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Marilyn Coffey, Great Plains Writer
Wednesday November 12, 2008
Enlightened by $$$
by Marilyn Coffey
I don't know how frequently your thoughts pitter-patter beneath your cranium, but mine sometime rat-a-tat-tat for hours. On bad days, I'm at their mercy, brought to my knees by their morose battering.
"Pay no attention to them," Donna, my meditation teacher, says. "They're just sparks of electrical energy." But I find electric sparks difficult to ignore. They so often mimic my mother's voice, silent now two decades but still alive in my head. "You're too generous." "You should try harder." "Are you going to wear THAT?"
So when I spotted Sandra Ingerman's book, How to Heal Toxic Thoughts: Simple Tools for Personal Transformation (Sterling, 2007), I grabbed it. "This one's for me," I thought.
But it wasn't.
"Start by just breathing deeply into your abdomen," Ingerman writes. But I've been belly breathing for years. For a while in the Sixties, I even taught slow, deep inhalations in Yoga classes. I still breathe deeply. It takes the edge off my anxiety, I'll say that for it, but my thoughts go swaggering on.
Ingerman pitches meditation, too. Again, I agreed, nothing beats meditation for dropping clear down deep into the blank space that precedes thought, but some days the electrical energy goose-steps so briskly I can't find my way there.
So, disappointed, still needing a way to deflate the constant rapping of my mind, I set the book aside.
Meanwhile, out of unrelated curiosity, I paged through Shira Boss's Green with Envy: A Whole New Way to Look at Financial (Un)Happiness (Warner, 2006). Her examples were funny. The U.S. congressman who wants everyone to think he's arrived, but sleeps on a cot in his office. The 50-year-old baby boomer with kids in college, no retirement fund, and the clock ticking. And Boss's own jealousy at the "couple next door" who paid cash for their condo and go on shopping sprees. How can they afford it?
Green with Envy had a nice gossipy quality; I raced right through it. However, Boss's conclusion surprised me. All of a sudden, hoping to avoid her preoccupation with money, she's training to run a marathon. In doing so, she learned to train her mind. The phrase Boss used to train her mind, "But it doesn't matter," sounded purely American, not like the Hindu mantras I know. But she used the phrase like a mantra: at the grocery store when the line inches along, in her hallway when she hears her neighbors talk about jetting to Tahoe for the weekend.
How can that work? I wondered. It's too simple.
But then I tried it out. To my surprise, I discovered that the phrase not only cut through my thought like my mantra but also through the layer of emotion beneath it. I realized that my feelings, which cling to my thought as piglets cling to a sow, were more problematic than the thoughts. And this modern American mantra dissolved both.
What is that old Zen saying, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear? Here I thought Sandra Ingerman's "simple tools for personal transformation" would lead the way. But no. Instead, I find nosy Shira Boss, Green with Envy, trying to figure out how her neighbors could afford to live so high on the hog is my teacher.
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Monday September 29, 2008
NISSITISSIT WITCH
by Rosemary Chaulk
This week I am featuring an up and coming author, Rosemary Chaulk and her new book, Nissitissit Witch. Here's what Rosemary said about the book:
"North Village caught my attention because of the curse of the witch. In doing my research I found that North Village was doomed long before the witches ever came.
My book, Nissitissit Witch, suggests that the original curse on the valley was from the Indians who were slaughtered when the invading white settlers took the Nissitissit. We, as victors, wrote the history, but what about the history of those who came before us, what about the troubled Indian spirits?
While telling tales of Indian Spirits and witches I use this platform for my true message, which is pollution. We took America from the natives and the first thing we did was to decimate the woods, pollute the rivers and torture the land for anything we could take for profit. We dammed the rivers and killed the salmon.
During the 1800s, the Nissitissit was no different than any other river. During that time, our rivers were the recipient of every waste product and poison produced. North village is located in a narrow valley that concentrates the flow from about forty thousand aces of land upstream.
There were many little villages along the Nissitissit and any toxins they wanted to dispose of were dumped into the river.
Right in North Village, I found that they made felt and had a velvet shop.
The process of making felt uses mercurous oxide. Velvet clothes use felt in the collars, and the dyes in the velvets were also very toxic. Long-term exposure to mercury causes death by fits of insanity and people died in 'an unusual way'.
Nissitissit Witch takes all of these factors and spins a fictional entertaining yarn that has lots of history of the area spun into a tall tale."
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Thursday September 4, 2008
AWARD-WINNING BLOG
Denise Cassino of "Perspectives and Ponderances" awarded my blog for "exemplary writing and interesting entries," August 24, 2008. She called it "a chronicled commentary on life, literature and the ironies that surround us" full of "humorous anecdotes and ponderings of daily life." Take a peek at my blog, Marilyn Coffey, Great Plains Writer. Or at Denise Cassino's blog , Perspectives and Ponderances
Now, on to my latest "humorous anecdote and pondering of daily life"!
OF ITALIAN ICE & SPITTING CAMELS
Checked out the Midway at Omaha's SeptemberFest. What a blast! A large colorful invasion of plastic since I had been on a Midway, especially in the children's section. My favorite: huge green dragons whose round bellies opened to swallow a child.
I rode the merry-go-round. I always do. It's my favorite. That and the Ferris wheel. I love the view from the top of the wheel, although Omaha's wheel was nothing compared to the first Ferris wheel, the one that Mr. Ferris designed and built for the 1893 crowd at the World's Fair in Chicago. His stood 26 stories tall and could carry 2,160 passengers. Ferris meant his wheel to rival the Eiffel Tower. What a gas it must have been to ride! Took six stops to load all the passengers; then the wheel revolved just once. But what a revolution! I expect it hardly mattered that the wheel rose to only a quarter of the height of the Eiffel Tower.
I wanted to ride one of the ponies, but the sturdy little beasts wore no stirrups. The man who circled them around also lifted the young riders onto the saddles. I didn't think he'd lift me, so I watched. One little boy got positively glassy eyed, imagining himself wheeling across the prairie, I supposed.
Purchased an Italian ice, the first I had eaten since I had left New York in 1989. It was much bigger than the New York version, not as lemony, and the tiny chunks of ice had been ground into something like a pudding. I spooned away and watched all the rides I avoid: dropping from a great height, locked in a cage and tumbled around, spinning upside down and the like.
Then I bought a tiny cup of critter food and began feeding the goats. How they spotted me coming! They butted their tiny two-horned heads against each other in food frenzies. The Australian kangaroo was much smaller than I expected, and the tortoise much larger than my little box turtle but just as inclined to ramble. The zebra was neat, but the camel was awesome, his big bushy heady swirling much higher than the fence. This camel did not look content, and I had heard that the beasts spit, so I edged past him quickly. (To watch a camel spitting at a transvestite, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAuy-Jeb_sY&NR=1.)
Wandered the huge grounds, listened to live music, and eyeballed the antique cars and trucks lined up for a contest. The older the vehicle, the more preposterous the design, it seemed. A truck so low its skirts almost touched the ground. A car with a grill so huge it looked like the entrance to a fun house. All of them seemed positively spit polished.
Figured I was due one new experience, so I bought a Chicken-on-a-stick, all warm juicy white meat inside and horrible peppery high-cholesterol dough on the outside. A fly and I fought over nibbling rights, so I left my nibbled stick high in the garbage for the fly and went home.
How about you? What is your favorite midway memory? | | | |
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Thursday May 1, 2008
Jared, the Subway Guy
When I read the words, "Subway Guy," on the cover of a nonfiction library book, I grabbed it. Naturally, I assumed the book was set in New York City's subways; I'd lived in New York nearly thirty years. Later, at home, I realized the book featured the guy who lost 250 pounds eating sandwiches from Subway.
Oh!
I never would have bothered if I'd known that.
Then I began to wonder what force led this young man to adopt such a strange solution. Curious, I began to read. I followed Jared into the doctor's office when he weighed 425 pounds. The doctor gave him a death sentence. Lose weight or else. This motivated Jared. Just a college student, he didn't want to lose his whole life.
Using his doctor's diet booklet as a guide, Jared went to the grocery store and filled his cart with okay food, shopping in sections—like produce—that he'd hardly ever visited. Then he went home to cook, a rare activity, and to eat smaller portions of food than he ever had. But he just couldn't hack it. Two days later, he scrapped the doctor's diet booklet.
Boy, did I empathize! Now what?
Next he brought home frozen foods, low-calorie, complete meals. The only problem was taste. Lasagna like chalk. Cheese like melted plastic. Dry turkey with bland stuffing. You get the picture.
After that, he began chasing the promises of commercial diet plans. He tried out diet shakes, but ended up pigging out at a buffet. Still he dreamed of weighing less than 200 pounds, he dreamed of being without the health problems that his weight caused him. So he continued to read, but the other diets he encountered made no sense: don't eat protein, or eat only fruit or just rice.
Fortunately, Jared lived in a building with a Subway in its corner. He dropped in for a sandwich. While he waited, he picked up a Subway dietary guide and realized he could lose weight with a careful selection of Subway food. So, as you may know, that's what he did. Black coffee for breakfast, Subway for lunch and for supper.
How clever! I thought, even though I knew Jared's program would never work for me. Eating the same thing day after day after day would bore me. But I admire the way Jared stuck to his goal and, through trial and error, figured out a way of eating that worked for him. He still eats at Subway, so he not only lost weight but he maintained his loss.
Reading Jared, the Subway Guy felt invigorating. I not only satisfied my curiosity, I put down the book with the sense that I'd met a winsome young man. Nice to pass his way.
And these days, I pass his way frequently. Every time I drop into my local Subway for an illicit dish of Goodrich ice cream, I see Jared, thin as the cardboard that holds him up, displaying a pair of pants nearly as wide as he is tall. I tip my hat. "Nice going, Jared."
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Thursday April 10, 2008
Title: Bagels & Grits: A Jew on the Bayou
Author: Jennifer Anne Moses
Publisher: Terrace Books
ISBN: 0-299-22440-6
Price: $26.95, Publication Date: 2007, Page Count: 166
I do not know what I thought I was getting when I picked this memoir up. Something humorous, perhaps. The title of another Moses' book is FOOD & WHINE. Something Jewish, of course. So many of my lovers were and friends are Jewish that I am perpetually attracted to that subject. And the bayou? That uniquely Southern/French combination. New Orleans is my favorite, but hey, Baton Rouge is close enough
That is what I expected, but what I got was the author, Jennifer, a terrified whiny young woman who wants it all (including God) for herself but does not know how to get it. Her beloved scattered family, people dying of AIDS in St. Anthony's where she volunteers, her rabbi, and her therapist all influence her. She writes, "God alone knows what the folks at St. Anthony's would think of me if they knew that not only do I cry buckets at the drop of a hat, but also that I actually pay money to someone to listen to me when I cry."
Early reviewers aptly use words like witty, honest, probing to describe Bagels & Grits, which lives up to its reputation. The book opens with Jennifer driving a minivan, listening to HIV-positive patient, Lorraine, with skin "like polished mahogany" describe, again, how she shot her husband "right in the head" when she found him in bed with her auntie. "My favorite damn auntie." The book pads quietly on from there, word by word, day by day, slowly changing into a moving memoir of spiritual growth
Jennifer questions much of what she sees. Of the Christian God she encounters repeatedly in St. Anthony's she writes, "This is the God Who forgives you every last nasty thing you've ever done, and all you have to do [is] ask. So you've killed a few folks? No problem! Just call on Him at the very end and —presto!—you get into heaven. Whored around? Don't sweat it! Cheated on your income taxes? Come on down!"
"At St. Anthony's, not only did He exist, but also, at times, He came down to earth to say howdy or give a thumbs-up. He was so present, so everyday, that you almost expected to bump into Him at the grocery store."
I love this book. It brought me to tears, which books rarely do. Indeed, I loved the book so much I could not bear to put it down. So I didn't. I turned right back to page one and read it over again. Knowing what would happen, I focused on the wealth of detail Jennifer supplies, like this description of Geraldine, one of the AIDS patients: "she was pretty the way a bird is pretty, with small jutting bones under smooth skin and quick, darting movements."
Read it if you can. Whether you are Christian, Jewish, or (like me) something else, this odd, detailed, delightful spiritual journey is bound to touch you.
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