What I've Been Listening To

I've loved reading since I was little. I remember the first "novel" I read. I was laying on my parents bed in the evening and the book was called "Star." It was about a girl named Star and that's all I remember.

The first books I read in school were about Buffy and Mack and the sun being up. Did you read those too in first grade?

"The sun was up. Buffy was up. Mack was up."

I read all the time when I was younger. It must have been when I started college that I stopped reading so much. During this time, I would go on binges of reading, once I started I had a hard time putting the book down. I love fiction, and I started to feel like fiction wasn't much better than TV. I should be learning something! I should be productive.

Recently, I've decided that reading is just fine, even if it's fiction. I'm learning about writing. I'm learning about myself. I'm using my visualization skills. I'm expanding my imagination and mind. I'm learning about the minds and imagination of others. And if I want to spend hours on the couch absorbed in a book, that is a-okay.

One way I have gotten around this obsession to be productive but still satisfy my reading "tooth" is listening to books on cd (or, as I can't help saying, cd's on tape). I spent much of last month on my love seat wrapped in a blanket crocheting hand warmers and listening books on cd from the library. It was wonderful.

Audio cds are awesome because you can multi-task: you can take them with you, "read" while doing tasks you need eyes for, your hands are freed to do things like dishes, and you don't have to sit still if you don't want to (although I find it hard to fully absorb a book while doing too many things at once). The unexpected benefit I found with audio cds is the reader's interpretation of characters. These are wonderful!

The books I have been listening or reading to really resonate with me and the current state of my life. I find this especially interested because I picked them out somewhat at random (is there true randomness?) by visiting the library and seeing what was on the audio book shelf. Perhaps I am especially sensitive to the parts that relate to my life, or maybe...there is a magic fairy world I can find if I crawl around on my hands and knees at Forest Park looking for the opening! The audio book shelf at my neighborhood library is awesome because it's relatively small (so not overwhelming) and changes frequently.

I've been listening to:

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

This was a great book. It's about a man who's girl friend suddenly leaves with out a trace. He spends six months in his apartment alone without speaking to anyone. His cat dies, and then he reenters the world. He realizes the woman is calling him in his dreams from the hotel she left him in. He searches for her and is taken through a strange world and connects with interesting people.

The first winter/early spring I lived in Portland I read The Wind Up Bird Chronicles by the same author. It was a great time, and a great book. I drank mate in a lawn chair in our grassy yard, obsessively read, and at lunch time I rode my bike to the house Wyatt was working on to bring him lunch, which we ate in the alley together. This was totally fulfilling. I remember making soup and biscuits. I dreamed of being a housewife.

Both books resonated with where I was in my life at the time.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

This was an excellent book, and a serious tear jerker. There were so many incredible quotes that I reserved the book at the library (a book is one of those paper things with printed words and you have to read it) so I could write them out. I'll share them here.

The book is about the author's experience with grief caused by the sudden death of her husband. She talks about the full experience of grief and love in a poetic and succinct way. It is an incredibly useful book. I especially loved balance between scientific research and personal experience.

Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera

The book is so much better than the movie. I remember the movie as good, but the book has so much more depth. It is very different on many levels from the storyline of the movie. The book talks about Maori legends, sexism, racism, and the threat to indigenous existence. I loved that the reader had a Maori accent. It made me miss the islands, want to visit New Zealand, and throw my lot in with the Maori.

The reader makes all the difference. I love hearing them impersonate different characters. In this book, I especially loved his reading of the character "Nanny Flowers", the grandmother. When I am old and grandmotherly, please call me Nanny Flowers!

various books by Judith Orloff

Some of the books on cd I've heard are read by Judith. I like these the best because she has such a great, warm, grounding way of speaking. She seems very genuine. She's great. I wrote about her in a previous post.

Next I'll tell you what I've been reading with my eyes (instead of my ears), cuz I've been doing some of that too.

"You had blood on your hands and I had blood in my eyes"

What happens when we stop becoming a "we" and start being an "I"?

"Last time I saw you
We had just split in two.
You were looking at me.
I was looking at you.
You had a way so familiar,
But I could not recognize,
Cause you had blood on your face;
I had blood in my eyes.
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine. "




"Relationships carry the whole universe with them. They can be everything, nothing, here, then gone. One moment, loving someone makes you shine; the next it feels like matter and antimatter colliding. The glory of loving a person over many years is learning his or her individual phases - and blending together, watching who you both become." - Judith Orloff

I have been spending a lot of my time lately thinking about friendship, relationships, individual self, boundaries, and what happens when you stop sharing time and space with someone who was so important to you, someone who was part of you. How do you deal with that hole in your life? How do you reconcile who you are without this person? What happens when you get close? How do you maintain your self and space while surrendering yourself openly to another person? Why does this hurt? Why do we hurt each other in the process of learning to love, and how do we avoid this?

How do you put your joined life aside and walk in your own direction?

How do you unblend?

I started going to a therapist to help answer these questions, but I didn't like her. I left thinking "Why did I just pay that person $13 to talk about myself for an hour? I can do that with friends for free, and they have more invested in the discussion! They give interesting feedback." I think I just didn't connect well with her and am interested in finding someone else. I think I need some skills and an unbiased view point.

So instead of therapy, I am doing lots of yoga and listening* to Judith Orloff. Oh, she is great! Judith Orloff is an intuitive and a phsychiatrist. It doesn't get much better that that. I love her work because she is so grounded. She also has a very comforting way of speaking. She is warm, practical, and down to earth while talking about what could potentially be some really woo-woo stuff.

Judith talks about how everyone can access their intuition and that we can all use it to help guide us, make decisions, get over our personal shit, be our own leaders and doctors, and find our own path. Instead of looking to someone else for answers, she's into teaching people how to look inside themselves. How fabulous is that? She also talks about how we are all intuitive beings but are not taught how to deal with this while living in a linear world. She gives solutions. It's very interesting.

As far as the hole I mentioned above, I think some holes you can't ever fill. You have to learn to work around them. People are not replaceable. But how do you begin working around them, what does this look like? I think grief is an essential part of this.

I have been thinking a lot about this topic of grief. I bought the January edition of Sun Magazine, which coincidentally was all about grief. What great timing.

One of the articles talks about how in our society we don't give ourselves proper time to fully experience grief. When we do experience it, we are essentially told to buck up, push through it, and not feel it. But grief is a natural and essential part of the healing process, and to not experience is just pushing it away to fester. Being alive is feeling. Judith Orloff writes (about the death of her father):

"The portal stays open only so long, then the nature of grief changes. This was holy time. The waves of exhaustion I felt, my body coiling into itself, hibernating, my endless tears, were prerequisites for healing."

In dealing with grief recently, I sometimes feel like I need to be exorcised. This is not because the events related to the grief caused me great harm; this person was caring and loving to the best of their ability, as I was in return. It is a sadness at the absolute tragedy of the whole situation.

It comes in waves, this grief, sneaking up on me, and I feel like I need to just step aside and let it whoosh through me, to experience and release it. It has a mind of it's own, it's so interesting to watch.

What is love? I was cocky enough to think I kind of had it figured out. How silly is that? People spend lifetimes working on this stuff. I think love is too vast to be defined and contained within words. It's not something you can understand with words, it exists as an expansive, multifaceted feeling.




Even if love can't be defined, maybe I can just figure out how to disentangle myself from it's grip so I can move on.

My sister used to ask my mom if she still loved her. My mom would respond "Love is not like a light switch. You can just turn it of and on again." I don't want to turn the light off, but I wouldn't mind dimming the light so it's not so painful. Why is there pain in love? So we can have a more full experience of joy?

I was also comforted by this idea in the Judith Orloff book I am reading: "Love doesn't disappear, it multiplies." I love this idea that you take love you built in the past and carry it on with you, spreading it out so it is something larger than before that effects more people than just two, like the wind carrying seeds. This means you also carry all the people you've built it with within you. They are there, they are part of you.

I have been doing a bit of "Yin" yoga lately. With all this thinking and feeling going on, I don't seem to have the energy for much beyond a beginners class. Yin yoga is about relaxing, everything is done on the floor, you hold poses for five minutes, and there is a lot of hip opening, meditating, and stuff like that. They say you hold emotions in your hips. Yin yoga is about learning to surrender. It's about unearthing deep stuff in your body, smoothing and expanding the connective tissues.

I have been working on surrendering. It is not comfy stuff.

How do you say good bye? How do you reconcile longing for that missing piece? For now, my answer is to just let the longing be inside myself, even if it is howling loudly, and hold on (breathing very deeply, of course) through it.

*audio books are great.