for enjoyment; a hobby.") I did a bit of reading of Wicked and Kon-Tiki, but I primarily finished my certification.

C: Centering - Two sits a couple of time and one sit about four times. Wanting to be consistent with two sits of twenty minutes a day.

E: Eating/Exercise - SO GOOD! I lost three pounds. We went out to eat with a staff candidate for Suburban and our head pastor and his wife, (so life-giving), but I ordered a cheap thing and rode my bike, taught Pilates and walked. So, I didn't go over even eating sourdough and soup with Sydney! LOL!

GOOD WEEK all the way around. Next week I want to...

F: Send Overviews to more people considering the Body and Soul Companion Spiritual Direction Training.

A: Read Kon-Tiki, Something Happened, 1000 books reading list that I cannot remember.

C: Two Twenty Minute Sits EVERY DAY!

E: 1300 calories a day. Pilates 3x. Bike 2x. Walk 5x. 

2 - Freewrite

I was going have a freewrite last night, but I fell asleep. So even though I am posting this on January 3rd, it is about January 2nd.

Yesterday went really well. We had Retreat 2 of the 2nd Half Collaborative, and it was unusual this time because it is the first time I was not able to bring an issue for discernment to the group because one of our members was gone. So, there were not enough of us to make two groups of three. So, my partner and I were just there to observe. It worked out well, but I do have an issue, and I have seen such fruit from "Listening in Community." Thankfully, I have a community here to do it with.  My issue for discernment is:

Should I commit myself to a year of training spiritual directors from September 2025-October 2026 through another organization?

I am already going to be doing a local training and possibly an online one from September 2025-May 2026 and September 2026-May 2027 out of Body and Soul Companion. And I would like to have another 19th Annotation of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius group too. 

I will doing "Discernment through Remembering" and "Discernment through the Body" today and another one tomorrow. 

I will be sad to leave doing these retreats, but if I am going to start training directors, I don't think I can fit this in, and I would love to have more input about who is in my group in the future. 

Back to yesterday, after the time at the Retreat, I put on all my rain gear and went for a long walk. I rested the remainder of the day. I am always tired after these Retreat times. They start very early. 

Sydney gave us ticket to the basketball game, and it was so great to see them win! (See picture above.) They are improving little by little. I wasn't that nervous even though it was a close game. 

Then I came back and watched some news. I am tired of Netflix. I get it for a month every year to watch over vacation, but I really only need two weeks to do that. Gone are the times when Netflix would send you DVDs of rare movies that you couldn't find anywhere else. It is mostly their content. I was going to watch about the Menendez brothers, but I didn't want to watch something so gruesome during Advent and Christmas!

Oh yes, I was going to talk about the song "Defying Gravity," but I forgot to do it. I will postpone it until Day 3 Freewrite because my time is almost up. 

(Just as I typed "up," my 15 minute timer rang!)

1 - Freewrite

This is the actual field that RS Thomas was talking about. Click on this to get full size.

I am doing Freewrites for 2025 and taking a journaling course that will give me certification as a journaling coach. I am only on Module 2 of 7 modules, but I already like it. 

One thing that is said is that for people who journal every day for 15-20 minutes, there is an improvement in mental health. Since this is a freewrite, I will not give the reference for the study.

I have been freewriting off and on since about 1998 or so. I have been journaling since I was about 10. Well, it was called "keeping a diary." So it was a little bit different. 

All that to say, I did the "Morning Pages" by Julia Cameron for a good part of last year. I think I stopped when I started doing the Spiritual Exercises with the wonderful group of A, J, L, and T. I enjoy them so much. 

The certification course mentions "Morning Pages," but it is six notebook-sized pages, and it is required to do it FIRST THING in the morning before you do anything else, and sometimes it would take me up to 40 minutes, and I really love to spend time in the word and prayer with my morning cuppa' Chai. So, it was a little too laborious for me. 

Julia also makes a big deal about writing. I agree that there is something about the physical act of writing letters (in cursive) that is really wonderful, but it means a LOT of pages to store after you are done. I did shift over to my Kindle Scribe which allowed me to write. 

I am modifying it and typing instead (sorry Julia) and doing it after my time with God. Sometimes, I love to write a bit about what my time with God was about. Thus the poem at the top of the page (that I will add after my freewrite) because it captures something we hit upon when we were talking last night with our small New Year's Eve dinner group.

The question in our Hygge Game time was something about describing the perfect day. Someone (I think it might have been Phil) was talking about living in the moment, and it made me think of this poem that I was given during the We Hope Advent Retreat with Pray as You Go. You can read it and decide.

Anywho, I realized I am 320 posts away from 3000 posts on this blog. So, I am going to try to freewrite more. I might do it every day in 2025. I will set my timer and promise to stop at 15 minutes of continuous writing. That is what freewrites are all about. I did them with my kids (one still does freewrites as a 30-year-old), and I have Julie Bogart of Bravewriter to thank for that. 

Another thing that I wanted to write about is the song "Defying Gravity." We saw Wicked yesterday, and I had heard the song, but I didn't know the story and where it landed in the musical. I don't know how it ends (the movie is only Part One), but there were words in the song that made me cry and related to my word of the year:

FLY.

My time is running out, so I will post the lyrics here tomorrow and discuss them for my Day 2 freewrite.

Flying with this freewrite. 

Signing off for today,

Carol Ann