She’s a Mil

I probably should be writing about Christmas and New Year and all the big news that we have (and I will do that soon) but I just want to get in the last movie and

Movie 9 - Avatar
This movie was very cool. Not life changing or anything but enjoyable. It was very beautiful and the 3D effects were very special I thought. This movie is about humans going to anpother planet to mine some valuable mineral. However there are some indigenous creatures on this planet whose homes are going to be destroyed in the process. Some humans get to know the indigenous creatures and one of course falls in love with one so they fight to protect them. The ending is predictable and while I was very pleased of course that all ended up ok part of me was hoping that perhaps it wouldn’t. Because in real life it has not been a happy ending for indigenous people, their land and meaning has been taken from them. Perhaps if this had happened in a fictional story such as this that had people so emotionally involved people may be more aware of what is going for indigenous communities around the world. Maybe not but you know what I am getting at.

Book 14 - “On Rage” by Germaine Greer.
This was a pretty small book, a long essay really about rage, specifically about the rage carried by indigenous men. It may be surprising to know that a book written by Germaine Greer was actually quite sympathetic to men and very well thought out. She basically made the point that indigenous men are drinking and being violent because they are filled with rage. While white men indigenous women have been able to hold on to some of their traditional roles and meanings through child birth and raising the men have almost totally lost their roles. She argues that alcohol restrictions and all other programs etc etc that are implemented are not going to work unless we create a space for this rage to be expressed (and maybe this won’t even work). She feels that the NT intervention actually creates a bigger tension between indigenous men and women and drives a wedge between them as it often portrayed as been about white people protecting indigenous women from their men. However she is quick to point out that white men have certainly not been portectors of indigenous women. The whole stolen generation basically amounts from the rape of indigenous women by white men. It is a bleak book but an important one I think.

So 14 books read and 9 movies seen in 2009. Not a bad effort really, especially as I managed to see more movies that Howie.

I think I am making a bit of a theme this year of joining in conversations when they have finsished. But I am at a loss of what to blog about and I meant to do this when it was going as I love books so here you go. Five books that have impacted my life. This list of course could be a lot longer and would probably be different on another day but here’s what came to mind today.

“Passionate Marriage” by David Schnarch

I think I have probably read this book or parts of it every year since I got married. I guess I am a pretty slow learner and I still get something out each time. The main theme of this book is differentiation which is about holding onto yourself in close relationships. Quite contrary to popluar cultures idea of romance and intimacy, this book argues that we need to validate ourselves and our own sharing in our relationships not expect that from someone else. When things go wrong in our relationships, especially our marriage, we like to blame the other person and spend most of our time trying to change them. Passionate Marriage puts the focus on us. If we want the sort of marriage we want we need to create ourselves not expect it from another person. It is very liberating I reckon.

“Christianarchy” by Dave Andrews

It’s been awhile since I read this book so I am not sure I can really articulate clearly what it is about and who knows if it would have the same effect now but the first time I read it felt like coming home. At a time when I was feeling that perhaps Christianity wasn’t for me this book made me feel it was. Christianarchy talks about a very radical Jesus. A Jesus that was inclusive, passionate about the poor and a grace that meets us where we are and is truly unconditional. It pushes us to also live like this.

“God of small things” by Arundhati Roy

Others have mentioned this book but it truly is rare. Perhaps not in it’s themes, no it looks at the univeral themes of love across boundaries and family and death and being on the outside but almost every sentence in a feast. The way she puts things together is truly extraordinary. It would creat a passion for language in anyone I reckon.

“Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Friere

This was one of the first books I read when I bagan studying adult education and it very much influenced the huge passion I have for my work. It certainly got me through some of the much drier, uninspiring texts we had to read and is still what I come to back to now for inspiration in my work. I have talked about this before but this book is written in a Latin American context and calls educators to use education to liberate people rather than oppress them.

“The Curly Pyjama Letters” by Michael Luenig

There had to be a Leunig book in there and I think this would be one of my favourites. I love the way Leunig points us extraordinary in the ordinary. Who makes us feel like life is filled with wonder in all that is mundane. Whenever I read this book or any Luenig prayer or thought really I am overwhelmed with a desire to give thanks or to dance or just bask in the sunshine.

“The good news according to Luke” by Richard Rohr

I have thrown this in at the end. I know I said five but then I thought of this and just had to put it in and I didn’t want to get rid of any of the others. I read this book this year and it excited me again at another low point in my journey to read the Bible. Not in the way I have traditionally but in a way that opens up possibilities for truth and understanding beyond the literal. It encouraged me that I can still come to the Bible even if I don’t come to it as most Christians do, that God is bigger than all our limited understandings.

This book has certainly slowed me down. Written in Spanish (and not really that good) meant that it took me a long time to get through. It was basically about a guy having a summer in holiday with his daughter in a place where he grew up remanicissing “the good old days” when he was younger. The focus was definitely on the girls that he was with. There were a few interesting reflections on life and marriage and getting older and all those things but I wasn’t that excited by this book. I guess I can not really relate to that feeling of school and uni being the best days of our lives and I thought the guy wasn’t a bit of an idiot. It was good to read a book in Spanish though. I know my Spanish is slipping mroe and more each year so I need to do these things to ensure I don’t lose it totally.

I loved, loved, loved this book. It was one of those books that you come across every now and then that seems to put into words (and eloquently) all the things that you have been struggling to get straight in your head but don’t seem to be able. One of those books that some how makes you feel at home and less alone in your thoughts. I am recommending it to everyone especially people who are perhaps disillusioned with Christianity and are needing a new way of understanding and living it out if they are to be able to stick with it at all.

Not that Marcus would say that the “the emerging paradigm”, what is described in this book is new, rather he sees it as the truly traditional way of approaching Christianity. I quoted this book a little bit in my last post, obviously the emerging paradigm is a more inclusive paradigm that envisages equality in the church between women (as well as homosexuals but let’s not go there perhaps) however I will quote it once more.

“Within this framework, being Christian is not primarily about believing, in the modern sense of believing certain propositions to be true. Instead, the emerging paradigm emphasizes the relational meanings of faith and leads to a relational and transformational vision of the Christian life. To be Christian means to in a relationship with God, lived within the Christian tradition.”

Book Nine: Poustinia by Catherine De Hueck Doherty
This book is about Poustinia (in case the title didn’t give it away). Poustinia is a Russian word meaning desert or a quiet lonely place. However, it is also a Russian tradition of taking time away to pray, to spend time in silence and stillness, to spend time in the mysterious presence of God. It is something that a friend here has practiced for some time and something that I am interested in trying to do on a regular basis ( 24 hours per month, although I already missed month three). For me Alice Springs is a place that really calls me to prayer and the hut that Keith and friends built is such a perfect setting beautiful, simple and quiet. Anyway, my friend lent me the book. It is an old book and thus some of it was a little bit old fashioned for me and the author is a very strong Catholic and it certainly had more of a Catholic flavour to it than I am used to but all in all it was very inspiring and gave me some new things to ponder.

“One day we realise all these geographical spaces are not enough, that they do not satisfy one’s desire for space. At that point we begin the journey inward. This journey is far more beautiful and satisfies far more ddeeply. The poustinia is involved in the great journey inward, exploring the vast spaces of God. A goal to strive for is when the need to have becomes the need not to have.”

Book Ten: The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
I heard Kate speak at the writer’s festival when I first got here. She read some parts of this book and they were lovely and so I had been meaning to get to it for awhile. It was lovely to read. In fact I had to try hard not to read it too fast as to try and savour it a little bit. It is a story about a friendship between a white lieutenant in the first fleet and a young aboriginal girl. It was very hopeful really which is not often the case with indigenous issues so it was a breath of fresh air.

“What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you. He friendship with Tagaran wasn’t a list of objects or the words for things it was the slow constructing of the map of a relationship.”

Kate got the idea from some real diaries that were found in which the liutenant records some of the language he was learning and writes about some of the interactions he has with the girl. Kate Grenville is truly gifted in the way that she can write fiction novels about real events that happened (particularly to do with indigenous issues) that some how get to the truth of the matter better than any history book would. Not to mention I am sure they engage people and get them concerned about the issues more than a history book.

“The girls lay quietly and he went back to the notebook. How would he record the joke that he and this child had shared? What had passed between Tagaran and himself had gone beyond vocabulary and grammar. It was the heart of talking not just words and their meanings. But how did you write down truth in a notebook when the truth was far more than the words and actions. When even in English he couldn’t describe what had passed between them. He would have to be willing to go beyond the literal, to take words into some place where they were no longer simply descriptive”.

Book Eleven: Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coehlo
This book isn’t actually book eleven. I think it was more like book six or seven but I forgot to write about it back then so it has become book eleven (and coincidentally it is called eleven minutes). This book is a love story, a love story between a prostitute and a famous artist. It was a very confronting book for me, a lot of dirty sex scenes in all their gory details, but after getting through all that I quite liked it. I like Paulo Coehlo’s writing and his thoughts about life even if they are not completely the same as mine. He managed to write a story about a prostitute, Maria who was a fantastic character, without been in anyway judgmental or condescending while also acknowledging that the work is not good for the souls of anyone involved.

I don’t care whether it was once sacred or not, I hate what I do. It’s destroying my soul, making me lose touch with myselg, teaching me that pain is a reward, that money buys everything and justifies everything. No one around me is happy; the clients know they are paying for something that should be fore free, and that’s depressing. The women know that they have to sell something they would like to give out of pleasure and affection. I need to love - that’s all. I need to love. Life is too short, or too long, for me to allow myself the luxury of living it so badly.

And I like stories about messy, broken people and their paths to redemption. I also like stories about love when they don’t fit the format of romantic comedy and this didn’t.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I realise that I didn’t go into that cafe by chance; really important meetings are planned by souls long before the bodies see each other. Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn.

Book 8: The Sound of one hand clapping by Richard Flannagan.
This is probably one of the most heart-wrencing books I have ever read. It begins in Tasmania in the 1950’s with a young girl whose mother committs suicide, and her immigrant, alcoholic father who is trying to desperately to escape his brutal past. He then bashes and beats his daughter til she finally leaves. 20 years later she returns to see him and the story resumes again. As you can imagine very depressing but it is beautifully written with redemption at the end. Transformation and redemption are key themse for me at the moment so it hit home in some ways and so I actually quite enjoyed reading it. Here is a quote I really liked:
“There was something about Bojan Buloh that strange evening something that approached the most curious innocence. As if innocence, thought Sinja, were not something one had before it was lost, a natural state into which one was born before life sullied it forever, but rather something that could only be arrived at after one had journeyed through all the evil life could manifest. He was lost and condemned to loss, he was damned and lived with the damned, but somehow, somehow because of what he had lived through he had acquired an innocence.”

Movie 4: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
I liked it although I was glad I had read the books. It missed so much which didn’t overly trouble me as I was able to fill in the rest for myself but Martin asked me a few questions after which made me realise that it would have lacked much without having read them. Like others have said I thought the first kiss was fairly poor but I can’t complain about anything else. I thought the child Voldermort was the freakist child and Snape and the other “baddies” as usual outshon the “goodies” but they didn’t do too badly either really.

I think I have already mentioned this book a few times but now I have finished it now. I was very sad when I finished it as I was enjoying it so much. It really opened up the gospel of Luke for me as well as the whole Bible. Richard Rohr has a way of reading it that really rings true to me.

A Tim Winton novel that I bought in a second hand shop in Byron Bay. There was a newspaper article in it about Tim Winton. That’s one of the things I love about buying books in second hand shops, you never know what you will find from the previous reader. It took me awhile to get through this hence the reason it has been such a long time since my last book entry. Not an easy read I have to say although I think Tim Winton is like that.

This book is set in a small, coastal, Western Australian town where many of Tim’s other books are set. The town’s primary industry is whaling but a local woman decides to join the protests against the whaling to the horror of many townspeople. The story then follows the lives of a few of these people and how their lives are constantly overlapping. This is a style I like in books and in movies. The characters were complex (except maybe the town mayor with whom I think Tim was a bit lazy) and the themes such as faith, marriage and aging were given the complexity they deserve but it lacked closure and at times I found myself feeling a bit lost and thinking, would you just get on it with it. In saying that overall I enjoyed it.

This book is a bit of a classis as far as I understand. First published in 1987 it was a very important story. Still is a very important story really but probably over the last 20 years has lost some of the impact it originally had. It is a book I have been trying to get to it for awhile but just hadn’t managed to. However with the move to Alice coming closer I thought it was time to get to it. I enjoyed it. I wouldn’t say it was the most brilliantly written book but I like reading people’s stories and I learned some things too.

My fourth book, like my third was by Anne Lamott. I got very into her and living with Jane that is bound to happen. Bird by Bird is a book about writing, although much of the advice she applies to writing could be applied to life as well.

I decided to read it because for a little while now I have been talking about writing a prayer book but I hadn’t started. I thought reading a book about writing a book may be a good place to start. It turns out it was. I have now started. I realised I hadn’t started because every time I thought about starting I thought things like “no one would be interested in this” or “it is not as good as Leunig” or “this will never get published” etc. etc. I still think that but Anne Lamott reminded me that writing a book is not about that. It is simply about the joy of writing. And I want a book with my prayers in it and if no one else reads it except me (and probably my mum and my husband) that’s okay. This is going to take a long time I am sure but Anne Lamott says that’s okay too. Writing (like life) should be done “Bird by Bird”.