lory_enterenchanted's reviews
536 reviews

Lots of valuable information, and especially suggestions for practice. The very last section of "Additional Practices" is a gem. 

I have a problem with one of McBride's central formulations, her insistence that "I am my body." There is a contradiction there, how can one own something with which one is identical? The possessive suggests two entities. And yet, we ARE one. Maybe it's like the mystery of the Trinity. I need to ponder this more, both what is true and useful and what is disquieting about the statement.

So whenever that notion comes in, I get uncomfortable. However, otherwise I agree with so much of what she presents. We have got to befriend and healthfully inhabit our bodies. Not doing that is causing most and perhaps all of the harm in our world, inwardly and outwardly. Here's a statement I underlined: "When we are feeling out of control in an area of our lives, experiencing pain or illness, or longing for connection with someone, it is easy to attack our bodies without realizing that our response is a defense against feeling something else that is painful." (250)

I can trace this pattern in my own life and would venture that it underlies not only self-harming behaviors and illnesses but the attack on other people's bodies and ways of living. Each one of us is trying to defend against painful feelings we don't want. Until we stop doing that, turn to the feelings and bring them into transformation (the chapter on "Feeling Feelings" speaks to this), peace will never come to our earth. 

And so embodiment is not just a self-healing practice, but a peace practice, the only one, in my opinion, that has any hope of being effective. And so I'm very thankful for this book and any others that usefully explore the theme. This is the future!

I loved Holmes's The Age of Wonder, about science and scientists in the Romantic era. This book could be seen as an extended footnote to that one, focusing as it does on the romantic era of ballooning. Though it's been superseded in our minds by the far more powerful and controllable technology of airplanes and space travel, Holmes reminds us that the dream of flying began with the simple balloon. 

What today is a relatively safe novelty experience was at the time of its invention an awe-inspiring revelation. Human beings were no longer bound by gravity! This gave rise to some exaggerated claims -- that ballooning would spread peace and democracy everywhere by erasing the arbitrary boundaries between nations, for example. This, of course, did not prove to be the case. 

Balloons did play a role in history, as they were used for wartime reconnaissance in the Civil War and  for communication during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. But their most important effect might have been on our imaginations. Holmes includes a wealth of literary examples, from Poe to Dickens to Verne (though he regrettably omits one that falls slightly out of the time range he's covering: the balloon that carries the Wizard in L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.) Ballooning evokes a daring journey that takes one into a strange land, dangerous and magical, possibly difficult or impossible to return from, and that is ripe material for storytelling. 

Indeed, rising up into the air inspired an incredible degree of foolhardy recklessness in some aeronauts, who seemed to think that overcoming gravity meant that they were now invulnerable to any other limitation, and were prone to wishful assurance that the wind they wanted at any particular moment would blow in the right direction! The stories of some of their disastrous journeys could stand as a metaphorical warning for the inflated hubris of our industrialized Western culture. We, too, have taken off in a direction we now find hard to control, and seem to be headed for a crash landing. 

However, those aeronauts who managed to stay a bit more sensible might inspire us with their bravery in the cause of science -- meteorology and an understanding of the earth's atmosphere began with them. The revolutionary discovery that gases could be weighed and some were lighter than air also meant a new direction in chemistry.

The book ends with a particularly sad story about a doomed polar expedition, which put an end to romantic dreams of heroic exploration by balloon. But the balloon, with its silent, wind-borne flight, still tugs on our heartstrings in a way noisy airplanes and rockets can't. I've never been up in one, but now I'm quite tempted to give it a try ...

Immersive, compelling historical fiction that taught me much about the history of Hawaii. As it approached the modern era I found it more of a slog, and didn’t share the pro-capitalist, militaristic perspective of the writer, but other than that it wax a fascinating story about intersecting and clashing cultures. 

I could not believe Victorian characters would really think or behave this way, but as an alternate history romance it was decent , if a bit lacking in real conflict or tension. Prone to a lot of modern psycologizing that I did not find convincing and obligatory sexual suggestion (very mild). The language was not too annoyingly anachronistic but also not very memorable, lots of cliches. Georgette Heyer, how we miss you. 

There’s a lot of good material but I feel Jamison was trying to do too many things in one book. And sometimes the language felt padded. Needed more ruthless editing. 

She also comes across as a frustrating and annoying  girlfriend. One feels sorry for her partner. 

Like many very smart people she can talk and argue and rationalize but it stays on the surface. Pretty words that skate over some deeper reality. It’s typical that she snobbishky fears she’s too smart for AA. Her appreciation of less intelligent people risks being condescending, and her privilege certainly shows — with all her fancy degrees and writing residencies. But that’s judging the person not the book. 

I think I might like The Empathy Exams better, if it’s less self absorbed. 

Whoa, that was quite a roller coaster. Stephen Fry has some amazing smarts and linguistic craft, but is (or was) a hot mess emotionally. I could not stop reading, even though at times it was more than I really wanted to know. Something of a therapeutic info-dump, it is undoubtedly energetic, but could have used some pruning perhaps. Though I appreciate how candid and open he is.

I'm glad he turned out OK and able to accept himself, but though he insists it is not to blame for his troubles, really one can't help thinking the English class/school system is seriously messed up. Not that America has much to brag about there.

One also has to imagine that his fate -- after being caught stealing credit cards and going on a spending spree -- would have been quite different if he'd not been white and from an upper class family. Let off on probation, he could go on to Cambridge and an acting career. If he'd been a different color and class I do not believe that would have been so easy.

The process of releasing a book or other creative work is not always easy, comfortable, or unmixed celebration and fulfillment. As I've experienced myself, there are feelings of anxiety, insecurity, conflict, and disappointment when a book or other creative work is released to the public. And there can also be difficult feelings surrounding work that can’t be released for some reason. What to do with these emotions, in a healthy creative process?

Andrew invites us to reframe writing as a gift and to consider ways the gift needs to move — whether it’s out into the world, or into and through the soul of the writer. She asserts that creativity does not end when the writing is done, but enters a new phase that can nourish and stimulate us just as much as the process of generating and revising work does. And she offers a wealth of practical suggestions as to how to encourage that to happen. This book has already made a difference in my own writing process, and I look forward to revisiting its principles with every new project, to help re-orient me in the direction of gratitude, abundance, and joy. 

These stories are different from the other three volumes in having all been written for Argosy, a "magazine for men" that Joan Aiken worked and wrote for (with an all-female staff, ironically enough.) They generally have a dash of romance, or rather insta-love, which is there not for realism but  for the sake of comic reconciliation. Aiken's boundless imagination gets full play and she somehow manages to make each brief scenario into a vivid, complete world. "It is possible, she seems to say, that just around the corner is an alternative version of the day to day," writes Lizza Aiken -- and that can lighten up our daily burden and take our own leap into a regenerative vision, the true spirit of comedy.

"Ghost stories" is taken loosely in this collection that leans toward the uncanny, but not necessarily scary side of things. Lizza Aiken says in her introduction that her mother had "a gift for sensing odd atmospheres or noticing the unusual in the everyday." Rather than just giving us a fright, these stories are meant to awaken us to a heightened sense of reality, to the layers that lurk behind what we call the real world. This is required if we are to know the fullness of Good as well as encounter Evil. Joan wrote "The world is not a simple place, far from it. The writer's duty is to show that it is an infinitely rich, strange, confusing, mysterious place." 

More wonderful stories, focusing on the magic of women as drawn from folk and fairy tales, but often given a modern twist -- "a shop girl who can sell you a pinch of weather, a lonely spinster piano teacher who can confront the devil and his pop group in a dark alley," as Lizza Aiken says in her introduction. Thus she "can call up the voices of the past to pass on the wisdom of a previous generation" in a time where evil is as present as ever.