May your own hospitality inspire others to greater generosities, and forgiveness be your silent secret gift. Take responsibility for your own life and for your own actions and you will know the freedom of self-reliance. Walk softly and enjoy.
The photo and the blessing are from a neat site that generates a blessing and three random spiritual photos. Who can’t use a few few words of wisdom now and then? Check out the Worldwide Blessing Generator.
The sun was bright but there was a chilled nip to the air that surprised Maxine, even though the calendar was about to turn over to December. She somehow always pictured the south of France to be a place that was perpetually glowing and warm, inhabited by partying royals, carousing celebrities, and half-naked sunbathers. She could see why Susie and Julia had decided to open their retreat center here. On the half-hour drive over from the train station she stared out the car window and watched as the country terrain began to roll gently under a lovely postcard blue sky, the fields and meadows changing color like the patterns on a quilt, moving from pale greens to muted golds to faded browns, dotted here and there with grazing creamy white sheep and striped with sleeping grape vines strung out like martyrs between five foot posts.
I gave myself the day off yesterday and indulged in a little escapist summer reading. Michael Connelly’s, The Overlook, is a classic who dunnit murder mystery. The 13th in the series featuring Harry Bosch takes us to a scenic overlook on Mulholland Drive where a physicist with access to radioactive cesium is found shot execution style. The Overlook is a compact 225 pages packed with just enough character development and a solid fast moving plot to make it the perfect book to tuck under your arm when heading off to the beach.
“It’s the whistling,” Laila said to Tariq, “the damn whistling, I hate more than anything.” Tariq nodded knowingly. It wasn’t so much the whistling itself, Laila thought later, but the seconds between the start of it and impact. The brief and interminable time of feeling suspended. The not knowing. The waiting. Like a defendant about to hear the verdict.
A well written book helps us step into the lives of people we do not understand, takes us to places we may never go otherwise, and if we are lucky we learn a little something along the way. In America we tend to look across the globe at the Middle East and shake our heads, we see what the nightly news shows us, the violence, the dusty landscape, the oil. Khaled Hosseini is a doctor who grew up in Kabul but was educated here in the United States, a world away from the turmoil in the country of his birth. When he began to write his first book, The Kite Runner, he stepped back into that distant world telling a tale focused on fathers and sons and friendship between men. In his new novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, we are again transported to Afghanistan and this time we experience life in Kabul through the eyes of two women, Mariam and Laila, from 1974 to the present. There are many good non-fiction books about life in the Middle East, but the beauty of a well written novel is its ability to lift us up and carry us along on a journey of imagination, a journey that allows us to live the lives of the characters in the story. That is what good storytelling does…and this book is good storytelling.
You are Cry the Beloved Country
Life is exceedingly difficult right now, especially when you put more miles between yourself and your hometown. But with all sorts of personal and profound convictions, you are able to keep a level head and still try to help folks, no matter how much they harm you. You walk through a land of natural beauty and daily horror. In the end, far too much is a matter of black and white.
Click on the book and take a short quiz to see what book you are! With a virtual nod to my friend, BookYeti.
My mom is home from the hospital and doing better so I’ve been busy buying flowers and catching up on my gardening this week. My favorite all around gardening guide is published by Reader’s Digest. It covers everything and anything you might need to know from planting to pruning to pests. It’s been a tough ten days, I think I’ll go get some dirt under my fingernails…there’s no doubt about it, flowers are food for the soul. Thanks for all your kind words and prayers, what would we do without the support of our friends and our family:)
The Golden Compass is a book written by Philip Pullman that was sold in the adult and young-adult categories when it was first published in 1998. It is a book rich in fantasy and according to the Detorit Free-Press it is, “extraordinary storytelling at it’s very best”. In December a movie based on the book will premier starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. On the movie website they have a fun generator where you can find out what your daemon is (not the same thing as a demon). In the book, a person’s soul lives outside their bodies in the form of a talking animal. Click on bookbabie’s daemon, Pereus, if you want to find yours!
I joined BookCrossing.com this morning. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s kind of like a free worldwide book club. After you’ve read a book that you’d like to share, or “release” out into the world, you go to the website and register the book, leave a few comments, slap an anonymous label in it, then pass it along to a friend, donate it, leave in a coffee shop, airport, or “forget” it on a park bench. Hopefully the finder will read your book and enter the number on the website so you can track it’s whereabouts. Very cool. I’m eyeing my bookshelf right now looking for candidates. Hmmm, my son and daughter in-law are taking a trip next week, I wonder if they’d mind scattering a couple of books for me during their travels?
bookbabie 
