October flew by and I’ve continued my trend of not knowing what day or month we are in.
I’ve now lost 27 pounds. So I’m giving myself 1 week off and eating Reese’s pumpkins. I have 13 more to go.
I finished a month of photo prompts, “Picture Fall,” and am beginning “Picture More Gratitude.” If you want to join, use code FIVE for $5 off.
I have started my Master’s program and, a few days in, like it very much. All of the engagement is via online discussion forums and I’m delightfully surprised that it’s been beyond interesting so far. I am taking one course at a time, so the goal is not to speed through by any means. I am also enjoying a weekly text study class, my Mussar class that meets every other week for one year, and a few seminars. I just had the honor of presenting to some fellow Mussar facilitators about the relationship nuances of how to effectively co-facilitate with a partner, which was received very well.
I’m facilitating a Mussar group in Houston, though we are meeting on Zoom. We are taking one middah (character trait) a month and diving right in. This month’s topic is Silence, something I have trouble finding. The idea is that when we quiet the external stimuli around us, we can listen to the guiding voice within. I usually find myself flitting around from one task to another without taking a pause to just BE. I’m working on it.
I put together an 84-page hardcover photo album of the trip to Israel I went on in February and made it available to the other participants, about half of whom have purchased a copy. I’ve gotten amazing feedback.
Here is my favorite response so far: “In these daunting times of fires, floods, Covid, riots, protests, injustice magnified, leadership that defies our concepts of democracy, we found ourselves once again immersed in the magic of travel. No ordinary travel! Mussar travel! Mussar friends personified! Joy and AWE infuse every photo, every page and every word of this magnificent photo journey of our time together. Your generosity Naomi, creativity, inclusiveness, artistry, joy and AWE infuse every photo, every page and every word of this magnificent photo journey of our time together.” I just love that my hobby can bring happiness to others.
Of course I’ve done more diamond painting. I’ve even gotten MORE people interested in the hobby. This set of 5 will soon be framed with thin black metal, no mattes. The one on the right is a photo I took in Tzfat. It’s about 1/4 of the way done but is very large so will probably take a few more weeks.
For Halloween, since we weren’t planning to go trick or treating this year, I put together a scavenger hunt for my family. There were 22 clues that sent them all over the house and yard and a grand prize at the very end – matching game day t-shirts. It was a blast.
There’s a new football fan in town! The Steeler games on Sundays lead to twice as many voices yelling at the tv. It’s pretty adorable.
We decorated cookies …
And then there’s virtual school. Sweet Girl is doing great being virtual, especially now that some kids have returned to in-person learning. The trouble is that she can come downstairs and find me anytime! There have been a few times like the photo on the left, where she’ll ask me something that was clearly just in the teacher’s presentation slide deck. Mainly she wants a snack in between classes, or a thermostat adjustment, or to ask me something unrelated to what she should be doing.
Now that I’ve started this graduate school class, I’m needing to concentrate for longer periods of time, which is hard to do when there are so many interruptions! Still, I love having her here and like knowing what she’s studying. It will be strange to send her back to school sometime soon.
I hope all the email and text spam that I’ve been getting from candidates will stop once the election is over! I’m somewhat worried about violence surrounding Election Day and the outcome. I’m concerned mostly that it seems to people like the rules are optional and that extremist views are even encouraged. I don’t know how long the collective we can keep it together waiting for election results.
On to fun stuff, like books and reading! I’ve come across some cute merchandise in my digital wanderings. I don’t know where I found this mask but since masks are all of a sudden fashion statements, I thought it was cute.
Cute reading tshirts and sweatshirts – Jane and Zulily:
13 Books We Love Set in the Library Because Libraries are the Best on Strong Sense of Place. I’ve read a couple of them but I think I’m going to have to read this one too. This is a new website for me but I love their mission statement: “Strong Sense of Place is a website and podcast dedicated to literary travel and books we love. Reading good books increases empathy.” It’s from Houston too! When you subscribe to the weekly updates, you’ll receive the 2020 Reading Atlas, 30 beautiful pages of travel photos and book recommendations, which starts with this:
25 Ways to Get Out of a Creative Rut on Stampington. Which is your favorite? I admit I love #11. 😉
Modern Mrs. Darcy’s 2020 Gift Guide for Book Lovers
10 Ways to Support Independent Bookstores Right Now
I thought it’d be fun to see how many books I’ve read this year so far. January (9) February (7) March (4) April (6) May (7) June (4) July (4) August (5) September (6) October (7) = 59. Somewhere around here there’s an annual total, but I don’t remember where.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
“We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”
Thinking about the past and how that may change everything you ever thought of yourself. This is disturbing, oddly suspenseful, and poetic.
“… as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been.”
The Gilded Hour: A Novel by Sara Donati
Two courageous female physicians in 1880s New York who help the most vulnerable are fighting a fundamentalist movement opposed to abortion. They find love and let themselves enjoy it. I LOVED all of the characters, the propriety, and the medical mystery that unfolds. I grew quite attached to the characters and so I’ll have to read the continuation of this in Where the Light Enters.
“You’re a turned inward soul. It’s the way you cope with the hard things in life. You hide away… Hard things come along. They always have and they always will. When that time comes, you have to turn toward Jack, not away from him. And that is not in your nature… your first instinct will be to shut him out and so beware of that and do what you can to stop yourself.”
Where the Light Enters: A Novel by Sara Donati
The continuation of The Gilded Hour. The two fearless doctors are reunited and carry on solving the medical mystery. It’s such a pleasure to enter the world of 1880s New York again. This one touches on marriage, family, and the social mores and politics of the time period.
I missed these characters! Apparently these characters are the descendants of the characters in a previous series by her. I’m going to have to read all of Donati’s novels.
Dear Edward: A Novel by Ann Napolitano
Edward is the sole survivor of a plane crash, but we learn the personal stories of others who were on the flight as well. The story alternates between Edward’s heartbreaking current reality of adjusting to a completely different life and the unfolding story of the flight, with background on a few passengers. When I read about the flight and got to know and care for the passengers, I was getting more and more nauseous, knowing the heartbreaking ending for them. Edward’s story is poignant and wise. Prepare for tears!
“He can sense the geometry of the lake—both its surface area and depth—and the moon, which is pinned halfway to the horizon. He can feel the loss of his brother, as if that loss has the solidity of one of the trees behind him. Edward breathes in, and when he exhales, he can feel his molecules travel into the air around him. Maybe I am a little asleep, he thinks. He’s aware of Shay beside him. Her molecules are mixing with his; he’s not just himself; he’s made up of her too. Which means he’s composed of everyone he’s ever touched, everyone he’s ever shaken hands with, hugged, or high-fived. That means he has molecules inside him from his parents and Jordan and everyone else on that plane. The letters always referred to the weight he had to carry, and he’d thought of it that way himself: He had to carry the burden of so many lost lives. He had to make it up to the people who died. It was him pulling 191 dead people, like a fallen parachute, in his wake. But if the passengers are part of his makeup, and all time and people are interconnected, then the people on the plane exist, just as he exists. The present is infinite, and Flight 2977 flies on, far above him, hidden by clouds.“
“Edward is aware, as if from a clock buried deep inside him, of a particular nanosecond that occurred six years earlier right above his head. The fleeting final moment when the plane was still a plane, and the people on it were still alive. Only Edward had bridged that nanosecond, and here he is, again. Taller than his brother and father, able to bench-press his own body weight, with his mother’s eyes. He’s created a circle, created a whole, by coming here. When he leaves, he can carry this full circle—everything this moment and this place contains—in his arms.”
Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin
“Once the gates have been shut, time belongs to me. I’m its sole owner. It’s a luxury to be the owner of one’s time. I think it’s one of the greatest luxuries human beings can afford themselves.”
This is a different sort of book, maybe because it’s translated from the French. I can’t put my finger on exactly why it seems so removed from other similar things I’ve read. It’s almost like a story told underwater, slightly blurry, if that makes sense.
Violette’s quiet life as the caretaker at a small cemetery in France is full with her small circle of coworkers, the animals she takes in, and encounters with families. We learn of her childhood, her earlier marriage and a terrible loss. The story is told in layers: life and death and the days in between. Very poetic and beautiful, but not for everyone.
The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir by Sara Seager
“Stars are light. Stars are possibility. They are the places where science and magic meet… windows to worlds greater than my own.”
Astrophysicist, wife, mother, and self-described square peg tells of her research and fascination with space while also guiding us through her grief after her husband dies. I can’t tell you how many times I cried during this book! Deep breath. It’s worth it. She has a beautiful perspective on it all.
“But when you lose someone, you don’t lose them all at once, and their dying doesn’t stop with their death. You lose them a thousand times in a thousand ways. You say a thousand goodbyes. You hold a thousand funerals.”
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
“A long pilgrimage of Americans seeking to escape their own harsh known world. Hubble identified a star that was far far away and was not the same sun that fed life on Earth. It was another sun. And it would prove for the first time in history that there were galaxies other than our own, that the universe was much bigger than humans had ever imagined, that there were, in fact, other suns.”
I read Wilkerson’s new genius work, Caste, last month thinking that I’d read this one too, but when I looked into it, I realized I had not. Here she tells the story of the decades-long movement of almost six million Black citizens from the South through three separate people’s experiences over the period of 1915 to 1970. It’s absorbing, disturbing, and absolutely riveting.
