The Blue Jay's Dance

Before our trip, I also finished reading The Blue Jay's Dance. I learned of this book because a sentence from it was quoted in Continuum (LLL's alumnae association) in the form of a poem, though in the book it is just one of the opening sentences. I will share it here in poem format too, since I think it is more poignant and meaningful that way:

Growing,

bearing,

mothering,

or fathering,

supporting,

and at last

letting go…

are powerful

and mundane

creative acts

that rapturously

suck up

whole chunks

of life.

--Louise Erdrich

Several other good quotes in this one too. Maybe I will be able to share them later. Maybe not. I'm so Zen...

Okay, it is quite some time later, but I'm adding the other quotes I enjoyed:

This book is a memoir of a writer's first year with her third baby (sixth child). She isn't particularly a birth advocate or anything, this is a general mothering memoir and in it she says:

"Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we are pushing out our babies. We are too often treated like babies having babies when we should be in training, like acolytes, novices to high priestesshood, like serious applicants for the space program."
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Later she is talking about male writers from the nineteenth century and their longing for an experience of oneness and seeking the mystery of an epiphany. She says:

"Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn't understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies."
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