Three Cups of Tea

Have you heard about this book, or Greg Mortenson? Maybe what’s flicked across your radar is the story of a man who failed to climb K2, instead found, in a tiny village on the edge of its glacier, sustenance so deep and nourishing that he promised to build the people a school, for their children whose classroom was a teacherless hillside, math done with sticks in soft earth.

He has since built 78 schools for boys and girls across the rural areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. When he made his first promise, in 1993, he owned nothing – he lived in his car, worked as a nurse. He had no idea how to raise the $12,000 needed to build a school.

He had no political agenda – he simply built schools, and paid the teachers the people chose among themselves. Of the two fatwa’s issued against him, one was overruled by the Ayatollah’s of Iran themselves, the other by a local shariah court.

While the Taliban is once again energetically blowing up girls schools, Mortenson travels eight months a year here to raise funds and awareness, and four months a year in Pakistan and Afghanistan to check in on existing and future schools.

His vision is so powerful and effective, this book is now required reading for our State Department.

Read this book and let your notions of possible and impossible, and scarcity and abundance be thrown into a swirling, heady, welcome chaos.

My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor

Imagine if you reorganize how your mind processes information, releasing painful triggers and keeping only happy ones. For good. This is what Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, got to do. Well yes, at age 37 she had to suffer a massive debilitating stroke from which she took eight years to recover for the privilege, but she did get to do this.

Sometimes a book comes along and so touches my life that it ever after informs the most intimate inner processes of my thinking and feeling. This book did that for me.

Consider this: when something triggers an emotion in us, a series of chemicals which we experience as fear, excitement, grief etc. goes through our blood stream in 90 seconds. Any experience we have of that emotion longer than 90 seconds is because we VOLUNTARILY keep thinking about whatever triggered us. We chose these thoughts. We can chose other thoughts.
But generally, we don’t – we mull and attach and prolong the feeling. Sometimes this is a good idea, sometimes not, but it is always a choice. Knowing that is incredibly freeing.

This is just one tidbit from Taylor's story, which is amazing both in terms of how wisely and imaginatively she handled her recovery back from a pre-verbal state, and in terms of how she made use of the fresh start that had been forced upon her.

For anyone who’s tried to meditate and wondered what the heck they were doing, this is for you.

Seven Pounds

I just saw Will Smith's latest movie last night, Seven Pounds. Deeply affecting when I saw it, it haunted my dreams all night.

Without "spoiling" the plot or ending, I can tell you that the reviews I read missed the point completely. They say it is a strange and failed vehicle for a story about redemption, or forgiveness, or repentance. It is none of these things.

It is an incredibly beautiful character study of a man who is going down, unstoppably. Suffering from what I would call a terrible mental illness induced by a horrific trauma, he does not perceive any way or reason to stop his own descent, but he does see a way to harness its sheer energy and give it meaning, make it resonant and beautiful.

This is a tragedy, a man whose fatal flaw is that he ceases to perceive his own value, but his strength of character and beauty of soul are such that he strives to use his life to bring beauty and possibility around him.

A devastating storm has its beauty, and as one watches it one can only pray that one's home is never touched by it.

I was especially affected by the story as I have a cousin who suffered the same trauma, and, after careful, painful years of rebuilding his life, became a whole new person. In a sense that is what Will Smith's character strives to do. See this movie, and tell me if you think he achieved it.

Upside-down

I have just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. What a searing gift, truly a master work by a master (mistress?) craftswoman.

My skin crawled, and I twisted in my seat as Atwood opened back up for me the secret world of childhood torture that I thought I’d let go but which still sickened and burned.

I had to turn and look and acknowledge that I still carried old lies about myself, lies contrived from the cruelty of a beloved childhood friend, long long ago.

It had been easier for me to believe that there was something so wrong with me that I deserved this girl’s betrayal, rather than wonder at what pushed her to cruelty.

Since reading Atwood, something has gone click, like a square peg sliding into a square hole after years of trying to push it into a round one.

I realized that the pain I’ve felt and the incomprehension at that girl’s actions showed my health. The cruelty showed her brokenness. It seems obvious to say that now, but what got written on my 8-year-old mind lingered yet.

Sometimes we live in a world where it seems that those who don’t feel are winners, and those who suffer are lost. Thank goodness for writers like Margaret Atwood, who shines a heroic light into those scary, slithering places where we’d rather not look, and helps us put things back right-side-up.

Me and Sgt. Pepper and Belly Buttons

I danced to a CD of Sgt. Pepper this morning. I grew up dancing and singing to the vinyl album my father bought when the record came out.

In the liner notes, I discovered that the Beatles started recording the album on December 6, 1966. I was conceived four days later (yes, my mother told me; she knew she was pregnant when she woke up the next day). The album was released during my mother’s her third trimester, with me fully capable of hearing.

I love the idea that I was incubated right alongside this momentous, gorgeous music, and that I was fed by its sounds right up to my birth.

I like to imagine my pregnant mama dancing in the living room with my long-limbed papa, delighting in the new, amazing music.

Now where do belly-buttons come in? Well I’ve just discovered Paul Coelho (I know I know, where have I been?) and The Witch of Portobello. All his talk of navels – as the center of our bodies, of our earth, as connection to the Great Mother – was in my mind as I belly (-button) danced to ‘Within You and Without You.’

And so: forty years after my mother’s joy and music poured into me through my navel, my own joy and dance poured out from there.

Shivers up my swirling spine: a grounding, transcendent moment of connection to the deepest realities of beauty, rhythm, and belly buttons.

A moment that spilled out into merry laughter, and now, these words.