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Cargando... The Love of Impermanent Things: A Threshold Ecology (The World As Home)por Mary Rose O'Reilley
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At midlife, Mary Rose O'Reilley reflects on her past and her hard-won sense of self. She is determined, now, not to sacrifice or waste her self. She has struggled for years along the paths set by her suburban childhood, her Catholic upbringing, her failed marriage, and the mute duties of daughterhood. Now, she is trying to see the world through the eyes of the deer that stop outside her window and look in at her. As a wildlife rehabilitator, she feels a closer connection to the natural world as experienced by animals. As an apprentice potter, she sees in a Japanese tea bowl the ultimate balance of action and contemplation. As a Quaker, she can both sit still and sing. And as a writer, O'Reilley can speak clearly to readers at midlife who are expected to know it all, but don't. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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O’Reilley’s “memoir” writings are, to me, reminiscent of Annie Dillard’s (as in An American Childhood or The Writing Life); they mix autobiographical facts with nostalgia-fogged memory as well as lessons learned (or learning) and ruminations on creativity. On the idea of “productivity” while at a writer’s retreat: “Should I count it a productive morning, having learned to watch drops of water stand at attention, or do I have to write a double sestina to earn my keep?” Giving herself permission to nourish creative needs, she writes, “It’s okay to throw pots all year… You don’t have to write a book… dig out the buckthorn, learn Spanish… clean your office…. Mary, just throw pots.”
O’Reilley also explores her own spiritual life, from her Catholic childhood to her call to the novitiate to Buddhism to the Society of Friends. Although this path is traced more explicitly in The Barn at the End of the World, it weaves in and out of The Love of Impermanent Things, as well. She writes of the sense of relief at discovering the use of the word “guidelines”—rather than rules—within the Quaker community, and that “Quakers are good at trying out the terrors of freedom within a circle of support.” She notes that Merton often wrote about “how difficult it was for him to live the religious life with the spiritual equipment of the artist.” She follows with this declaration from friend Parker Palmer: “I value spontaneity more than predictability, exuberance more than order, inner freedom more than the authority of tradition, the challenge of dialogue more than the guidance of a rule, eccentricity more than staying on dead center.”
The entire book is a quiet declaration (non-linear and often non-narrative) of a belief in exploration, letting-go, trusting, trying, trying again, holding conflicting ideas simultaneously—the master potter making the teabowl who must “in the same breath, obey the rules and transcend them.” The book is offered as memoir, and the subject headings provided by the publisher are biographical, but O’Reilley lays out her hopes in the introduction that what the reader will find out “will not be the story of [her] life, but of your own.” She invites you “not to work but to rest. Stare and ponder.”