Lilian Nattel's Blog, page 20

Do You Love All Your Parts?

It's Valentine's Day, the day of love–and so I have to ask: do you love your toes, your eyes, your brows, your butt, your belly, your intestines, your femors, your ribcage, your waist, your spleen, your skin (which in some kids' lexicon refers as well to chesty bits)?

What about your creativity–that's not too bad, eh? Or your kindness? Your laughter? Oh, but how about your anger, your unreasoning terrors, your regret, your whininess?

This Valentine's Day, let's spread the love around, not only to the cute, but to all parts, physical, mental or emotional. I suspect that's what we all want from each other: to be wholly accepted and embraced.

And it's possible. I've seen it, for example, in the instance of people with DID (dissociative identity disorder aka multiple personalities) who are able to love a singleton even though singletons are so different–being strangely deluded that they are consistent. I mean as if! Doesn't everyone have parts? But still, they are able to love those singletons with all their hearts.

And I've seen this, too: singletons, despite their clinging to the illusion of permanence and continuity, are able to love with all their hearts their partners who are DID. Not just the parts that are cute, but all of them, the bristly parts, the distrustful ones, the super-competent and bossy parts, the motherly, the curious, the wide-eyed, the ones with a wicked sense of humour.

And they are loved back, those singletons, in return with a deep understanding of how the best parts of a person, the strongest, can be the ones most strange. Even in singletons.

Happy Valentine's Day dear ones–all of you–every sort of part–in every sort of person.

Toes are beautiful too.

And here I want to add a shout-out and thank you to Emily Rosenbaum who inspired this post with a review of Web of Angels that focuses on the universal.

Filed under: Fun, Literary Tagged: dissociative identity disorder, mindfulness

The Taxi Driver and the Book Lovers' Ball

The Book Lovers' Ball was fantastic. I met several of my favourite writer friends there and we had a great conversation before dinner. Great conversation continued during dinner at my table with the collections manager, planner, and other delightful librarians, as well as the couple who won the best first line for a book contest.

There was high fashion, literary icons, notables, elegant food, and more importantly a lot of money was raised for one of the best causes around: books, more specifically, the free availability of books in the public library system. And that brings me to the most memorable part of the evening, which was the taxi ride to the Book Lovers' Ball. I described it to to the other guests at my table, and as their faces lit up, I knew that the evening wasn't really all about what was on the stage at the far end of the vast dining room but about this story I'm going to share with you now.

The driver was a woman, the first female taxi driver I've ever ridden with. When I told her that I was on my way to the Book Lovers' Ball, which was raising money for the public library, she was delighted. After berating our mayor for cutting funds to the library, she spent the rest of the ride telling me how important the library has been for her and her two children. She's an immigrant from Ethiopia, and a single mom. She took her son, now 8, and daughter, now 16, to the library every weekend, pulling them away from TV and video games. She worked hard to support them and, exhausted, she'd sometimes put on dark glasses and rest while they read. Other times she'd read to them and help them pick out books. But always, she knew that the library was a good place for them to be as a family, a place for her children to develop and grow with books.

Filed under: Literary, Uplifting Tagged: Book Lovers Ball

I Am A Snout

"Mommy, you're the core of the family. It's like, you're the snout, and Dad is the nostrils. And us, we're the eyes."

Filed under: Fun, Personal Tagged: family life

Springboks South Africa

Doesn't this look like a painting from centuries past?

Springbok Picture – Animal Photo – National Geographic Photo of the Day.

Filed under: Beautiful Tagged: nature photography

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Another blogger recommended this book, and as usual I can't remember who it was! So please remind me in the comments. I wanted to re-read your review after I finished it.

Excellent Women, written in the early 50′s, is almost excellent and certainly very good. The narrator, Mildred Lathbury, is a 30 year old spinster whose calm life doing good at church and at a society dedicated to the assistance of impoverished gentlewomen, is disrupted by the arrival of tumultuous neighbours who move into the flat below hers.

Helen Napier is a messy, cigarette smoking academic. Her husband Rocky (short for Rockingham) is a handsome, debonair naval officer whose service consisted of arranging the social life of his superior in picturesque Italy. Their marriage is on the rocks (pun intended), each of them appealing to Miss Lathbury, as an excellent woman, to clean up their messes, figuratively and literally.

This is the thrust of the novel, a depiction of single women as, despite sometime loneliness and a yearning for love, the cleaners-up and protectors of civil society, the proof-readers and index makers of books and life.

Clear-sighted and brutally honest with herself, Miss Lathbury is tactful with others and a witty narrative voice as she comments on herself, her neighbours, the vicar who is ensared by the lovely and mysterious widow, his flappable sister, or the stiffly reserved anthropologist Everard Bone.

I wanted the ending to be different, feeling the author had led me a merry dance, and closed the book with a tiny harrumph. But I still enjoyed it thoroughly. Reading about Barbara Pym in Wikipedia, I can see why she ended it as she did–without giving too much away, I'll just say it's based on personal experience.

Sadly, after a successful early career she wasn't able to get her books published for 14 years, from 1963 to 1977, until more famous writers (including Philip Larkin) championed her work. I'm glad to know that the last few years of her life saw the publication and positive reception of several new books.

Excellent Women is a delightful read for a grey day.

Filed under: Fun, Literary Tagged: Barbara Pym

Flying Books Video

Watch the whole video–it's gorgeous and inspiring and made me bawl.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

h/t Pieces

Filed under: Beautiful, Literary Tagged: book lovers video, fantastic flying books

Snowy Owl

All the snow has melted here. Yesterday was sunny and warm, spring weather, but the temperature is dropping, the sky grey. I can't hope to see one of these birds here, but there's something special about a snowy owl. I'd like a conversation with this fellow. His posture and direct gaze make me want to write a story for him.

Snowy Owl Picture – Bird Photo – National Geographic Photo of the Day.

Filed under: Beautiful Tagged: nature photography

Monday Sun

The sky is shining this morning and I have a bit of time to post a few pictures from a walk I took earlier in the month. (If only the squirrels scurrying along the flat roof outside my window would stay still for a moment, I'd take a picture and post that too, but they're having too much fun to cooperate.)

Before I do that, though, I want to give a shout-out to Beth Kephart who brought joy to my heart this morning with her post.

Now the photos, click to enlarge:

I took the first one on Dupont Street–it's in a stretch of warehouses and I always wonder whether this storefront is a fossil or a living store.

I looked at the cat and the cat looked at me.

Toronto's transit is red–the streetcars, the buses, the uniforms. It brings colour to the grey slush of winter.

And this woman, too, in her red jacket and her dignified waiting for a bus made me think about colour, life, and age.

I don't know if these images capture the feeling I have as I walk through city streets. The city doesn't have the peace and spirit of the countryside, which I miss terribly when I spend any amount of time away from the city. And yet there's colour and beauty, here, of a different sort. It comes from this, I think, at least for me: there are stories, mounds and masses of stories wherever I walk; it's the density of human life that is talking. It's a challenge to live this way, so many people, close together, but there's also something that is magnificent in an entirely ordinary way.

Filed under: Interesting Tagged: urban photography

What If

Sometimes I say to my kids, That's a tool not a toy, treat it with respect. But what if I'm wrong about that? What if they're all toys?

I've been thinking about this lately while preparing for questions about Web of Angels that may come up at readings. The intelligent questions are a pleasure to answer, the ignorant ones an opportunity for illumination, but what about attacks in the guise of a question? Any writer can encounter those even with subjects that seem completely innocuous because the human capacity to find an axe to grind is endless.

And my subject is hardly innocuous. Preparing the answers is the easy part. Finding equanimity in thinking about it is a lot harder. Meditating about this, I began to see potential attackers as hurt children. And when I took that image further, I began to see us all as children, small or big.

What if all the money, prizes, electronics and tools are toys? What if all the clothes are dress-up? What if we are all just big kids, fighting over our toys, scared that we're getting less than the other kid, grabbing, squabbling, tired out by too much of too much, carried away by enthusiasm, sometimes kindly sharing, sometimes viciously jealous or mean? It would explain a lot.

Kids have the most fun with simple toys and basic supplies–scissors, paper, markers, cardboard. But they all want the glitzy noise-making toys they see on TV or in the store or at a friend's house. So I understand that I can't help being envious of someone who's gotten a bigger advance or a shiny prize that I haven't. You can't convince a kid that her little home-made cloth mouse is as good as the store bought rocking elephant as big as a room. It's human nature.

But here's the thing–life seems a lot less serious if we're all just here to play. I'm not quite there yet. Playing isn't my best thing; I was raised in an extremely serious manner. And yet I can see the creative freedom and joy in my children when they're completely absorbed in play, whether it's a game with stuffies or building a structure or blasting off with a sewing machine or writing a story.

I want that–I want life as my best friend. Play with me.

Filed under: Personal, Uplifting Tagged: play as spiritual practice

Saturn's North Pole–a Hexagon

 

APOD: 2012 January 22 – Saturns Hexagon Comes to Light.

Filed under: Beautiful, Interesting Tagged: astronomy