life lessons

Life has taught me a lot of things….but more than anything….I have learned to slow down and think a lot more and not make hasty decisions. And I’ve also learned the word, “no.” And I have let go of a lot of expectations I’ve had about being married and raising kids. I ask for help a lot more. I take more naps. I make sure I set aside time for myself too. This helps calm and center me more as a person. I also realize that I love learning new things. This keeps the neurons firing in my brain and makes me very happy too. I love listening to music too….especially good classical piano….it just feels like there are a million little fingers….like each key represents, tiny little finger, plinking away at my brain, massaging away all the anxiety, worries and cares of this world!

So what are some of my favorite books:

There is one book that changed my life that I read while I was studying to be a teacher at Concordia University (which I no longer am doing. I changed my major to English and am now attending Portland State University and love it!)

I had an excellent teacher at Concordia by the name of Dr. Hill. He was a Humanities major and English major. His classes were tough but I feel that his teaching made a huge impact on my life. I could sit for hours listening to him lecture and never feel bored.

One of the many books he shared with us and required us to read was “A Human Being Died That Night – A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid” by Pumla Gobodo-Madikezela.

One of my favorite quotes from her book (pg. 119):

“Dialogue, of course, will not solve every problem faced by a society that has suffered sustained violence on a large scale. But dialogue does create avenues for broadening our models of justice and for healing deep fractures in a nation by unearthing, acknowledging, and recording what has been done. It humanizes the dehumanized and confronts perpetrators with their inhumanity. Through dialogue, victims as well as the greater society come to recognize perpetrators as human beings who failed morally, whether through coercion, the perverted convictions of a warped mind, or fear.”

An incredible story about forgiveness!

Another book I really liked was called “Silencing The Self – Women and Depression” by Dana Crowley Jack

On being RELATIONAL:

“Depression is both individual and social; it combines the personal and the political. The relational perspective asserts that the self is social. Mind and self come into being through communication with others. One cannot heal the self in isolation. Since the individual is in the deepest sense relational, and because women’s vulnerability to depression lies in the quality of their relationships, it is the self-in-relation that begs for healing. A woman must work at this task herself and with others-perhaps in therapy, in group work, and with friends. But the fundamentally social nature of the healing implicates the cultural fabric. Each woman cannot seek these new forms of dialogue alone; they must come into being on a larger level, in ever widening circles. Women and men together must search for new forms of connection that transcend power differences and that allow for the dialogue and intimacy.”

It’s interesting how important dialogue truly has been for me, in light of the quotes I have chosen and books I have read…hmmm….Could there be a running theme here?

Favorite authors:
Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Douglass, Stanton, Spanbauer, TS Elliot, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou and Francine Rivers.

Favorite movies:

Last of the Mohicans, Dances with Wolves, Joshua, Shawshank Redemption, Steel Magnolias.