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4.22 AVERAGE
4.22 AVERAGE
Reading this book made me want to learn magic and to learn to heal. Starting with myself first. I want to see the weavings of ch'i. I want to learn how to mend energy or release it when it's blocked. I wish I could do it for my own body because I need it. What a gift it is to have people who are able to heal others through energy from the Source.
Even though this is fiction, so many pieces of this story resonate with me. I love the communal living and the idea of loving so many--even though I think it would be hard for me to open to that because I wasn't raised like that. But maybe I could learn? We have a lot of love to give and share, who says it should be limited to only certain people?
I think compassion is missing in society today. The fact that petty crime is on the rise, that people feel so desperate that they are willing to break car windows in a crowded parking lot during the day to steal a backpack from car floors and cause someone else grief and a sense of violation in order to ameliorate whatever lack of power or material resources they think they have, says something is broken amidst us. We don't live in love or compassion for each other, but rather fear of each other. We need to fix this in order to heal. To have this thought first: "If I steal from someone else, it hurts them. Would I want to be stolen from like this?" and most of all, to have a system in place where that person feels secure enough and has "enough" that s/he doesn't even think of stealing from someone else to get his/her needs met.
And to have the idea of what "enough" is redefined. It doesn't mean material things, but more: to never hunger, never thirst, to have shelter, to have warmth, to have love, to feel safe, to contribute to society positively, to work and be sustained and valued by that work. That is enough. We are too consumed with being consumers and always needing to have more, more, more to our own detriment--the detriment of our happiness and our environment. It's all linked. We are all linked.
"'May the air carry your spirit gently,' Madrone whispered to the corpse. 'May the fire release your soul. May the water wash you clean of pain and suffering and sorrow. May the earth receive you. May the wheel turn again and bring you to rebirth.'" pg. 5
"'We hope for a harvest, we pray for rain, but nothing is certain. We say that the harvest will only be abundant if the crops are shared, that the rains will not come unless water is conserved and shared and respected. We believe we can continue to live and thrive only if we care for one another. This is the age of the Reaper, when we inherit five thousand years of postponed results, the fruits of our callousness toward the earth and toward other human beings. But at last we have come to understand that we are part of the earth, part of the air, the fire, and the water, as we are part of one another.'" pg. 17
"The broken ribs, the injured kidneys, were discordant sounds, a rupturing of the body's harmonics, but he could find a note to repair the worst of the damage. The man would live." pg. 24
"Where there is fear, there is power,he murmured to himself. He remembered the phrase from somewhere." pg. 28
"And when he was far enough gone, so that even the edge of his mind disappeared, she came: the Crone, the Reaper, the one whose breath you feel in your hair when the gate slides shut and there's no going back anymore, the terrible beauty, the hag who holds out withered arms and demands your embrace. In the fairy tales it was always the older brothers who rejected her. But he was the younger brother, the one who laid out his cloak for her and lay down with her to let her take him into herself, and take her in. And so he came to know in his body the power of the Reaper and the song of the stars." pg. 33
"Who sees all beings in their own self, and their own self in all beings, loses all fear." pg. 34
"He was remembering tall, silent Tom, how making love to him was like falling into a mirror, as mind opened to mind and they could feel each other's pleasure and rise with each other's heat." pg. 37
"Madrone sniffed emotion--anger, outrage, a sense of being cheated, the aggrieved surprise of the unexpectedly dead. She felt sweat on her face and willed herself to breathe deeper, to sink down further. This was the worst level, and she could only get through it by saying over and over again, 'Not mine. Not my pain. Not my grief.'" pg. 43
"When we are gone they will remain,
Wind and rock, fire and rain,
They will remain when we return,
The wind will blow and the fire will burn." pg. 46
"But as she looked around the room, all she could see were energies, earth and air and fire and water congealing into bone and breath and nerve and blood, emerging into form and fading back into formlessness." pg. 47
"He didn't know Littlejohn, not really, not down in the soul where it counted, and he ached for people he did know, who opened at his touch and shared the same ground." pg. 87
"With a breath, he grounded himself, sending roots of energy down through his feet into the earth, making contact with the earth's core fire and drawing in the moon's light." pg. 96
"He opened to her fully and gave himself over to the power she harbored within her, and she opened to him, revealing pain and beauty that answered his own pain. She was broken as he was broken, as this land was broken but, thanks to him and to the others who had suffered and died for it, not destroyed." pg. 98
"He brought the sun to her, the dying weakening, wounded sun that consumes itself as it gives light, as he had brought to the land his own life-sustaining willingness to give himself away. And so he received back the bittersweet gift of the land, and rained." pg. 98
"Speaking was a great effort. Madrone could see the words as she could see her own breath on a cold day. They wove a pattern of color and then dissolved." pg. 113
"Now I have become the child, Maya thought. This is what it means to grow old. I play at nagging, nurturing, feeding. But in the end, the young must comfort me." pg. 116
"She was afraid, and she was keeping him at a distance by healing and feeding. Giving out, giving out, generating a power that in the very force of its giving kept him away." pg. 123
"It was beautiful and fierce and fragile, like a lot of things." pg. 151
"Information is power. I just mean that no information is useful unless the mind is prepared to receive it." pg. 152
"When things are really bad, you know, you begin to think you could pledge your life to anything that touches you with kindness. There was one ray of sunlight that leaked through the window cover. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, that narrow beam of light, and I began to feel like I could talk to it, could ask it to speak for me to the wind and the rocks and ask them to forgive me. But then I realized that the sunlight and the wind and the rain and the rocks didn't care what I'd done or left undone. It had nothing to do with them. The grace they offer can't be earned or lost. It's just their nature to cleanse and scour and heal." pg. 166 (Bird speaking)
"All I can say is, it's not that the fear goes away but that it changes. When something really bad is happening, it's just what's happening. So you face it, because in that moment you don't really have any choice." pg. 178 (like me getting through my blood infection and heart surgery)
"Madrone had been raised to treat water as sacred, but she sensed in that circle a reverence greater than she had ever imagined, a reverence she was rapidly coming to share. She swirled the water gently in her cup. She had never really appreciated the stuff before, how crystalline and transparent it was, how eager to take the form of its container, how it shaped and molded everything it touches. These hills, this flat bed of land, the course of the stream, the physical properties of the trunks of trees, the rounded shape of the stone in her pocket, her own body's form and the texture of her skin--everything on earth was some revelation of water. Blessed water." pg. 204
"Our credits function like money, but they're not backed by gold or silver. They're backed by energy, human and other sorts, and our basic unit of value is the calorie. So a product is valued by how much energy goes into its production, in terms of labor and fuel and materials that themselves require energy to produce. And part of that accounting is how much energy it takes to replace a resource that is used. Something that works with solar or wind power becomes very cheap. Anything requiring irreplaceable fossil fuels is generally to expensive to think about." pg. 274
"'What about incest and child molesting?'
'We don't have the kind of social isolation that breeds it. We have a lot of different kinds of families. Some of us grow up in big collectives, like I did. Some are in extended families, with aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents; some in small nuclear families. But we make sure that no family is isolated. The Neighborhood Councils form support groups of people from different kinds of households and backgrounds--to give perspectives. So every kid has half a dozen aunties and uncles from the time they're tiny. They're encouraged to talk about things, to ask for help, to protect themselves. And we train all our children, early on, in self-defense, both girls and boys. Oh, I've read a lot about incest and child abuse, but we don't have the climate of secrecy and shame that lets it go on for any length of time. I'm not saying it never happens, but nothing supports it. The same with rape. Our men aren't raised to believe they have the right to rape. In fact, we consider it the most shameful, degraded thing a man could do.'" pg. 276-277
"'Actually, we honor our ancestors, but we don't think a lot about race, exactly,' Madone said. 'We consider it a concept designed to separate people. We try to honor all our different heritages and histories. Diversity is part of our strength. It enriches us.'" pg. 278
"Katy's hand rested a moment on her round belly, a protective gesture that Madone envied, suddenly, in a physical way. Would she ever be pregnant, feel life moving inside her, smell the milky odor of her own child? Or had she given that up, too, by coming down here? The sense of loss was a hollow, aching emptiness in the air in front of her." pg. 295
"That was one thing we'd learned from history. Any revolution that starts murdering its opposition becomes just as bad as the thing it fights against." pg. 297
"There are many ways to be a healer, but this is what we believe about it and what I was taught when I began. We say that there are Four Sacred Things, and the fifth is spirit. And when you live in right relation to the four, you gain the power to contact the fifth. The four are earth, air, fire, and water. They live in the four directions, north, east, south, and west. No one can own them or put a price on them. To live in right relation is to preserve them and protect them, never to waste them, always to share what we have of them and to return all we take from them to the cycles of regeneration. Together they form the magic circle, which is the circle of life. And the understanding of that circle is the beginning of all healing." pg. 300
"So let's begin by putting that circle inside ourselves. We call it grounding, touching the four within us and around us. Close your eyes and feel your breath. That's the first sacred thing inside us, the breath, which opens the roads of the mind and the imagination. Let it come in and out of our lungs, bring it down deep. We can't live without it, but when it's there, there's always as much as we need." pg. 300
"Your breath is the beginning of power. And when it's strong in you, let it awaken the second sacred thing, your fire, your energy. You can feel it first by noticing how you do feel. Strong or weak, awake or tired? Imagine your energy like a force flowing through you, as if you were a tree and you had roots going down into the earth. Can everyone picture a tree?" pg. 301
"Any kind of plant--with roots that go down into the earth. And those roots are your energy, your life force, and they go down through the dirt and the dust and the soil, and down through the rock, and down through the third sacred thing, the water that is hidden under the earth, and let them flow down to the fire in the earth's heart. And the earth is the fourth sacred thing, and the fire that is her blood becomes the source of your energy. That's the power you draw on, and it's always there. You can use your breath to draw it up and it flows through you, like water. . ." pg. 301
"She went on, leading them through the visualization of the treelike energy flow in the body, teaching them to fill the branches and leaves of their auras with earth fire, to draw down the power of the stars and become whole." pg. 301
"Here as at home, la luna was round and white, marked by the same shadows, changing in the same waxing and waning rhythms. Madrone somehow found that hard to believe. How could the same moon shine on such different worlds?" pg. 304
"But what can you do? If you want to be true to your own power, you have to answer the call when it comes." pg. 306
"What do the dead have to say to those who grab with both hands at precarious life? Hold on. Let go." pg. 307
"'In this city,' Maya said, 'we don't judge a person by their race or color or who your ancestors were. That's not important to us. It's interesting to know, and to learn the history of your roots, but it doesn't determine what you can be or how well you're treated.'" pg. 339
"My love, you are a river fed by many streams.
I bless all who have shaped you,
The lovers whose delights still dance patterns on your back,
Those who carved your channels deeper, broader, wider,
Whitewater and backwater lovers,
Swamp lovers, sun-warmed estuary lovers,
Lovers with surface tension,
Lovers like boulders,
Like ice forming and breaking,
Lovers that fill and spill with the tides.
I bless those who have taught you
and those who have pleased you
and those who have hurt you,
All those who have made you who you are." pg. 356-357 (the blessing we say to our lovers on Beltane Eve)
"'What do you want for yourself?' her mother asked.
'Nothing, Mama. Not for myself.'
'Then you cannot heal. A healer must have a powerful desire for life and all that goes with it. Only then can you stand safely at the gates of death.'" pg. 410
"Attach your will to your own existence. Then you begin to gather your true power." pg. 402
"'I wish that you may always find the healing you need." pg. 408
"'Be free, be strong, be yourself, be lucky, be proud to be a woman, be loved and loving; live among flowers, surrounded by free flowing waters; live in the sun's warmth, breathing clear air, nourished by moonlight and starlight; know that you are welcome, that you are a precious gift to us; be blessed,' Madrone said." pg. 409
". . .under the Bay Bridge, which gaped with twisted and jagged metal. It's like returning to a lover whose arms have been broken, she thought. The bridges were more than structures, they were symbols of the City itself, as much a feature of the landscape as Twin Peaks or Mount Tamalpais to the north." pg.420
"Katy turned, shifting the sleeping baby. Her movement was unconsciously graceful, as if the child were still a part of her, and Madrone nodded approvingly. A sign of good bonding, that ease. Babies held like that would thrive." pg. 434
"Inwardly, Madrone poured colors down gray dust roads, kindled rain on mud-cracked fields, cried over corpses, and excavated a long-buried stone that began to pulse and beat like a heart." pg. 447
"I see him wear that pain as armor, grow into it until it becomes his skin." pg. 454
". . .and so there is a loss here, loss of the possibility of some opening. Maybe I've had it backward all along. I thought healing was pouring energy out, but it's not. It's opening, refining each receptor to any possibility of hope and comfort and change, taking in and taking in until you overflow." pg. 480
Book: borrowed from Skyline College Library.
Even though this is fiction, so many pieces of this story resonate with me. I love the communal living and the idea of loving so many--even though I think it would be hard for me to open to that because I wasn't raised like that. But maybe I could learn? We have a lot of love to give and share, who says it should be limited to only certain people?
I think compassion is missing in society today. The fact that petty crime is on the rise, that people feel so desperate that they are willing to break car windows in a crowded parking lot during the day to steal a backpack from car floors and cause someone else grief and a sense of violation in order to ameliorate whatever lack of power or material resources they think they have, says something is broken amidst us. We don't live in love or compassion for each other, but rather fear of each other. We need to fix this in order to heal. To have this thought first: "If I steal from someone else, it hurts them. Would I want to be stolen from like this?" and most of all, to have a system in place where that person feels secure enough and has "enough" that s/he doesn't even think of stealing from someone else to get his/her needs met.
And to have the idea of what "enough" is redefined. It doesn't mean material things, but more: to never hunger, never thirst, to have shelter, to have warmth, to have love, to feel safe, to contribute to society positively, to work and be sustained and valued by that work. That is enough. We are too consumed with being consumers and always needing to have more, more, more to our own detriment--the detriment of our happiness and our environment. It's all linked. We are all linked.
"'May the air carry your spirit gently,' Madrone whispered to the corpse. 'May the fire release your soul. May the water wash you clean of pain and suffering and sorrow. May the earth receive you. May the wheel turn again and bring you to rebirth.'" pg. 5
"'We hope for a harvest, we pray for rain, but nothing is certain. We say that the harvest will only be abundant if the crops are shared, that the rains will not come unless water is conserved and shared and respected. We believe we can continue to live and thrive only if we care for one another. This is the age of the Reaper, when we inherit five thousand years of postponed results, the fruits of our callousness toward the earth and toward other human beings. But at last we have come to understand that we are part of the earth, part of the air, the fire, and the water, as we are part of one another.'" pg. 17
"The broken ribs, the injured kidneys, were discordant sounds, a rupturing of the body's harmonics, but he could find a note to repair the worst of the damage. The man would live." pg. 24
"Where there is fear, there is power,he murmured to himself. He remembered the phrase from somewhere." pg. 28
"And when he was far enough gone, so that even the edge of his mind disappeared, she came: the Crone, the Reaper, the one whose breath you feel in your hair when the gate slides shut and there's no going back anymore, the terrible beauty, the hag who holds out withered arms and demands your embrace. In the fairy tales it was always the older brothers who rejected her. But he was the younger brother, the one who laid out his cloak for her and lay down with her to let her take him into herself, and take her in. And so he came to know in his body the power of the Reaper and the song of the stars." pg. 33
"Who sees all beings in their own self, and their own self in all beings, loses all fear." pg. 34
"He was remembering tall, silent Tom, how making love to him was like falling into a mirror, as mind opened to mind and they could feel each other's pleasure and rise with each other's heat." pg. 37
"Madrone sniffed emotion--anger, outrage, a sense of being cheated, the aggrieved surprise of the unexpectedly dead. She felt sweat on her face and willed herself to breathe deeper, to sink down further. This was the worst level, and she could only get through it by saying over and over again, 'Not mine. Not my pain. Not my grief.'" pg. 43
"When we are gone they will remain,
Wind and rock, fire and rain,
They will remain when we return,
The wind will blow and the fire will burn." pg. 46
"But as she looked around the room, all she could see were energies, earth and air and fire and water congealing into bone and breath and nerve and blood, emerging into form and fading back into formlessness." pg. 47
"He didn't know Littlejohn, not really, not down in the soul where it counted, and he ached for people he did know, who opened at his touch and shared the same ground." pg. 87
"With a breath, he grounded himself, sending roots of energy down through his feet into the earth, making contact with the earth's core fire and drawing in the moon's light." pg. 96
"He opened to her fully and gave himself over to the power she harbored within her, and she opened to him, revealing pain and beauty that answered his own pain. She was broken as he was broken, as this land was broken but, thanks to him and to the others who had suffered and died for it, not destroyed." pg. 98
"He brought the sun to her, the dying weakening, wounded sun that consumes itself as it gives light, as he had brought to the land his own life-sustaining willingness to give himself away. And so he received back the bittersweet gift of the land, and rained." pg. 98
"Speaking was a great effort. Madrone could see the words as she could see her own breath on a cold day. They wove a pattern of color and then dissolved." pg. 113
"Now I have become the child, Maya thought. This is what it means to grow old. I play at nagging, nurturing, feeding. But in the end, the young must comfort me." pg. 116
"She was afraid, and she was keeping him at a distance by healing and feeding. Giving out, giving out, generating a power that in the very force of its giving kept him away." pg. 123
"It was beautiful and fierce and fragile, like a lot of things." pg. 151
"Information is power. I just mean that no information is useful unless the mind is prepared to receive it." pg. 152
"When things are really bad, you know, you begin to think you could pledge your life to anything that touches you with kindness. There was one ray of sunlight that leaked through the window cover. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, that narrow beam of light, and I began to feel like I could talk to it, could ask it to speak for me to the wind and the rocks and ask them to forgive me. But then I realized that the sunlight and the wind and the rain and the rocks didn't care what I'd done or left undone. It had nothing to do with them. The grace they offer can't be earned or lost. It's just their nature to cleanse and scour and heal." pg. 166 (Bird speaking)
"All I can say is, it's not that the fear goes away but that it changes. When something really bad is happening, it's just what's happening. So you face it, because in that moment you don't really have any choice." pg. 178 (like me getting through my blood infection and heart surgery)
"Madrone had been raised to treat water as sacred, but she sensed in that circle a reverence greater than she had ever imagined, a reverence she was rapidly coming to share. She swirled the water gently in her cup. She had never really appreciated the stuff before, how crystalline and transparent it was, how eager to take the form of its container, how it shaped and molded everything it touches. These hills, this flat bed of land, the course of the stream, the physical properties of the trunks of trees, the rounded shape of the stone in her pocket, her own body's form and the texture of her skin--everything on earth was some revelation of water. Blessed water." pg. 204
"Our credits function like money, but they're not backed by gold or silver. They're backed by energy, human and other sorts, and our basic unit of value is the calorie. So a product is valued by how much energy goes into its production, in terms of labor and fuel and materials that themselves require energy to produce. And part of that accounting is how much energy it takes to replace a resource that is used. Something that works with solar or wind power becomes very cheap. Anything requiring irreplaceable fossil fuels is generally to expensive to think about." pg. 274
"'What about incest and child molesting?'
'We don't have the kind of social isolation that breeds it. We have a lot of different kinds of families. Some of us grow up in big collectives, like I did. Some are in extended families, with aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents; some in small nuclear families. But we make sure that no family is isolated. The Neighborhood Councils form support groups of people from different kinds of households and backgrounds--to give perspectives. So every kid has half a dozen aunties and uncles from the time they're tiny. They're encouraged to talk about things, to ask for help, to protect themselves. And we train all our children, early on, in self-defense, both girls and boys. Oh, I've read a lot about incest and child abuse, but we don't have the climate of secrecy and shame that lets it go on for any length of time. I'm not saying it never happens, but nothing supports it. The same with rape. Our men aren't raised to believe they have the right to rape. In fact, we consider it the most shameful, degraded thing a man could do.'" pg. 276-277
"'Actually, we honor our ancestors, but we don't think a lot about race, exactly,' Madone said. 'We consider it a concept designed to separate people. We try to honor all our different heritages and histories. Diversity is part of our strength. It enriches us.'" pg. 278
"Katy's hand rested a moment on her round belly, a protective gesture that Madone envied, suddenly, in a physical way. Would she ever be pregnant, feel life moving inside her, smell the milky odor of her own child? Or had she given that up, too, by coming down here? The sense of loss was a hollow, aching emptiness in the air in front of her." pg. 295
"That was one thing we'd learned from history. Any revolution that starts murdering its opposition becomes just as bad as the thing it fights against." pg. 297
"There are many ways to be a healer, but this is what we believe about it and what I was taught when I began. We say that there are Four Sacred Things, and the fifth is spirit. And when you live in right relation to the four, you gain the power to contact the fifth. The four are earth, air, fire, and water. They live in the four directions, north, east, south, and west. No one can own them or put a price on them. To live in right relation is to preserve them and protect them, never to waste them, always to share what we have of them and to return all we take from them to the cycles of regeneration. Together they form the magic circle, which is the circle of life. And the understanding of that circle is the beginning of all healing." pg. 300
"So let's begin by putting that circle inside ourselves. We call it grounding, touching the four within us and around us. Close your eyes and feel your breath. That's the first sacred thing inside us, the breath, which opens the roads of the mind and the imagination. Let it come in and out of our lungs, bring it down deep. We can't live without it, but when it's there, there's always as much as we need." pg. 300
"Your breath is the beginning of power. And when it's strong in you, let it awaken the second sacred thing, your fire, your energy. You can feel it first by noticing how you do feel. Strong or weak, awake or tired? Imagine your energy like a force flowing through you, as if you were a tree and you had roots going down into the earth. Can everyone picture a tree?" pg. 301
"Any kind of plant--with roots that go down into the earth. And those roots are your energy, your life force, and they go down through the dirt and the dust and the soil, and down through the rock, and down through the third sacred thing, the water that is hidden under the earth, and let them flow down to the fire in the earth's heart. And the earth is the fourth sacred thing, and the fire that is her blood becomes the source of your energy. That's the power you draw on, and it's always there. You can use your breath to draw it up and it flows through you, like water. . ." pg. 301
"She went on, leading them through the visualization of the treelike energy flow in the body, teaching them to fill the branches and leaves of their auras with earth fire, to draw down the power of the stars and become whole." pg. 301
"Here as at home, la luna was round and white, marked by the same shadows, changing in the same waxing and waning rhythms. Madrone somehow found that hard to believe. How could the same moon shine on such different worlds?" pg. 304
"But what can you do? If you want to be true to your own power, you have to answer the call when it comes." pg. 306
"What do the dead have to say to those who grab with both hands at precarious life? Hold on. Let go." pg. 307
"'In this city,' Maya said, 'we don't judge a person by their race or color or who your ancestors were. That's not important to us. It's interesting to know, and to learn the history of your roots, but it doesn't determine what you can be or how well you're treated.'" pg. 339
"My love, you are a river fed by many streams.
I bless all who have shaped you,
The lovers whose delights still dance patterns on your back,
Those who carved your channels deeper, broader, wider,
Whitewater and backwater lovers,
Swamp lovers, sun-warmed estuary lovers,
Lovers with surface tension,
Lovers like boulders,
Like ice forming and breaking,
Lovers that fill and spill with the tides.
I bless those who have taught you
and those who have pleased you
and those who have hurt you,
All those who have made you who you are." pg. 356-357 (the blessing we say to our lovers on Beltane Eve)
"'What do you want for yourself?' her mother asked.
'Nothing, Mama. Not for myself.'
'Then you cannot heal. A healer must have a powerful desire for life and all that goes with it. Only then can you stand safely at the gates of death.'" pg. 410
"Attach your will to your own existence. Then you begin to gather your true power." pg. 402
"'I wish that you may always find the healing you need." pg. 408
"'Be free, be strong, be yourself, be lucky, be proud to be a woman, be loved and loving; live among flowers, surrounded by free flowing waters; live in the sun's warmth, breathing clear air, nourished by moonlight and starlight; know that you are welcome, that you are a precious gift to us; be blessed,' Madrone said." pg. 409
". . .under the Bay Bridge, which gaped with twisted and jagged metal. It's like returning to a lover whose arms have been broken, she thought. The bridges were more than structures, they were symbols of the City itself, as much a feature of the landscape as Twin Peaks or Mount Tamalpais to the north." pg.420
"Katy turned, shifting the sleeping baby. Her movement was unconsciously graceful, as if the child were still a part of her, and Madrone nodded approvingly. A sign of good bonding, that ease. Babies held like that would thrive." pg. 434
"Inwardly, Madrone poured colors down gray dust roads, kindled rain on mud-cracked fields, cried over corpses, and excavated a long-buried stone that began to pulse and beat like a heart." pg. 447
"I see him wear that pain as armor, grow into it until it becomes his skin." pg. 454
". . .and so there is a loss here, loss of the possibility of some opening. Maybe I've had it backward all along. I thought healing was pouring energy out, but it's not. It's opening, refining each receptor to any possibility of hope and comfort and change, taking in and taking in until you overflow." pg. 480
Book: borrowed from Skyline College Library.
This predicted the high cost of living in the Bay area.
I’ve read this twice, several years apart. It’s an incredible visionary book, beautifully written. Highly recommended.
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
There are a lot of things to like about this book, but the one that stands out to me is that it is an answer to the question, "How could pacifism survive as a viable strategy in a violent dystopia?"
I'm probably due for a re-read.
I'm probably due for a re-read.
this isnt a bad book. its heavi handed but there are sum v moving passages. highli suspicious of a white woman calling herself starhawk but i guess it was like the 80s. it took me four months to finish this which, for me, is shameful, and i had to drag myself thru the first half and use the momentum to propel me to the end. could have been half as long.
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Finally finished this one, took me ages. Started to read a dystopia (dealing with pandemics etc.) wasn't such a good idea, but I'm glad I've finally finished this one. Great poly / queer and intersectional representation, but also over the top at some points...
Dystopia fights utopia and ideology fights freedom in this complex and interesting novel, which takes a magical turn and is quite esoteric (in the beste sense) and pacifistic.
It also was a bit too much, violence-wise, plot-wise and also pathos-wise, but I liked the hopeful message in the end and the really cool take on poly and queer representation. The utopia part of this one really restored one's faith in humanity, I'd say.
4 stars
Dystopia fights utopia and ideology fights freedom in this complex and interesting novel, which takes a magical turn and is quite esoteric (in the beste sense) and pacifistic.
It also was a bit too much, violence-wise, plot-wise and also pathos-wise, but I liked the hopeful message in the end and the really cool take on poly and queer representation. The utopia part of this one really restored one's faith in humanity, I'd say.
4 stars
I loved this story of a near future utopia based on the principles of earth based spirituality and social justice. The combination of the well thought out details of how daily life would look in a post-capitalist society, combined with the rich description of the various locations across California where I grew up, made for an emotional read for me.