Metta, loving kindness, is the act of well-wishing toward yourself and others. You settle on a set of phrases and then recite them silently, over and over. The phrases can be directed toward yourself, to others as a whole, or to particular people.
These are the phrases I settled on in the early 1990’s for my metta practice:
May I be peaceful.
May I have ease of well-being.
May I reach the end of suffering.
And be free.
There’s no magic in these four phrases. The cadence and meaning just work for me.
…The goal of metta practice is to cultivate loving-kindness in this fashion until it’s a mental state that arises effortlessly. At that point, you’ll find it increasingly natural to greet all living beings with kindness and friendliness.
With this chapter, as with many others, I found that Toni put into words concepts that I’ve discovered myself during my illness – recognizing that everyone has challenges in life, treating others with kindness, understanding that change is a part of life, and accepting what is out of my control. Her book provides concrete guidance on how to internalize concepts like these that can lead to more peace and happiness, even in a life clouded by chronic illness.
I devoured How To Be Sick, tagging pages, underlining key thoughts, and taking notes so that I could return to these fascinating teachings. At the end of the book, Toni includes a reference guide to help you pinpoint which concepts and practices will help for particular situations. I have already learned a lot, and I plan to refer back to this book often to try to bring more joy and tranquility to my own life.
How To Be Sick is a captivating book that will help to improve and enrich the life of anyone struggling with chronic illness, anyone who cares about someone who is chronically ill, or anyone at all who has experienced suffering in his or her life (hint: that would be all of us!).
195 pages, Wisdom Publications
For more information, visit Toni’s How To Be Sick website.
Disclosure: I received this book from the publisher in return for an honest review. My review is my own opinion and is not influenced by my relationship with the publisher or author.
Note: This post contains affiliate links. Purchases from these links provide a small commission to me (pennies per purchase), to help offset the time I spend writing for this blog, at no extra cost to you.
Listen to a sample of the audiobook here and/or download it from Audible.
You
can buy the book through
Bookshop.org,
where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all
indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local:
Or you can order How to Be Sick from Book Depository, with free shipping worldwide.
Fog
The sky is a womansuppressing her tears.I think that woman is me.
Courage
Courage is docking a small boatwith the current shoving your keelone way, wind pushing your hullthe other and knowing Supermanisn’t going to show up to help you.
The night before I left on the trip, my high-school lacrosse buddies threw me a going-away party. They bought a keg of beer and we played numerous drinking games on the kitchen table. Mildly hungover the next morning, I loaded up the Hyundai that dad had purchased for me two years earlier in Washington at an embassy surplus sale. The car had previously been owned by the African nation of Chad and driven by their diplomat’s errand boy. The car still had diplomatic license plates, which allowed me to park anywhere I damn well pleased. I strapped Dad’s urn containing three-fifths of his remains into the front passenger seat. Before I pulled out of the driveway, I took a spoonful of the ashes and sprinkled them on the front lawn of the house I had shared with Dad for eight years.
“One down, forty-seven to go,” I said to myself, as I shaded in the state of Maryland on the map I carried to show the trip’s progress.
Dr. Hancock approaches weight-loss from the unique perspective of being both a medical doctor who has studied obesity and nutrition as well as someone who herself grew up overweight, lost 75 pounds, and has kept that excess weight off for over 25 years. Her book is a distinctive blend of science, personal experience, and religion, equally referencing scientific studies and the Bible.
Her premises on weight loss are refreshingly compassionate and common sense: eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full, reduce portion sizes, and use your spiritual base to help support your efforts. Here, she explains why she called her book The Eden Diet:
If we had lived in Eden, we would have eaten only when we were hungry, and we would have eaten less. Therefore, we would have automatically reached our ideal weight without trying.
Instead of food being the center of our universe, God would have been the center. We wouldn’t even have thought about food until we felt hungry. That’s right – we would have eaten primarily for sustenance and in response to our God-given internal hunger signals, not to escape boredom or to fill our emotional or spiritual voids.
And we would have eaten any food that was readily available without regard to whether it was good or bad for us. We wouldn’t have had consciences about such things.
With the Eden Diet, there are no bad foods, no difficult-to-maintain restrictions. Dr. Hancock describes how to retrain your body to recognize its natural hunger and fullness signals so that you can give up traditional restrictive dieting for good. She delves into underlying emotions and conditioning that may cause you to overeat, and explains in detail how Christian beliefs support this type of natural approach.
The Eden Diet is perfect for Christians who want to lose weight and live in a way that is consistent with their beliefs. It is especially relevant for people who have struggled with weight loss and with various diets for many years and will help them to finally say good-bye to unhealthy habits and yo-yo dieting. The Eden Diet Workbook is also available, to help readers apply the concepts of The Eden Diet to their own lives. You can learn more about the program, Dr. Hancock, and local support groups at The Eden Diet website.
(Full Disclosure: The author of The Eden Diet is one of my oldest and dearest friends. However, I would not write a review of her book unless I truly thought that it was worthwhile, since the purpose of this blog is to recommend good books. I was quite pleased to find that my wonderful friend’s best qualities – her intelligence, compassion, and sense of humor – come across beautifully in her book.)
224 pages, Zondervan Boooks
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
Life on the Refrigerator Door by Alice Kuipers is a unique novel, to put it mildly. It’s told entirely in notes left between a mother and her 15-year old daughter. Mom is an obstetrician and a single mom, working odd hours and struggling to handle it all. Claire is busy with her own life, running to school, hanging out with friends, and feeling her way through a relationship with a new boyfriend.
Claire and her mom are often running in different directions, so they leave lots of notes for each other. Their notes run the gamut from the mundane details of everyday life – grocery lists, requests for money, scheduling difficulties – to expressing deep feelings to each other as they struggle with unforeseen challenges.
Claire-Bear,
I had to go. One of my patients delivered two and a half months early. January is a horrible month to have a preemie…
When’s your presentation? Isn’t it coming up soon?
Let’s do something tonight. I feel like I haven’t seen you for days.
Love you –
Mom
-Could you get some more apples?
Hi, Mom!
I can’t do tonight. I have to go to Emma’s to study. James is coming too and we’re all working on the presentation for tomorrow.
I made some pasta with a cheese sauce so there’s no milk left. I didn’t get apples yet.
Hope work was fun. How’s last night’s baby?
Claire
A novel told through notes on the fridge sounds like it would be light and superficial, but this book has a surprising depth of emotions. At one point, I was crying so hard I could hardly see the words on the page, but I wiped my eyes and kept reading. I finished the book in one afternoon but felt as if I had lived through their experiences with them. Life on the Refrigerator Door provides an extraordinary and unique look into the complex relationship between a mother and daughter. Thanks for the great recommendation, Kim!
220 pages, Harper (an imprint of HarperCollins)
This Is Where I Leave You is about a dysfunctional family that comes together for a week to sit shiva for their father. This is how the oldest sister, Wendy, informs her brother (and main character), Judd, that their father has died:
“Dad’s dead,” Wendy says offhandedly, like it’s happened before, like it happens every day. It can be grating, this act of hers, to be utterly unfazed at all times, even in the face of tragedy. “He died two hours ago.”
“How’s Mom doing?”
“She’s Mom, you know? She wanted to know how much to tip the coroner.”
I have to smile, even as I chafe, as always, at our family’s patented inability to express emotion during watershed events. There is no occasion calling for sincerity that the Foxman family won’t quickly diminish or pervert through our own genetically engineered brand of irony and evasion. We banter, quip, and insult our way through birthdays, holidays, weddings, illnesses. Now Dad is dead and Wendy is cracking wise. It serves him right, since he was something of a pioneer at the forefront of emotional repression.
Judd is a depressed but side-splittingly funny narrator with a dark sense of humor. Here, he describes his father’s last months:
…It took four months for him to die, three more than the oncologist had predicted. “Your dad’s a fighter,” they would say when we visited, which was a crock, because he’d already been soundly beaten. If he was at all aware, he had to be pissed at how long it was taking him to do something as simple as die. Dad didn’t believe in God, but he was a life-long member of the Church of Shit or Get Off the Can.
As you can see, Judd – and the rest of his family – are quite irreverent. If foul language or explicit sex scenes bother you, then you may want to skip this book. If not, then you’ll find the scene where Judd walks in on his wife and his boss very entertaining, as Judd sets it up here: “My marriage ended the way these things do: with paramedics and cheesecake.”
I laughed out loud all the way through this novel, but it also has a serious side, as Judd and his sister and brothers try to resolve their various problems and begin to come together, despite their expertise in remaining distant. Judd himself is struggling just to pull his life back together after his wife’s devastating betrayal. Tropper has a talent for portraying real-life relationships and problems with depth and humor. I enjoyed this novel very much and can’t wait for his next one!
For more information on Jonathan Tropper, you can visit his website.
You can hear an interview with Tropper about his novel at amazon's page (scroll down a bit) - he's working on a screenplay of it for Warner Brothers!
339 pages, Dutton (Penguin Group)
But change is inevitable, kid. No use trying to run from it or pretending to keep everything the same. It's a law of nature. Things die if they stand still too long. They get stagnant, like an old pond. That don't mean that everything will get better right away. But everything happens for a reason. In the long run, it usually turns out for the best.
...Listen up, Yumi girl, there's no use running away from your problems. 'Cause where are you gonna run to? There'll be up times and down times, and sometimes, looking back, they're the opposite of what you thought. Sometimes big changes force you to grow in ways you can't predict. But if you got a problem, look it straight in the eye and deal. That's good advice, kid. Take it. I wish I'd followed it myself. You can't return to the past, as much as you'd like to. Look at me: I couldn't go back to Japan, and when I finally returned New York, it didn't work out neither. You gotta keep looking forward, little one. Live in the present, take on the future. That's what I say.
The 5-year diary had once belonged to a young girl named Florence Wolfson who started it on her fourteenth birthday in 1929. Florence lived a rather privileged life, attending Wadleigh High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in the city and spending her summers on Long Island and, later, in the Catskills. Florence was a remarkable young woman, mature beyond her years, who had started high school at age 11 and graduated at 15.
Koppel read the diary from cover to cover, then hired a private investigator to help her find Florence. Amazingly, they found her, alive and well, now 90 years old, and living in Connecticut and Florida. The two women met, and Koppel returned Florence’s diary to her. Florence answered Koppel’s questions and filled in more information about her life as a young woman of the 20’s and 30’s.
Koppel’s book is a combination of Florence’s original diary entries and additional details, some supplied by Florence and some gained through research, as in this excerpt:
A magnificent day – I still can’t get over the beauty of New York – at dusk.
Everywhere she looked there was a scene ripe with artistic possibility. Around her neck dangled her new Leica camera with a Zeiss lens from a brown leather strap. Florence snapped a photograph of a man in a Magritte hat scanning a store display, which she titled on the back, “Reflections,” for a competition she entered by mail. Off Fifth Avenue, streetcars buzzed diagonally across intersections on brass rails powered by live wires. Florence reached her arm out the trolley’s window to feel the breeze. Wires also transmitted phone calls, courtesy of New York City’s thousands of telephone girls, easy to flatter with a joke as they plugged in the right exchange. “Atwater 9-5332” reached the Wolfsons. At the Horn and Hardart Automat, sticking a nickel in a slot opened a little glass door for a slice of pie. Silver dolphin spouts poured hot coffee.
Young Florence’s boundless joy for life and love of the arts is evident in many of her exuberant diary entries, like this one:
Bought several books today and feel quite proud of my tiny library. Alice and her adventures in Wonderland are included – and why not! There’s so much to do – music, art, books, people – can one absorb it all?
The result is a fascinating and engaging portrait of that time period, from the perspective of this lively, enthusiastic young woman. Florence went to Hunter College in New York and enjoyed all that the city had to offer. She shares intimate details of her friendships, love affairs (with both boys and girls), hopes, and aspirations. Sprinkled throughout the book are captivating photos, many of them from Florence’s own collection, that help to complete the picture of a young woman’s life in 1930’s New York.
352 pages, Harper Perennial
If you’re interested in kids’ books, check out what the rest of my family is reading at Great Books for Kids and Teens.
I’m making progress on my backlog of reviews. I posted two here last week, both books that I loved: The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder and Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table. I also posted a kids’ audio review at Great Books for Kids and Teens of Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman.
So, what are YOU reading this week?
What are you reading Mondays is sponsored by J. Kaye's Book Blog.
The Rules of Life According to M'Dear:- The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder by Rebecca Wells
- Sleep with the windows open (window screens are fine, when necessary).
- Whistle in the dark. Calla Lily, your attempt at whistling is good enough.
- Good enough is good enough. Perfect will make you a big fat mess every time.
- Sing anytime you feel like it, and even more when you don't feel like it. Sonny Boy, this does not mean in math class, although you have my permission to sing in all other classes. Will, all your silent singing is good, and also try to sing out loud at least once a day.
- Let love slip underneath closed doors, through tiny cracks in the walls, through your pores.
- MOST IMPORTANT: KEEP ON DANCING. Dance while you're brushing your teeth, dance while the sun shines, dance under the moon...Remember, La Luna waits for us to dance in her light, so dance in the streets. When life is happy, dance in the kitchen, and when life is roughest, dance in the kitchen...
Gumbo is the most important dish in the Louisiana lexicon for its prevalence and dependability alone. It’s difficult to come up with a single regional-leaning restaurant in New Orleans with a menu of any substance that doesn’t serve some version of it at least once a week. Gumbo’s pervasiveness does not, however, diminish the dish’s mystique; just as its variations are infinite, so are gumbo’s controversies and questions.
Every native can, and is dying to, describe her quintessential gumbo down to the final grain of rice, rice being the single constant among gumbos. Usually. There are at least as many definitive gumbos in Louisiana as there are accents, and like accents, definitive gumbos are established at home. It’s an intensely esoteric topic, as personal as pie crust and pimento cheese: whatever style a person grows up eating tends to remain her ideal for eternity. If you disagree with that ideal, it’s clearly because you’re impaired in some sad, fundamental way.
Note: This post contains affiliate links. Purchases from
these links provide a small commission to me (pennies per purchase), to help
offset the time I spend writing for this blog, at no extra cost to you.
Paperback or Kindle edition from Amazon.
You can buy the book through Bookshop.org, where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local!
Visit my YouTube Channel for more bookish fun!
I really enjoyed Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and its sequel and prequel, so I was excited when the audio version of her latest novel, The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder arrived at my house this past summer. But this warm and satisfying story surpassed even my high expectations. As I listened to it over the course of several weeks this fall, I laughed out loud and cried my eyes out."My name is Calla Lily Ponder. I was born in 1953 in La Luna, Louisiana, on the banks of the La Luna River. That is where my mother cut and curled hair, and my father and mother together taught tango, waltz, and Cajun two-step. They said they named me for their favorite flower because they wanted me to spiral open into a radiant beauty, inside and out. Even when I was born, a red, tiny, hollering thing, they claimed they could see the beautiful, creamy-colored, velvety bloom of a calla lily.
My eyes are blue like my mother’s – I call her M’Dear – and my complexion is olive like Papa’s. I guess the only thing that resembles the flower I’m named for is my long, strong legs. They’ve served me well so far, and I’m grateful for that. I was taught not to care much what other people thought, unless someone said you were mean to them, and it was true. Then you better pay attention. My big brothers and I learned this at an early age: That it is kindness that makes you rich."
Calla tells her story, from her childhood in La Luna with M’Dear, Papa, and her brothers through romances, lifelong friendships, a career in New Orleans, and all of the ups and downs that come with every life. That’s what makes this book so appealing – the author’s ability to portray real life, with its highs and lows, joys and sorrows. Calla is one of the most endearing characters I’ve ever encountered in a book. I was concerned at first that the sweetness of the book might turn out to be cloying (and some reviewers thought it was), but Calla Lily just happens to be a pleasant, kind main character, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I love everything about Louisiana (we used to live in New Orleans), and this novel perfectly captures its unique spirit and character. I could picture the tiny town of La Luna, and I felt like I was right there with Calla when she moved to New Orleans, experiencing that one-of-a-kind city for the first time.
I love to read, and it’s rare that I prefer the audio version of a book to the printed version, but this was one of those exceptions. The reader, Judith Ivey, has the perfect southern Louisiana accent and portrays Calla Lily both as a child and as an adult so flawlessly that you forget you’re listening to a fictional story. She made Calla and the other characters come alive, until I felt like I was in La Luna myself.
The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder was one of my favorite books read or listened to all year. I’m so late with this review in part because I was sick when I finished the book, but I think I also put off writing the review because I wasn’t sure exactly how to capture the warmth and spirit of this special novel. I got a print version of the book out of the library so that I could find quotes for this review, and I ended up reading much of it again, as I browsed through the book and spotted favorite passages I had listened to. Do yourself a favor and escape into the world of La Luna for a while and get to know Calla Lily Ponder. You won’t regret it.
416 pages, Harper-Collins
Audio book by HarperAudio
Disclosure: I received this book from the publisher in return for an honest review. My review is my own opinion and is not influenced by my relationship with the publisher or author.
Note: This post contains affiliate links. Purchases from these links provide a small commission to me (pennies per purchase), to help offset the time I spend writing for this blog, at no extra cost to you.
Visit my YouTube Channel for more bookish fun!
Listen to a sample of the audiobook here and/or download it from Audible. This book is amazing on audio!
You
can buy the book through
Bookshop.org,
where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all
indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local!
Or you can order The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder from Book Depository, with free shipping worldwide.
