Letting Go Henri Nouwen Style

“It is our great illusion that life is a property to be owned or an object to be grasped, that people can be managed or manipulated.”  Henri Nouwen

I’m a control freak.  I recognize this about myself.  Everything in its place; everything planned; everything on time, or I’m irritated.  I was well into adulthood before I realized other people weren’t usually like me.  I’m much more relaxed now than I used to be, but I still function better in an organized space, following a routine.  The problem with being a control freak is that you can’t control the people around you, the people you love.

In part two of Henri Nouwen’s Turn My Mourning Into Dancing, he addresses the issue of learning to let go and of realizing how much happier your life will be if you learn to relinquish control.  The metaphorical theme he employs in this part is of trapeze artists, noting “Before they can be caught they must let go.”  Personally, I cannot imagine letting go of a swing in mid-air and trusting someone else to time the catch correctly enough to save me from a fall.  Maybe that’s a good metaphor for why I am single, because Nouwen goes on to quote CS Lewis’s observation, “To love at all is to be vulnerable.”  And I suck at being vulnerable.  It’s not in my nature.  Vulnerability implies giving over control, and well, we’ve already determined I’m a control freak.  

Nouwen asserts that life, love, the journey, all of it, is not about our ability to choreograph every step, but about our willingness to let it drag us along, sometimes kicking and screaming, sometimes laughing and reveling, to ends and destinations we can’t foresee.  When we try to assert our will over our lives, we are also trying to assert our will over those around us, with no regard for what they might want or need.  The truth is that we are all self-centered; we all want what we want.  The question is can we let go enough to love what we get and let go of what we think we want?  It’s so hard not to be afraid of the unknown.  It’s so hard not to try to control and organize everything, but we’ll never find out what waits for us if we don’t learn to let go of the known and accept the unknown.  Live outside your comfort zone; try something new. Be afraid; it's ok. You'll be amazed what your life can become.

This Year's Beach Reads

This year at the beach, I finished three books, two of which were written for the YA crowd.  The adult book I finished was Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver.  I enjoyed the novel, but it was not my favorite Kingsolver, although she is one of my favorite authors.  I completely identified with Dellarobia’s plight in her marriage and family, feeling trapped and hopeless and trapped by that hopelessness.  So much of what she felt and thought were my own feelings and thoughts when my children were small.  Strange how much I miss those little kids now.  I didn’t feel like Kingsolver fully developed the plot line, though.  The plot either seemed to jump around a bit or seemed like pieces were left out.   Being a nature freak (as opposed to a freak of nature, which may also be true, but is a post for a different blog), I loved the butterfly lessons scattered throughout the novel.  

The second book I read was Wonder by RJ Palacio.  I’ve been putting off reading this story of a genetically differently formed child for a while, because I was afraid it would disturb or depress me, but it did neither.  It ended up being quite uplifting and even caused me to shed a tear, which, in reality, isn’t all that difficult to elicit.  I loved the quote/theme of “When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind” (Wayne Dyer).  How much easier life would be if we could all just do that.  

And finally, my third beach read was Navigating Early by Clare Vanderpool.  I’m a sucker for quests / journeys of self-discovery, but this one left me a bit cold.  I felt like the Pi story embedded in the main plot line was redundant.  It was like reading the same story twice, just with different characters.  I think I would have liked the book a lot more without the unnecessary repetition.  I did love the themes of how people see and think and feel and reason so very differently and how important it is for us to embrace all these different paths on the same journey.  I absolutely loved the way Vanderpool tied the story lines up in a neat little box in the epilogue.  I am a lover of neat little boxes.

And now, back to reality and less reading time.  Much sadness.

"Our Glory Is Hidden In Our Pain"

 

 

 

"..the gift of life has revealed itself in the midst of all the losses." Henri Nouwen

 

 

I’m going to do something a little different with the slim volume I’m reading called Turn My Mourning Into Dancing by Henri Nouwen.  I’m going to write about each section of the book because to do otherwise would be unmanageable.  The book reveals too many truths and inspires too many thoughts to do less.  

The first section of the book addresses how we deal with our own suffering.  There are so many different kinds of brokenness and loss in our lives.  We all struggle with letting the same situations and the same people break our hearts over and over again.  The worst pain doesn’t come at the time of wounding; it comes at the time of scarring.  We have all been scarred; we are all wounded.

Nouwen teaches that the way out of suffering is “in and through,” that we must accept suffering and move through it instead of fleeing from it.  He says that only those who can fully face, confront, and accept their pain can heal and grow.  Attempting to avoid and forget pain only temporarily masks it.  Embracing your whole life, including your pain, and finding peace in spite of it keeps you whole.  It sounds facile and cliched to say that it’s not about what happens to you but how you handle it, but it really is true.   And this is a truth we have to learn and re-learn every day.  It is perhaps the most difficult, yet most important of all truths of who we are, who we become, and how we affect the world around us.

Often, we need only to step outside of ourselves and our lives to forget in order to remember:   to forget the overwhelming mess we live in and to remember the overwhelming beauty that we live among.  Sometimes, just doing one little thing:  a walk, a ride, a movie, dinner with a friend will re-center our entire lives for that one moment in time.  And sometimes, that’s the best we can hope for -- one calm moment.  Because all life is really about is choosing to keep breathing in gratitude and breathing out compassion.  When we are wrapped up in our own pain, we skip right over the pain of others.  When circumstances around us seem to be spiralling out of control, we feel helpless and insignificant, and we rant and rave just to be heard, to exert some kind of control and influence.  But the voice that heals is the quiet voice of peace.

Did I Love The Ocean at the End of the Lane

photo by Amy

I'm going to start this post with a caveat so I don't engender angry comments.  I know a lot of people love everything Neil Gaiman writes.  The Ocean at the End of the Lane was my first adult Gaiman novel.  The caveat to this review is this:  while I seem to be reading a lot more than usual recently, I don't seem to be able to love anything I read.  In addition to the annoying weather, (it's been ridiculously hot and humid here in the South), one personal irritation after another keeps piling up, so maybe that's why I didn't love The Ocean at the End of the Lane, or any other book I've read recently.

When I first started the book, I thought I was going to love it, but it just never seemed to develop fully enough for me.  It felt more like a short story (or maybe a JF book), and I've never been a fan of short stories. Too many things felt undeveloped or incomplete, like an outline, rather than a finished work. I do often seem to feel this way when reading Science Fiction, so it could just be the genre for me.  One thing I do love about science fiction authors is their penchant for embracing vast philosophical questions like why we are here; where we are for that matter; who we are; and what happens to us after death.  I loved the idea introduced when the narrator wants to stay in the ocean of all knowledge and is told that if he does, he will eventually spread out into points of everything and become nothing.  That's a fascinating interpretation of what happens to us after death, I think.  Something about this idea reminds me of the end of Arthur C Clark's 2001:  A Space Odyssey.    Another interesting idea touched on in this part of the story is the fallacy of self-knowledge.  When our narrator finds himself in the ocean of all knowledge, he realizes that while he may be able to know and see everything, the one thing he cannot know or see is himself, his true image.  I like the idea that the only true unknowable to us is ourselves.  No one can truly, objectively see himself. 

One concept in the book that spoke personally to me was when the narrator says, "…and I would imagine that I was in my boat on the ocean and that it was swaying with the swell of the sea.  I did not imagine that I was a pirate, or that I was going anywhere.  I was just on my boat."   Often when I can't sleep because my life feels overwhelming to me, I will imagine myself on a train to lull myself to sleep.  This is a very specific fantasy:  I am in a sleeping berth beside a window on an overnight train in Russia, crossing a snowy steppe with a view of the Ural Mountains in the background across the moonlit plain.  I have no idea where any of that comes from, as I have never been to Russia, nor have I been in a sleeping berth on an overnight train.  Reincarnation, maybe?  Regardless, it calms me and puts me to sleep every time.  And it calms me to know that at least one other person on the planet thinks this way too, even if it is a British author I will never meet. Maybe that, too, is the power of art, literary or otherwise; it helps us feel less alone in the world of our thoughts.
 
Another point of synchronicity to me occurred when Ginnie Hempstock says of Ursula Monkton, (who is the most insidious kind of evil, like Doroles Umbridge in Harry Potter -- the type masquerading as perfectly good):  "I don't hate her.  She does what she does, according to her nature."  This touches on a conversation I've had recently and often with a friend about people who hurt others with their neglect or selfishness or dishonesty.  Certainly, some people are natured to be selfish and dishonest and neglectful, and certainly they will hurt those around them, and those of us who are not natured to be that way would do well to accept the truth of who these people are and move on (and avoid them like the plague), but does that make it acceptable for people to be this way?  To have this kind of Zen attitude about these people is almost akin to saying it is acceptable for them to be thus.  I don't know exactly what I think of this issue, but I did find it interesting to run into it in this book, when I've been discussing it so much recently for personal reasons.

Interesting that a novel I didn't love provoked such an outpouring of words from me.  I think this has been one of my longest blog post.  I did find the book to be well-written, engaging, and entertaining, and Gaiman did a great job with the narrator's voice, which I found to be very convincingly child-like and natural.  I just wish the ideas and plot points had been more fully developed and explored.  Had Gaiman finished this novel, it could have been fantastic.  

Now I'm off to Barcelona to finish the Carlos Ruiz Zafon Shadow of the Wind series. 
 

Much Ado About Nothing Again

photo by me

"No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born...." Beatrice

 

I don't usually discuss movies on here, as this is a book blog, but last night I saw the new version of Much Ado About Nothing, and it was FABULOUS!  I may be a bit biased, as the witty banter in Much Ado makes it one of my favorite Shakespearean comedies.  The visual styling of the movie (shot in black and white, with classic clothing and hair-styles) combined with much of the original dialogue was a treat for eyes and ears.

Every time I see Shakespeare, I am amazed at how funny and true his words are today.  People truly do not change.  We continue to cross ourselves up over nothing and bicker and complain about nothing to the point of breaking each other.  Even when our natures are pure and true, we fall into the trap of exaggerating our problems and risk losing people we love over the superficially inflated molehills in our lives.

The new Much Ado About Nothing was a much needed 2 hour break from reality that left me still smiling this morning.  What a wonderful testament to the power of art that the words of a man 400 years dead continue to change hearts, minds, and moods every day, including mine.

Just Be Beautiful As You Are

Driftwood at Dawn
photo by Amy Brandon

 

"Stories are people.  I'm a story, you're a story...your father is a story.  Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we're less alone."  Alvis Bender in Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter is book I should have loved but didn't.  I liked it, but for some reason (maybe the scattered, disjointed narration), it never grabbed me and held on.  I liked the plot, the characters, and the setting, but I didn't like the mechanics of the story jumping between different points of view so often and so abruptly.  There's a fine line between too many points of view and plot lines and the perfect amount, and Beautiful Ruins, to me, often felt a bit ADD. I found myself angered on occassion by having to stop reading in the middle of a story over and over to readjust to another story.

That said, and complaint department closed, the writing in this novel was lovely and moving, as were many of the ideas and truths revealed.  I love the theme of learning to appreciate the present, to live in the now, to be happy with the person you are, instead of always grasping and striving for more, and the lesson of how that continual grasping will make your life a beautiful ruin.  How much better just to be beautiful as you are, instead of a beautiful ruin of what you wanted to be. 

In Which I Finally Finish an Adult Book

Nellie Olsen and The Round House
photo by me

"In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Travis went on.  Everything out in the world is also in you.  Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything.  So we study our souls."

One would think with all the rain we've had this Spring here in Piedmont NC, I would have finished reading more than one adult book in the last month.  Not so much, and honestly, I have no freaking clue what I've been doing, certainly not mowing my lawn or cleaning my house.    Anyway,  today I read the last page of The Round House by Louise Erdrich.    This was my first Erdrich novel, although a friend recommended and lent me The Master Butchers Singing Club, which I started but had to abandon because I couldn't read the font.  I love getting old. 

Describing The Round House is not easy.  It is a mystery, a coming-of-age story, and historical fiction all rolled into one character and plot-driven novel.    I loved the narrator's voice; it reminded me of the John Boy Walton voice-overs at the end of every Waltons episode.  And while I found the Native belief-system stories and mythological histories interesting, sometimes they interrupted the plot flow and felt artificially inserted for only the purpose of disseminating them.  The plot points bringing to light the common-place and unpunished abuses of Native women and the purposefully convoluted, specious court system that is Native law were infuriating.  And at the same time, the escapades of the teen boys at the center of the plot, while sometimes crude and a bit over-the-top, were also often very funny.  I certainly did not see where the plot was going and am still a bit unnerved by it, but I'm glad I read the book and plan to read more of her work in the future.

Erdrich nails the deep, often hidden and hard to name parts of human nature in the quotidian evil of the Larks, the Atticus Finch-like honor of Joe's judge father, the Native-hating governor who surreptitiously and immorally impregnates a Native girl, and in the searching, unorthodox compassion of Father Travis.   She covers huge moral questions like the problem of pain and its partial answer of free will, the question of how much we are or are not our brother's keeper, as well as the central conflict of vengeance versus justice and how far we can go to right wrongs without destroying ourselves in the process.  This book gave me a lot to ponder, and I'm sure as soon as I post this, I'll think of something else I'd like to say.   In the meantime, happy reading to you all.  I'm headed back to Italy to finish Beautiful Ruins.

Just For Fun

Cartwheels in the Sand
photo by me



For the last month, I have been reading purely for entertainment.  I haven't blogged about the books I've been reading, I suppose, because I thought they lacked the proper gravitas for reflection.  But as I consider this idea, I think maybe I have been wrong.  Sometimes, life is so stressful and overwhelming, and it seems like every day is full of decisions that are full of portent and promise or disappointment that we need to escape.  We need to see ourselves in another place, another time, another world, even.  Being a lover of books, to me, doesn't just mean loving the books that "matter."  Sometimes it means loving the books that matter right then, the books that save you, every day, from the stress and ennui and overwhelming reality of life. 

The first "just for fun" book I read was Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor.  I loved the mystery of this book at first.  The plot wore a little thin for me as the book went on, but it was entertaining and well-written for a YA fantasy novel.  I bought the second book and started it, but I'm not sure I'll stick with it.  Daughter of Smoke and Bone would be a great beach read.

After a YA fantasy, I switched to a YA (maybe a littel too much) reality in Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell.  Eleanor and Park is also well-written, and I guess true to life for some people.  I don't know how realistic either character really is, but I enjoyed reading the book, even though the ending was very abrupt.  It's not a pick-me-up kind of book.

After these two, I entered the land of "WTH am I going to read now?" and started several books without finishing anything yet.  I started Beautiful Ruins by Jess  Walter and The Turkish Gambit by Boris Akunin, but now I've found The Round House by Louise Erdrich on my library's 14 Day Shelf and started it.  And I am still limping along on Les Miserable; I think it's going to take me all year.  I need a beach trip...a very long beach trip.  Happy Summer Reading!

Falling Off in the Middle

Apple Blossom Time
photo by Amy Brandon

“Outside was quiet.  Light clear as water created shadows of leaves curled and minuscule on the ground.  She looked at the sky as she walked, a passionate blue.  Cloudless.  In the grove by the far apple orchard the apple trees were in shadow.  The sun postured along the curvature of canyon and illuminated the walnut trees starkly….  The sun on the porous bank near where she stood was lit up, incandescent, the minerals glittering and the dull mud peculiar and particular even in its dullness.  Each pore and streak and detail was washed and brought forth as is a person’s face by the light.” From The Orchardist

 The last two books I have read I loved until half-way through.  I still liked them both at the end, but lost some of my feeling for each of them for different reasons.    The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin succeeded in evoking its time and place and in investing me in the characters and their lives.   The main complaint I have about the novel is that half-way through, the plot starts to drag out a bit.  I felt like the story could have been told a little more succinctly.  I also ended up fairly disliking the character of Della.  I wanted to like her, and naturally, I pity anyone who grows up like she did.  I just lost patience with her.   To be fair, however, I will have to say that I have no basis for understanding her kind of misery.  The older I get, the more I see, every day, evidence of how truly messed up a person’s upbringing can make him or her.  I’d say the contrast between Della and Angelene exhibits this point perfectly.  Regardless of the dragging middle part and the irritation I felt with Della, The Orchardist is definitely a book worth reading.  The descriptions of the land and the people and of how they are tied to the land, the family saga and the harshness of people’s lives, and the feeling of place and time in the novel reminded me of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which is one of my favorite novels.

After The Orchardist, I read The Fault In Our Stars by John Green.  The first chapter of this book is almost perfect, and I loved the brilliant, quirky, highly improbable dialogue, which was very entertaining and laugh out loud funny sometimes.  There are so many themes presented worth exploring and considering:  existential angst, living your best life anyway, how small people and small infinites matter too.    The last part of the book, however, was so difficult for me to read that I don’t feel like I can say I loved the whole book.  It needs to be read, deserves to be read, but was not an easy thing for me to get through.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

Too Many Books Too Little Time

Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus
 Piazza della Signoria, Florence
Photo by Amy Brandon

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve read The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and Holes by Louis Sachar.  I read Holes because I was reading it aloud where I volunteer.  I enjoyed it but not as much as some of the reviews indicated I should.  It seemed a little over-hyped to me.    

I found The Song of Achilles to be very entertaining, and as I read, I researched some of the myths I was less familiar with, so it was educational in that way.   I enjoyed the story being told from Patroclus' point of view.   The point of view and the narration type brought freshness and immediacy to a story we all already know.  It's a good quick read if you're looking for some light entertainment.

I’m still chipping away at Les Miserable and Beowulf, and I am half-way through The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin, which I am absolutely loving.  Within the first twenty pages of The Orchardist, I knew it was going to be one of those sagas that would sweep me up into its world.  I do love a novel that transports me so completely.   The OCD part of me is not happy being in the middle of so many books and not completing them, so now it’s time for some lunch reading!

Tempus Fugit

photo by Amy Brandon

"Walk without a stick into the darkest woods." Cheryl Strayed

 

Three of the stories Cheryl Strayed tells in Tiny Beautiful Things haunt me.  One is about her mother’s last gift to her, and it haunts me because it happened to me. Her mother’s last gift to her was a coat.  In 1993, when I was five months pregnant with my first child, I went to visit my mother in the hospital.   Her cancer was advanced enough that she begged me to pray for her death and told me she planned to wear the dress she wore to my wedding to her burial.  I was hurried, harried, overwrought, overworked, confused, and not wanting to hear anything she had to say about her death.  It was February.  I breezed into her hospital room coatless, because I’d finally reached the point where nothing I owned fit my growing belly.    Even in the midst of her death, she noticed my lack of a coat, forced cash on me, and made me go to the mall to buy a coat I could fit into.  I kept that coat, ugly and out-dated though it was, until last year. 

The second story Strayed tells that haunts me does so because nothing like it ever happened to me.  She tells of her mother’s buying a child’s dress at a yard sale years before Strayed ever thought of having a child and how her child eventually wears that dress.  This haunts me because my mother never bought either of my children anything, because she never had the opportunity.  Strayed speaks of how quotidian it is to some people to dress their kids in clothes their grandparents bought and of how shimmeringly beautiful that one dress her mom bought was because it was the only thing her mom ever bought for her child. 

The third story haunts me in a good way, because it makes me understand that I am not alone.  She advises a motherless woman’s fiancé to accept the emptiness that is part of the woman he loves and to accept that it will never be ok that her mother died when she was young.  She says that when you lack a parent, it’s like walking around with empty bowls in your hands that you can never fill.  I learned a long time ago that we learn to live around the voids left in our lives by death.  The best way I can honor my mother is to live the hell out of the life she gave me and to love my children the same way she loved me, like there was never anything more beautiful in the history of the world.