yoga for a world out of balance: michael stone

The description:
Every aspect of our life has a part to play in the greater ecological system, Michael Stone explains in this book. How do we bring this large view to our yoga practice? According to Stone, our responsibility as human beings is to live in a sustainable and respectful way. He says two things need to change. First, we need to understand the relationship between our actions and the effects of our actions. Second, once we see the effect of our actions in the human and non-human world, we need practical skills for learning how to make changes.

Using the five principles (yama) described in the Yoga-Sutra attributed to Patanjali, Michael Stone offers a basis for rethinking ethical action and the spiritual path.

My thoughts: I wish I could review this clearly and precisely. My head is too full with the book I am currently reading to go back. Michael Stone is a fantastic author, and if yoga and connecting and relating it to the outside world and environment around you is something that is of interest to you, taking yoga off your mat, then this is a good read.

I have been reading quite a lot of the Lonely Planet Guide to Miami and the Keys because I am going there this week for a week! My cousin Brad and also my Uncle Tom and Aunt Barbara live in Southern Florida and Brad has been trying to get me to come visit for awhile now. I wonder if he was surprised when I finally accepted. I have already planned out a million things I want to do. Too many probably. But even though I wanted to go just to be warm and in the sun, there is so much to do there. I have never been to Miami, or the Keys, or the everglades (except when I was really young I think). I have already made reservations for a canoe trip in the 10,000 island area. And there is snorkeling (not in the everglades) in the Keys and in Biscayne National Park and great restaurants and clubs in Miami and great beaches everywhere. All winter I have been so sick, weak all the time and in pain and going to physical therapy to try to rebuild what some mysterious virus sucked out of me. I can hardly wait to be warm and lazy and adventurous, all things that have been lacking this winter. I also hope to finish more books. I have been going back and forth between three rather long and intense books and it would be nice to finish them up and move on to other things. So here's hoping lazy beach reading will take care of that.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

I read this because my sister sent it to me years ago and then Kristina decided to read it for the YA book club. It is a really touching story of boy who doesn't fit in, who doesn't really play an active role in his own life. Then he meets two people who help him open up his world. He never seems quite right or normal. You learn two things later on: that he is exceptionally intelligent, that he was sexually molested by his favorite aunt when he was a small boy, and that he blames himself for her death. The book is written all in letters - a one-way correspondence with a person who is never revealed. Only halfway through the book did I realize that he was actually mailing the letters to this person and never revealed himself or his address to this person. Parts of the book are heartbreaking, some heartwarming, some insights into the depth and sensitivity that come with being a wallflower. This is something I could have related to when I was in high school. Even though I always had friends, I never felt like I really fit in. And I became quite a good observer, listener, and empath. This made me special but also made me walk the line between taking up space in my own life versus only existing within a limited version of what everyone around me needed. I still struggle with this to this day. I liked this book because I understood it and related to it.

I know you wrote that you loved this book, I did not. It fell so far short of my expectations. It is of course beautifully written. She is a graceful and fairly descriptive writer. But this was called a memoir of a friendship and i saw very little of that in the book. It was all about her, a little bit about their friendship, and almost not at all about Caroline Knapp. I barely got a sense of their friendship apart from their walking their dogs and rowing. And I could not get over how self-absorbed the author was. Wow, I was really disappointed. I wanted to love this book, I wanted to cry, I wanted to rail against the universe for the loss and grief that people so intimately connected endure when they lose each other. But I wasn't allowed to care. I found myself wishing badly to know what Caroline was like. I think I would have liked her. But I do not think I would like Gail. Elizabeth Berg wrote a much more devastating, honest, complex story of a friendship and a death in her NOVEL Talk Before Sleep. Now that was a heartbreaker.

Ok, it may seem as though I am avoiding Anna Karenina. I'm not, it's just that I started so many books in January that I am trying to finish a few in between reading AK. This was a beautiful slim book by Amos Oz, who is probably the best known novelist in Israel. Called Rhyming Life & Death, it is the first thing I have ever read by Oz. I honestly picked it because of the look and the feel of the book. I do this every once in awhile. I roam the stacks and I pull out book by book to read the backs and explore. This novella takes place during the span of one night. The narrator is referred to as the "author." The author is in Tel Aviv for a reading at a local community center. He arrives early and goes to a nearby cafe to pass the time. He is not looking forward to the evening, the same questions he is asked over and over again i.e. why do your write, do you write with pen or computer, do you draw from imagination more than real life, how much do you earn, how do you handle criticism, etc. As he sits in the cafe he starts making up stories about some of the people in the cafe, the waitress, the two men sitting at a nearby table. He goes to the reading and continues to do this, makes up stories about the man who introduces him, the woman who reads his work, the heckler, the young hopeful poet, etc. The rest of the night switches between his reality and the made up realities of the characters. It is beautifully written but the stories he makes up are almost all ugly, almost brutal in their telling - this man is in the hospital with a catheter no one empties, this man lives with his mom and has to change her sheets, this woman lives trapped in the memory of an affair she had twenty years ago, etc. But there are a few passage that are so beautiful they take your breath away. It is a mix of ugly and beautiful, pure and profane. It is indeed a rhyming of life and death. I really took a lot away from it. And am definitely going to read more by this author.

I read this book in two nights. Sort of a break from Anna Karenina even though I am really enjoying it. I loved it. The premise is: a boy in high school receives a package on his doorstep from a girl who committed suicide two weeks before. She says that there are 13 reasons why she killed herself and that each person who receives the tapes is one of those reasons. In listening to the tapes he hears her story. And he takes his walkman and a map she provides and walks around his town one night with her narration of her experience as a backdrop. It was sad and honest and I really liked it. I think it is an important book for high school kids to read. Because it really demonstrates the impact you can have on someone without even realizing it. Especially in high school at that age when everything feels bigger and harder and more lonely because you don't have the skills yet to negotiate everything that can be thrown at you. Also it is important that the book shows that there was a point where she could have reached out for help but in the end she chose not to and she knew she was choosing not to. So it was of course in the end a choice she did not have to make.

beginning of book review

so, after a month of beginning books and not finishing them, i have rested upon reading Anna Karenina with my friend Jamie. I have only read 56 pages but so far i am more interested in the writing deviation of tolstoy than the actual plot itself. I never read War and Peace or the Demons or the Ivan Il... something or other book. the only other thing i ever read was notes from underground which was a heady character study of a man who feels so ignored by the world that a stranger bumping into him and not saying excuse me sends him into a spiral that leads him to plot the man's death. so sitting down to a novel of society and propriety and general austen-like depictions of the social lives of a group of russian elites is just weird to me. kinda like a tolstoyan version of Emma. but it is extremely well-written and is starting to pull me in. i am hoping the context of the setting will also teach me a bit about russian society during that time. which is something about which i know nothing.