| A Cottage by the Sea |
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 You’ve gotta love Truluv, as everyone in this story does. Well, just two people, a young girl, and an old woman who end up living together in his home. Then there is his deceased wife and her beautiful presence. Read the book. It’s full of compassion and hope in the midst of the living and the dying.
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 This glimpse into a slice of life in the Appalachian mountains around 1900 offers plenty of opportunities to offer compassion. There is pain for everyone, but there is also redemption. We all have tough stuff in our lives and we all do bad and immoral acts. But we can change, as did Mercy, who affirms both our humanness and our hopefulness.  This book may make my Top Ten Books for 2018. It offer compassion for all human beings, and particularly for women who live in places where women are disempowered because they are women. Please note that in that sentence I consciously use the word women three times. This story takes place in modern day Turkey, with flashbacks to 2001 in Turkey and Oxford, England. Although it is particular to those times and places, it speaks to individual suffering that any woman might experience.  Throughout history literature has shown the world how to silence women. I quote from Goodreads: “{Beard} traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial. As far back as Homer’s Odyssey, Beard shows, women have been prohibited from leadership roles in civic life, public speech being defined as inherently male. From Medusa to Philomela (whose tongue was cut out), from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren (who was told to sit down), Beard draws illuminating parallels between our cultural assumptions about women’s relationship to power—and how powerful women provide a necessary example for all women who must resist being vacuumed into a male template…” My compassionate ponderings: • To gain power, the best we can do is act like a man. But that doesn’t get us far. • Maybe power doesn’t lie in government or boardrooms. • Consider Beard’s question: “If women aren’t perceived to be within the structure of power, isn’t it power itself we need to redefine?” • I wondering if the big power shift might be in the anti-gun movement. Women, and let’s include students, know that the ultimate power lies in love.  Just to set you straight, the color of law is green, as in money. Although published in 2005, this book reads like a 2018 news article. And a good read, for sure. In many respects I have zero compassion for the homes and privileges that corporate lawyers amass through their work.However, I sense that on some level they know they are living in a house of cards that by it’s very nature will fall. My 100% compassion goes to those living in the projects, who though the daily precariousness of their lives know that they are living in a house of cards. Because they can see love in the little things, their fall won’t be as catastrophic or deafening as those living houses behind the gates.  I love islands to the point of fantasizing living on one. If my life had taken a different turn, I can envision living on the Isle of Skye. This assumes that I’d become an islander as an adult, not as a native. And of course my island would be somewhere off the Scottish mainland. Although this story takes place on an island off the coast of France, its setting could be anywhere. What is important is not location but the insular life of native islanders. I have compassion for the life-limiting way they find themselves, and yet, island life offers fodder for a good story.  I was a hospice chaplain for seven years, and currently I visit elderly people, help them get to appointments, listen to their stories. Let me just say that death as part of life is fascinating to me. Eugene O’Kelly was a healthy 52 year old CEO when diagnosed with terminal cancer: three months to live is very terminal! He chose to live those months, days, hours, and minutes in the present. He spent the time ‘unwinding’ his relationships, from acquaintances to intimate family. A clear prognosis of our death journey is rare, and regardless, most of us are not as methodical as Kelly about mapping our future, not matter what the circumstances. But some of his ways of saying goodbye, staying present, and being at peace might be worth making our own, now and for the future.  After reading ‘Mercy Snow’ I went right across the street to the library and checked out this one, Baker’s first novel. Her characters are not like the folk I know in real life, well not in obvious ways. But underneath they have the variety of traits that we all possess to varying degrees. I have compassion for each of them, even the unsavory ones, but especially for Truly, the little giant of Aberdeen.  I love discovering a new author. Mercy Snow was waiting for me at the library on a shelf featuring books about winter. It turned out not to be a book about winter weather, but about a woman named Mercy Snow, who lived on the margins and who led the citizens of a mill town to face the truths about their lives.  Another book on Obama’s 2017 reading list. Compassion for those in a world I don’t know; the physical world, that is. But every day I see sadness and despair, as well as moments of joy and redemption. |
Author Compassionate Reading may sound strange, but that’s my purpose in joining the Goodreads 2017 Reading Challenge. A book a week seems like a reasonable goal. Maybe I’ll read 52, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll read 32, but probably not 520. Archives
December 2017
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