wild melody

i just finished brain on fire. everybody should read it.  it sparked a lot of thought about things i already think about--how to fight against mental illness stigma, how to create greater empathy from the neuro-"typical" of us. how to understand better & reach out to include better & what are the best ways to communicate love to those who battle mental illness. i think this book could do some good in that direction. but also. damn. i never had autoimmune encephalopathy i never hallucinated or experienced psychosis. i'm very grateful for this, and i wouldn't say that i have come close to experiencing what susannah did. it's incomparable. but the first part of the book...shocked me with how releatable it was? the memories it stirred. i know what it's like to cave in, to lose pieces of your thought patterns and feel disconnected from your own neurons, to hide it for so long until you appear to flip personalities overnight but really you've...

I wrote this shortly after my 27 birthday; and while I'm in a different place I wanted to post it here so I don't lose it.  I'm sitting here reading a memoir from a Jewish boy who escaped the Soviet Union with his family in the late 1980s. I thought it would expand my mind, & my heart; put myself in another's very different shoes for a while. Maybe gain a little more insight into the history of the Ukraine I know & love so fiercely.  I didn't think I could possibly relate. I didn't expect to find myself reflected. I didn't foresee having to  move the book so the pages don't wrinkle--not from tears of empathy for his pain, but of familiarity.  I didn't expect to hear I wasn't alone from such a vastly different experience.  as he explains his self-loathing, his need to run from who he is. the journey of realizing the communist hatred for his ethnicity has become his own. as he talks about trying to run from himsel...

sometimes the easiest way to fight for joy, to fight to trust God when it seems He is letting go of His grip on the world is (for me anyway) to completely shift focus. to not think on those things. not sort them out, not try to understand. to let go & admit that my mind is too small. to really grasp His plans anyway. to humble myself--lets be real, if God explained His plans step by step i still would be unable to grasp them. i have not the mental scope. finite meeting infinite. i need to let it go. focus my mind on Christ. its in His hands. so. A Praying Life  by Paul Miller is a book i've been soaking in for almost a year now. haven't quite finished it, but i've reread chapters over n over. its simple. but parts of it have grabbed my heart. thought i'd post some of the underlined sections that convicted/comforted me .  One of the biggest key points of the book is that prayer is about our hearts & relationship with God. "As you develop your rela...

um, why yes, i'd love one of my walls to be covered in the book peter pan, thank you very much... www.spinelessclassics.com

This book. Is incredibly well written. It's rough, but superb. The word choices, the pictures it paints in my mind...I can't put it down. But sometimes I have to take a break to absorb it all. if I could write like anybody on earth I think I'd pick this man. With some Harper Lee thrown in. The characters have totally grabbed me, which isn't something that happens easily for me. Liesel. Brilliant girl. Sometimes I want to throttle her, but mostly because I would be making the same wrong decision in her place. Her foster father. Excellent but realistically flawed. Gotta respect a man who won't join the Nazi party in 1940's Germany. Especially when he's not your typical hero type. Her foster mother. Hated her at first. But I think we've come to an understanding. I even like her now. Max. Hmm. Not actually sure how i feel about him. as much as i want to love him, i just can't seem to stir up anything stronger than pity. If/when he dies, my sorrow will be...

I pulled out Elizabeth Elliot's "Keep a Quiet Heart" to look up a specific passage last night and came across this one as well. It's classic. I found myself guilty of #1 this morning--I was whining about cares to God first thing before I even opened my Bible and not even asking for the grace to handle them! (He is indeed gracious!) Several Ways to Make Yourself Miserable 1. Count your troubles, name them one by one--at the breakfast table, if anybody will listen, or as soon as possible thereafter. 2.Worry every day about something. Don't let yourself get out of practice. It won't add a cubit to your stature, but it might burn a few calories. 3.Pity yourself. If you do enough of this, nobody else will have to do it for you. 4.Devise clever but decent ways to serve God and mammon. After all, a man's gotta live. 5.Make it your business to find out what the Joneses are buying this year and where they're going. Try to do them at least one better even if yo...

Recently I've been reading the Chronicles of Narnia to my fam the evenings I'm home. We finished "The Horse and His Boy" {one of the best ;)} last night. In this passage, Lewis paints such a picture of God's loving kindness in the seemingly "bad" or discomforting things in life. Shasta is wandering alone at night in a strange country. He can't see where he's going in the mist and has no idea where he is. A stranger falls into step beside him and they have a conversation: " [Shasta] told how he had never known his real father or mother and had been brought up sternly by the fisherman. And then he told the story of his escape and how they were chased by lions and forced to swim for their lives; and of all the dangers in Tashbaan and about his night among the the tombs and how the beasts howled at him out of the desert. And he told about the heat and thirst of their desert journey and how they were almost at thier goal when another lion chas...

Nothing will come out right. So. To make up for the last post's 2wk existence (!) I thought I'd post something fun. Hmm. What's one thing that me and all 4 of my faithful readers {the kars, als, beks} enjoi? Pride & Prejudice. Jane Austen. Even if we disagree on which film is better, the book is best. So in honor of my fellow Elizabeths, and other Bennet girls; some quotes: Bingley: "Come Darcy, I must have you dance. I cannot bear to see you standing about in this stupid manner..." Darcy: " You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room." "There is one of her sisters...who is very pretty." "She is tolerable, but not handsome to tempt me. I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men." Jane: He is just what a young man ought to be: sensible, good-humoured, lively..." Elizabeth: "He is also handsome, which a young man ought to be, if he possibly can...he certainly...

December 11, 1939 "A conversation with the doctor. We always come back to the same point: 'The church may not mix in politics', he says. And I tell him that when you are a Christian and profess that God is almighty, there is no single area of life from which you can eliminate God." -- from the journal of Diet Eman Over the weekend, I indulged my love for good books with "Things We Couldn't Say". It's the semi-autobiography of Dutch student-turned-resistance-worker Diet Eman. The above quote comes from the context of how to respond to the German Occupation. When Germans started to persecute the Jews, Christians were very divided about forming a RResistance Many believed that they were subject to the Germans as a higher authority God had placed over them, and therefore "resistance aagainstthe established government was, quite simply, sin". Just to put that quote into context for you... Anyway, it's an excellent book. Her transpa...