Diana's Blog: Quirky Words and Book Reviews

December 20, 2008
It's getting Christmasier and Christmasier. In Portland, Oregon, thick plump snowflakes have been falling for two days. The snow is about a foot deep in the suburbs where I live. Never mind that in the early morning, I somehow have to drive to the radio station thirty miles away to tell people about traffic conditions.
My next-door neighbor just knocked on the door to tell me the snow has changed to freezing rain. I feel lit up.
The Christmas music is playing non-stop on five-discs while I read THE PAPER BAG CHRISTMAS. It's written by Kevin Alan Milne. I've not yet met him, but, on an unsnowy day, he would live ten minutes down the road. It's a slim, elegant Christmas novel with a story so perfect, I almost don't want to spoil it by talking about it.
Long pause.
It's about two kids who don't believe in Santa any more, and when their parents take them to the mall to tell Santa what they want for Christmas, they meet the most unusual Santa ever. He tells them they won't get anything on their list. Instead, they'll receive everything they never wanted. And, then he talks them into helping him out at the local hospital in the children's ward where most of the kids have received a death sentence.
I read the book in one long gulp and a bucketful of tears.
Something has shifted deep inside me -- it has taken all year to come to fruition. But, this is the first Christmas I've not felt worried that things I plan won't happen. I'm loving what is: Lovely conversations with strangers and neighbors, adventures that take me down different roads, books I might not ordinarily read fall into my hands.
THE PAPER BAG CHRISTMAS. It is perfect.
I might not wait for the snow to melt before I meet Kevin Alan Milne.
He made me believe in Santa again.
It is a magical time of the year.

Labels: book review., children dying of cancer, hospital, Kevin Alan Milne, magic, Santa Claus, THE PAPER BAG CHRISTMAS

October 2, 2008
Gary Zukav's SOUL TO SOUL is comprised of one blessing capping another. The book is packed with brief vignettes -- from the lessons the seasons teach us, to allowing space in our consciousness to discover new perceptions, to answering intensely personal spiritual questions.
This is a book to be sipped, so that the concepts simmer. To load you up with stories from Gary's book would do it a disservice.
Some stories are plucked from ordinary experiences -- like passing a tool to a workman -- and end up packing powerful wisdom from an unexpected perspective. Some vignettes are essays about monumental events in our lives -- like 9/11 -- where compassion is the favored victor over fear. And some are stunning in their simplicity -- an aging, ill, unnamed movie star who was once photographed in her peak moment of beauty. By contrast, Gary says, the soul's journey cannot be photographed, and we yet can observe our own journeys -- and hers -- with appreciation and awe.
I know a bit of Gary's journey, so reading his essay Fight or Flow reminded me of my own lessons, and showed me his.
This happened several years ago.
I receive Gary Zukav's book THE SEAT OF THE SOUL, and more than anyone else in the world, I want to interview him. I approach Gary's publicist to learn that his schedule is jammed, and he won't be anywhere near Portland. She discloses nothing else.
But, I hold lightly to the desire, as if it were a helium-filled balloon I let drift out of my hands.
In the meantime, I hear a story about houseboats in Northern California and I convince my husband and two sons to vacation somewhere different than our annual South Texas jaunt. We would drive from Portland to Lake Shasta.
One day I call Gary Zukav's publicist, just checking one more time on his availability. She says, "Sorry, he's not touring right now. He is taking a brief break at his cabin near Lake Shasta."
"What a coincidence," I say playfully, "that's where we're going on vacation."
Two weeks later, our black Bronco bounces down a wooded, unmarked road to Gary Zukav's cabin. We are all warmly greeted by Gary and his spiritual partner, Linda, who has just moved in. My boys decide to play outside, waiting with their dad.
Gary is patient and soft-spoken, and I leave with a cassette tape brimming with wisdom. One thing is not on the tape -- my own awakening to how dreams can magically come true.
In his new book SOUL TO SOUL, Gary tells of living in this small cabin in the woods, and how, when Linda came to live with him, how small it became. They lived there seven years, and it wasn't easy, he says, to find a new place. An adventure! Gary says. They made it an adventure, inviting the Universe to "find us where we need to be....and let us both recognize our new home when we see it."
He says they knew at once when they spotted their new home. Letting go? Easy, he says, as fruit dropping from a tree when it is ready. They were ready. Gary Zukav says "fight or flow, the process has its own timing, and it creates changes in your life when those changes need to happen."
I would simply call it magic.

Labels: book review, Gary Zukav, Linda, magic, SOUL TO SOUL

September 1, 2008
Are you happy? I mean really, beneath-it-all happy? Marci Shimoff says only about a third of us are -- and she was determined to find 100 of these people for her book HAPPY FOR NO REASON. What she did find -- and she packed the book with studies, graphs, stories from these happy one-hundred -- was a fascinating statistic that there is a happiness set-point. And that half our happiness is genetically programmed. Ten-percent is determined by factors such as wealth, marital partner, and career. And a whopping forty-percent depends on what we feel, think, do and say.
A story came to mind -- that of my birth. My mother told me I was a week overdue in one of the hottest summers on record in New York -- she rode trolleys over every pock-marked city road she could find. Finally, one blazing hot afternoon, it seemed I was about ready to make an appearance. Instead of heading to the hospital where her mom was the head RN in the ER, she made her puzzled dad wait while she showered at their apartment and leisurely shaved her legs. It was customary at hospitals in those days to knock the woman out with drugs, so the delivery was as easy as possible. When her father finally got her to the hospital, they checked her, and I was sliding out. It was too late for the drugs. They told me I was born laughing.
I thought, that joy must be my set-point. But after age four, life changed radically for me. My mother remarried, and I was raped and traumatized in the family home for the next fifteen years. That natural joy turned to fear. For the past year, I've been processing all those memories using a tool called EMDR. Now that I'm ready to deal with the pain, and change the meanings I derived from the abuse, the joy is beginning to resurface. I am transcending the trauma. I live in the moment, and feel very little trauma, pain, guilt, fear of the future. Oh I have my moments, but I can swiftly recapture the peaceful center.
I used to believe I didn't deserve to play. Counter to that belief, I accepted an invitation to go hiking in the Gorge. This was the first time for me.
A friend and I went to Eagle Creek Trail, and we hiked for nearly five hours. It felt absolutely wonderful, feeling the shifts in cool wet breezes amid the trees and the warm blasts of sunshine, the fascinating patterns in the rock and tree limbs, and the waterfalls. About midway through, I said "I feel so light! Like I can fly!!!" I happily moved, dancing from rock to rock, as we moved along the trail.
And then a sparkle caught my eye. It was a spider web, with the sunlight behind it. A leaf floating in the web. It was a delightful piece of natural magic, and a reminder that I am free now.

Labels: book review, Eagle Creek Trail, HAPPY FOR NO REASON, magic, Marci Shimoff, spiderweb, the Gorge, transcending the trauma