MARCIA'S BOOK JOURNAL: FEBRUARY 2001

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2/6/2001

Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan

Terry McMillan's novel about four black women in their thirties struggling with love and career had good characters, real dialogue, and honest situations.  I really enjoyed this book.

But it reminded me why I don't often read mainstream fiction.  Getting absorbed into the conversations and life events in the book was exactly like having a consultation with my clients.  And as much as I like the people I do readings for, I need a break from that reality when I read a book.

It doesn't matter that McMillan was writing about African American women in Phoenix, AZ.  I heard the voices of the suburban Chicago women who are my primary client base.  Bernadine in Waiting to Exhale is going through a tough divorce.  I had that client this week -- just like Bernadine, her husband has hidden his assets in the hopes of giving her a smaller settlement.  And like Bernadine, another recent client had to find out if she still "had it" by jumping back into the dating world before the divorce was final.

Beautiful and intelligent women tell me they cannot find a decent guy, like Savannah in McMillan's book.  Many women with a bad Neptune make excuses for unsuitable boyfriends like the ever-hopeful Robin.  And I have my share of "Gloria's" -- single working mothers trying their best to raise children on their own, so tired and worn out they don't know how they're gonna make it through another day.

McMillan's women are real people.  Her natural style and the juxtaposition of characters and point of view allows you to see life through their eyes and feel you are a part of this group of friends.

As an astrologer, I'm already part of this.  I'm privy to people's inmost hopes, dreams, and motivations -- and I, like many counselors, have a hard time releasing and letting go of that reality.  So when I read a book, I need to go into outer space, thirty thousand years into the future or back into "Middle Earth."  You can never get away from the universal themes of human life but I guess I'd choose quest and adventure over the dance of romance.

Earthquake Weather by Tim Powers ...

... which I read last week put me in an alternate reality, a surrealistic modern fantasy, sequel to Last Call and Expiration Date.  To like this book you have to enjoy
 

• fantasy in an urban setting rather than swords and sorcery

• that feeling of being off-balance, thrown into an alternate reality that has a striking resemblance to California in the 1990s but sure isn't where I went on my vacation

• and an interest in mythology, symbology, and ritual

2/12/2001

The Best Spiritual Writing edited by Philip Zaleski - continued

The next book I've read on their list on the 100 best books of spiritual writing for the twentieth century is The Road Less Traveled by M. Scot Peck., M.D.  I read this somewhere back in the early 1980s.  I remember the first few pages and most of all the first sentence: "Life is difficult."

The reason that's so important is when I was young, I didn't believe it.  I knew that my life could be difficult.  But I kept thinking I'd figure it out.  That one day I'd wake up and the sun would be shining and music would be playing softly in the background and I'd float through the day dressed in gauzy gowns ...

... and my car would never get flat tires and my house would be perfectly clean (elves would do it, I suppose) and no one would ever get sick or die ...

I think my mother's death from cancer when she was only fifty knocked the wind right out of me.  When Scott Peck said, "Life is difficult" I was ready to believe him.

He wrote:  "Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult.  Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy.  They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others."

I was talking to my meditation class about this tonight.  About how there's always ups and downs in life, but how we react to these situations is what matters.  Meditation gives us the ability to rebalance more quickly, to "not sweat the small stuff," to gain a greater perspective, to accept life with some degree of equinimity.

Later, I'll tell them about "santosha", the yogic principle of contentment.  Kriyananda teaches that contentment on the verbal level is non-complaining.  I'm still working on this.  It may be my life's work.  When I'd whine and complain as a kid, my mom would say, "You know, Marcia, life isn't fair."  But I disagreed.  I thought it *was* supposed to be fair.

Scott Peck says, "Once we truly know that life is difficult -- once we truly understand and accept it -- then life is no longer difficult.  Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters."

I believe that at this point in life I have accepted that life is difficult or as the Buddha says, "Life is uncomfortable (or unsatisfactory)."  What to do now?  Seek peace of mind, expand lovingkindness, gain wisdom.  And enjoy the heck out of our crazy, complicated life on earth.

 "Before enlightenment, chop wood - carry water.  After enlightenment, chop wood - carry water."  ~~~Zen saying

February 25, 2001

Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb

This book was so much sweeter after having attended my first big science fiction convention last September.  At ChiCon I found out that I am not a real science fiction fan.  I am defined, by the fannish fans, as a 'reader.'  That means I enjoy reading science fiction but I do not feel the need to get together on a regular basis with other people who read science fiction.  And the people who get together because they like science fiction, apparently read less and less SF and do more and more socializing with each other.

And there are hierarchies of fans.  At the top is the "fannish" fan.  The fannish fan goes to all the cons and has been participating in these since Isaac Asimov was in short pants.  They are allowed to look down on everyone else.  There are media fans, who are in love with Star Trek or Star Wars or Doctor Who.  There are costumers, who dress up for both the con hallways and masquerade balls.  There are filkers, who are a type of science fiction folksingers. Of course the authors have their own hierarchies - the award winners, the literary authors, the popular best seller authors, the scholars and historians, plus the editors and magazine publishers.

I was disappointed by most of the panels I went to.  The speakers seemed unprepared and felt perfectly at home to go off topic.  According to someone fannish I talked to later, this was as it should be.

There were a few bright spots. The first was a panel for writers about character motivation which was excellent.  Included on the panel were long time SF writer Larry Niven, Nancy Kress who is both an SF author and columnist for Writers Digest, and Jaqueline Lichtenberg who is an SF author and columnist for our local new age magazine.

The other bright spot was a panel that included Connie Willis (one of my favorite writers and a very funny speaker) and Terry Pratchett, who is just about as amusing in person as he is in his Discword Series.  He autographed one of my books but since he had a constant swarm of fans, I couldn't say more than a few words to him.

When I expressed to a friend that I dearly wished I'd just spent the money on SF books and stayed home reading them, she recommended Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb.  I tried for a long time to get the book from my library.  According to the card catalog they had it but it was never on the shelf.  Months later, a librarian checked for me and found out it had been damaged and withdrawn.  When I got an Amazon gift certificate for my birthday, combined with that wild and crazy Uranus so prominent in my solar return chart, I knew that a book titled Bimbos of the Death Sun would be perfect.

And it was!  Not only is Bimbos a great send-up of science fiction and gaming cons but it is also a murder mystery which won the Edgar Award.  The sleuths are an engineer (who wrote his theoretical ideas as a novel which got the goofy Bimbos title and a lurid babe cover thanks to his publisher) and his girlfriend, an English professor who teaches a science fiction course at the University.  These half-way straight people are surrounded by elves, Federation officers, medieval princesses, adoring fans, zinesters, filkers, gamers and assorted hangers-on, in a swirl of constant intrigues, upheavals and mayhem to the point where the murder is just another glitch in the con organizers schedule (but a plus because the fans will talk about this con for years to come, making it legendary).

This book could only have been written by someone who had been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt, just like I did.  I loved it!

(c) 2001 Marcia M. Sacks