September 13, 2004
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MONDAY BOOKGrace and Grit – by Ken Wilber (cont.)
I will be returning to this book each week until I’ve made my way through, because while I’m reading other things currently, this book is not just for pleasure. It’s not just a sad story or a love story. It’s a story about what two highly intelligent and spiritually motivated people did when faced with a limited lifetime for one of them. When I left off last week, Treya Wilber had been diagnosed with breast cancer just as they had met and married. Soon after this, she had to abort a pregnancy because it threatened her recuperation from surgery and radiation, and a year into their marriage they moved to Lake Tahoe. There Treya wrote this in her journal:
Why in the past have I wanted to travel so much? Why do I feel so constrained when I can’t just pick up and go? I twist in this new form, resist, feel confined. I squirm, wonder if ths is after all, really just another search for inner God displaced and sought “out there”? If I let myself live more freely within myself, a whole being, on my side, in support of myself completely, perhaps the foreign land will emerge within myself, strange sights and smells and thoughts swirling inside, pulling me into another land that begs to be experienced and felt and shared with others and shaped and molded in some way that satisfies that deep need – an African bazaar within my belly, incense-soaked Indian temple festooned with monkeys in my chest, high white Himalayan expanses with endless sky in my head, limbos dancing to balmy Jamaican breezes, the Louvre, the Sorbonne, washed down with a cafe au lait. This planet, our home, a tiny land in my heart.
The chapter that begins with this paragraph is called A Universe Within. In this last part of my own life, it is where I spend most of my time – traveling within. Lately, writing about the mileage of my youth I see how logical it is that outer travel be done then when you have the muscles and the lungpower. Considering the movement by foot, bus, train, ship, and plane then, I wonder if I have the fortitude to travel as far and with as much exhilaration on this dive into my own deepest soul. I’m determined that no matter what I find there, I can recognize it, respect it, forgive it, and even improve on it. Here I go. And here is a poem about it.
Deep Thought: If you lose your job, your marriage and your mind all in one week, try to lose your mind first, because then the other stuff won’t matter that much.
Today I am grateful for: Being younger than some
Guess the Movie: “We all go a little mad sometimes.” Answer: Psycho, 1960
Winner: thenarrator
End of Day – 8:38 pm
+ = Discovered Jack Kerouac took the same voyage I did on a Yugoslavian freighter out of New York to Africa, just 7 years earlier and landing in Tangiers instead of Casablanca.
- = Tried to unplug my bathroom sink and succeeded in completely stopping the drain. I need a plumber’s wrench.
Comments (10)
“being younger than some” I love that.
Psycho?
You got it!
I love your deep thought for today!
Having lost my husband to a lengthy illness that pretty must exhausted me physically and emotionally, I don’t feel I need to read any books on the topic. It’s an awful ordeal for the caretaker/survivor to live with. If reading this book gives you some kind of peace or understanding or insight I think that’s a good thing. We all have our demons we must face. I’ve written a few poems about looking within, too. They’re not all of them very pretty. Thanks for sharing.
Actually, understanding breast cancer is the least of my reasons for being interested in the book. It’s more that as I grow older it becomes more and more clear to me how all the material stuff is way less meaningful than self-knowledge and spiritual growth. Nothing seems to challenge folks more to grow than to be faced with a life and death situation. Some cave and some rise.
Well- I caved many times, but I guess I must be part phoenix, because I have so far managed to arise from the ashes of my defeats. Some days I don’t believe I’m any closer to knowing myself than what I did the day before. Such is life. :c)
I truly believe that every time you phoenix back you’ve grown and learned something that you don’t have to go through again. You are strong.
I think I did lose my mind first…still have the job though…damn!
Lionne, that is already one of my favourite poems! And the slideshow, if that is what the technical term is, are perfect, resonating with the images of a spiritual journey that becomes finally and at the end inward. And it is as simple as two hands in prayer, isn’t it.
OMG, I would not try plumbing unless I was on some serious drugs….with my luck I would break the pipe and the house would float away!
Having to abort a pregnancy would be the very worst thing…