Tag: abuse

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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Tippett: And then you talk about growing up in a sad, depressed place, a difficult place. You don’t belabor this, I mean, and in other places — there’s a place you talk about you were one of many thousands who’ve had insufficient childhoods, but that you spent a lot of your time walking around the woods in Ohio.

Oliver: Yes, I did, and I think it saved my life. To this day, I don’t care for the enclosure of buildings. It was a very bad childhood — for everybody, every member of the household, not just myself, I think — and I escaped it, barely, with years of trouble. But I did find the entire world, in looking for something. But I got saved by poetry, and I got saved by the beauty of the world.

— Mary Oliver, from “I Got Saved by the Beauty of the World” in “On Being Interview with Krista Tippett” (Feb 15 2015)

Notes:

  1. Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
  2. Poem Source. Thank you Make Believe Boutique.

the little things were everything

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But after a couple of weeks of listing things I was grateful for, I came to see that the little things were everything. The little things were what I held on to at the end of the day. Single jokes that gave me the giggles. A beautiful flower arrangement, viewed through the window of a café. The fact that my cat came to cuddle me when she saw I was sad. These things gave me hope, pleasure, solace. Together, they added up to a fulfilling life. If a simple flower arrangement could make this world just a little more bearable, then perhaps my own small actions meant more than I was giving them credit for. Maybe when I made dinner, or listened to a friend rant, or complimented a woman on her incredible garden, I was helping make this world survivable for others. Perhaps that evening, when tallying up their own wins and losses for the day, someone would think of something I’d done and smile.

— Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (Ballantine Books, February 22, 2022)

Notes:

Who put out the fire?

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I’m 1/3 of the way through Tara Westover’s book “Educated: A Memoir” and it’s a Wow.

For book reviews, check out:

“For eighteen years I never thought of that day, not in any probing way. The few times my reminiscing carried me back to that torrid afternoon, what I remembered first…Now, at age twenty-nine, I sit down to write, to reconstruct the incident from the echoes and shouts of a tired memory. I scratch it out. When I get to the end, I pause. There’s an inconsistency, a ghost in this story. I read it. I read it again. And there it is. Who put out the fire?”

~ Tara Westover, “Educated: A Memoir”

Highly recommended.

 

He is running, running, running

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spill-simmer-falter-wither-book-jacket

He is running, running, running. And it’s like no kind of running he’s ever run before. He’s the surge that burst the dam and he’s pouring down the hillslope, channelling through the grass to the width of his widest part. He’s tripping into hoof-rucks. He’s slapping groundsel stems down dead. Dandelions and chickweed, nettles and dock. This time, there’s no chance for sniff and scavenge and scoff. There are no steel bars to end his lap, no chain to jerk at the limit of its extension, no bellowing to trick and bully him back. This time, he’s further than he’s ever seen before, past every marker along the horizon line, every hump and spork he learned by heart. […]

He is running, running, running. And there’s no course or current to deter him. There’s no impulse from the root of his brain to the roof of his skull which says other than RUN.

~ Sara Baume, from the Prologue of Spill Simmer Falter Wither (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)

Ray, a 57-year-old loner on Britain’s southern coast, adopts a one-eyed terrier. You can guess what happens next: Ray falls head over heels in love and is soon organizing his life around One Eye’s walks and feedings…Ray falls deeper under the spell of the damaged but joy-filled dog who has transformed his “squat, vacant life” and renewed his interest in his surroundings…This lovely book seems destined to become a small classic of animal communion literature, fervently handed along among friends and family…Early on, Ray asks himself a question that anyone whose life has been changed by a pet will recognize: “What did I use to do all day without you? Already I can’t remember.”

~ Sam Sacks, from his book review of Spill Simmer Falter Wither

One of NPR’s Best Books of 2016.  See NPR book review: For A Young Irish Artist And Author, Words Are Anchored In Images

Petty: Being a person is a challenge

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tom-petty

Alexandra Wolfe, Tom Petty Won’t Back Down:

…On the afternoon we meet, he’s sitting on the couch with his dog, Ryder, a golden lab with a red bandana tied around his neck. Alternating between drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, he talks about how he’s gearing up for a reunion tour and new album with his first real band, Mudcrutch. The musician, known for hit songs such as “American Girl” (1976) and “Free Fallin’” (1989), hasn’t been on tour in two years, and it’s a departure from his usual band, the Heartbreakers. But for Mr. Petty, 65, reuniting with Mudcrutch is a kind of homecoming…

“I can’t stand to be bored,” he says. “I don’t cope with it—I’m not the best me I can be when I’m bored.” Over the years, he has immersed himself in his work to get through troubled times in his life.

Since childhood, he has listened to music as a way to escape. Mr. Petty says that his father, an Air Force veteran who worked as an insurance salesman, used to beat and verbally harass him. (His father died in 1999, and they never reconciled.) Going to therapy in the 1990s, he says, helped him to get through the anger and depression from his childhood. “I could really get mad easily, and it wasn’t attractive, and [after therapy] that went away for the most part, and I became somebody different.”

…He says that while the musical side of his life has gone well, “being a person is a challenge, but I think I’m a better one than I used to be.” He suffered through depression in the mid-1990s after divorcing his first wife and then again around 2001 when his close friend George Harrison died. Continue reading “Petty: Being a person is a challenge” →