August adventures: books and blog posts (part 1)

Hello friends! The summer has flown past and kept on going right out the window.  My daughter began kindergarten and is thriving, thank goodness.  Now we just need the hot and humid Houston weather to get the message that it’s time for pumpkins and jackets and jeans.

I started the month by writing about adapting my schedule to my need for lots of quiet and recovery time.  Thank you all for your supportive comments!  Then, as if in answer to that very post, life got slowed down quiet a bit when my daughter and then I got sick.  I bounced back and wrote a post about finding joy in every single cotton pickin’ thing.  Also, in case you missed it, this post is about my upcoming adventures.  It’s a full and wonderful life.  Finally, my post about how to be a slacker generated some of my favorite comments from you all.

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I read 10+ books in August! Partly that is thanks to having my Kindle, which allows me to read with it’s soft backlighting while I’m putting my daughter to bed.  She doesn’t even realize it.

I am dividing this post into two posts.  Also, a couple of these books deserve their own post so I can tell you much more about them.

So without further adieu…

Diary of a Psychic: Shattering the Myths by Sonia Choquette

Oh my goodness is this a good book! Choquette has such a sense of humor and starts with her childhood and tells how it feels to have these gifts.  I honestly couldn’t put it down.  Reading about Sonia’s life, lessons, readings and teachings really inspired me. She is a great teacher… honest, real, and full of wonderful and fascinating stories.

Trust Your Vibes: Secret Tools for Six-Sensory Living by Sonia Choquette

After reading that first one, I want to read all of Sonia Choquette’s books.  This one is SUCH a helpful book about transitioning from a five-sensory person to a six-sensory one by trusting your intuition.  I am writing a separate post on it and you will see it very soon.

Infinite Possibilities: The Art of Living Your Dreams by Mike Dooley

This one is about how our thoughts and beliefs create our reality.  It’s amazing how powerful we really are.

“Your feelings come to you through a window that opens to Divine Intelligence.  Keep that window open, practice gazing from it, and open yourself to following your heart and thinking as you perhaps have never thought before.  Begin appreciating its priceless view.  And follow your dreams; they’re yours for a reason, not the least of which is to make them come true.”

“You are in control, and you’re riding a wave of incalculable proportions.  You are powerful beyond imagination, loved beyond comprehension, eternal and free to live the life of your dreams based on the thoughts you choose to think — all thanks to the elements, principles, grace, and magic that now sustain you and your entire world.”

Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich

Perhaps you know Ehrenreich as the social thinker behind Nickel and Dimed. Here, she recounts her quest to find “the Truth” about the universe and everything else.  She found a journal from her childhood (which was WAY more impressive than any journal I kept as a child or teenager) where she recorded a mystical experience that she’d never told a soul.  I must say that I forced myself to finish this one.  It was tough to get into her rambling on and on about something that happened to her ages ago.

Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty by Diane Keaton

I loved her first memoir, Then Again, and her down-to-earth personality.  This memoir is about beauty, aging, and remaining true to yourself.  This was a quick and entertaining read.

Two favorite passages:

“I’ve always loved independent women, outspoken women, eccentric women, funny women, flawed women.  When someone says about a woman, “I’m sorry, that’s just wrong,” I tend to think she must be doing something right.”

“I live with the beauty of regret, and the memory of love… I see Mother’s hands.  I see her fingers throwing bread crumbs to the pelicans on the seawall.  I believed in Mother’s permanence.  I believed in the radiance of her face in the photography Dad took of her with her head thrown back in laughter.  When I try to make her photograph laugh in three dimensions, I feel the sorrow of beauty lost.”

Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison by Piper Kerman

I read this along with a few girlfriends so we could talk about it.  We agreed that it’s an interesting read but that it was sort of choppy, like reading someone’s journal.  Piper was in a minimum security women’s prison. Apparently, this book is very different from the show, which I understand must be sensationalized a little bit.  The women in Danbury formed friendships and “tribes” and helped each other through.  It was rather heartwarming in a way.  I enjoyed her thoughts on our prison system in general.

You try to adjust and acclimate, yet remain ready to go home every single day. It’s not easy to do. The truth is, the prison and its residents fill your thoughts, and it’s hard to remember what it’s like to be free, even after a few short months. You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful prison is rather than envisioning your future. Nothing about the daily workings of the prison system focuses its inhabitants’ attention on what life back on the outside, as a free citizen, will be like. The life of the institution dominates everything. This is one of the awful truths of incarceration, the fact that the horror and the struggle and the interest of your immediate life behind prison walls drives the “real world” out of your head. That makes returning to the outside difficult for many prisoners.

What made me finally recognize the indifferent cruelty of my own past wasn’t the constraints put on me by the U.S. government, nor the debt I had amassed for legal fees, nor the fact that I could not be with the man I loved. It was sitting and talking and working with and knowing the people who suffered because of what people like me had done. None of these women rebuked me—most of them had been intimately involved in the drug business themselves. Yet for the first time I really understood how my choices made me complicit in their suffering.

However, most of all, I realized that I was not alone in the world because of the women I lived with for over a year, who gave me a dawning recognition of what I shared with them. We shared overcrowded Dorms and lack of privacy. We shared eight numbers instead of names, prison khakis, cheap food and hygiene items. Most important, we shared a deep reserve of humor, creativity in adverse circumstances, and the will to protect and maintain our own humanity despite the prison system’s imperative to crush it. I don’t think any of us could have managed those survival techniques alone; I know I couldn’t—we needed each other.

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Part 2 coming soon!

What have you been reading lately? And are you on Goodreads? I’d love to connect there.

Everything I’ve Ever Read (I think)

Currently Reading

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