Books cont'd

My brief birthday thoughts a couple of entries back prompted this one.

Elaborating more on Anne Morrow Lindbergh's book, 'Gift from the Sea' and the paragraphs that struck a chord with me...

She has found a channelled whelk shell which prompts chapter 2; some excerpts from this chapter that ring true:

“I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily… But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity…The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications. It involves a house in the suburbs...It involves food and shelter; meals, planning, marketing, bills and making the ends meet in a thousand ways…It involves health; doctors, dentists, appointments, medicine, cod-liver oil, vitamins, trips to the drugstore. It involves education, spiritual, intellectual, physical; schools, school conferences, car-pools, extra trips for basketball or orchestra practice; tutoring; camps, camp equipment and transportation. It involves clothes, shopping, laundry, cleaning, mending, letting skirts down and sewing buttons on…It involves friends, my husband’s, my children’s, my own, and endless arrangements to get together; letters, invitation, telephone calls and transportation…

"For life today…is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands…through social and cultural pressures…My mind reels with it.

“For to be a woman is to have interest and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel…We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community...”

With a little humour, she continues:

“I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing to do with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls – woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.”

She comes up with simplification of life as an answer! Easier said that done of course, but she call the cutting out of distractions as a first step.

I love her analogy of a woman being a pitcher; she spills herself drop by drop until she is drained and then needs to fill herself back up. “…woman spills herself away in driblets to the thirsty, seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim.”

On this note, one of Yogamint’s recent posts is Be Still My Heart:

Be Still My Heart
Breathe into Quiet

"These days it’s not enough just to sit down for a moment to take a breather. In a restaurant, at the office, even in your own home, information bombards you, asking to be read, listened to, interpreted and decided upon. The effect is that when you sit, even in the absence of any input, it takes your body a while to shut down the channels that are open to receiving these electric, sometimes emotional pulses.

Do it anyway. Give yourself time to let the storm pass. Most importantly, tune into the body. Breathe deeply. Notice any involuntary movement and placidly direct the breath to whisk away the uncontrolled reflex. Wait. Don’t move your attention until you feel calm. Once you’ve done this everywhere in your body that needs attention, focus on your heart. Let the breath find its rhythm. And now, having surrendered all other unintentional movements to that of your inner metronome, rise, ready to play your tune for the world."

And so reading this along with Lindbergh's book made me finally decide to close my Facebook account…for now at least. My head feels overloaded with everyone else’s information. Which is actually the reason I went on it in the first place – having emigrated I wanted a way of staying touch with family and friends back home; it was a quick and convenient way to let everyone know news and goings-on and to find out theirs. So those of you that know my details, can contact me via email, text, skype and home phone AND this blog – become a follower if you want. I’ll be off it probably in the New Year, starting a little fresher if you know what I mean. New Year’s resolution (although I don’t always agree with them – most just set you up for disappointment!) is to email and call the Family more and call my friends here rather than texting and facebooking, and make my life simpler. InshaAllah!

There, that feels good! It'll probably annoy/upset a few people back home but I'm into quality not quantity now!

Until I just can't resist checking out friends' photos!

Edit: at the time of original writing my pitcher was empty! SO tired! But I’m sitting here reading and writing this, slowly being recharged, the kids back at school, I’m organising my new diary and calendar, I have Boot Camp starting today and I have a awesome new camera on which to vent my creative urges! This is the year for my photography, I am really going to focus on it… Oh and I decided not to close my fb account....too many people I want to stay in touch with! I'm just simplifying it.