Wednesday, November 26, 2008

A New Earth

I haven't had much time for this blog lately. :( I wanted to quickly share two related quotes that spoke to me this week. One was in the book A New Earth: Awakening Your Life's Purpose, that I recently read. The quote is actually from the 14th century Persian poet and Sufi master, Hafiz:

"I am a hole in a flute that the Christ’s breath moves through. Listen to this music."

It gave me chills. Then, in a stroke of synchronicity, my $1 Shop Zen calendar had this to share with me:

"We too should make ourselves empty, that the great soul of the universe may fill us with its breath."
--Lawrence Binyon

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Mindful Mama essay again

Edited to say that I found out today (11/19), that my essay was one of the runner ups and won a prize. So, that was fun. This is the first time I've ever entered a contest like this.

I found out today that my Mindful Mama essay is one of the finalists on the essay contest I posted about before. Here is the link to the essay (Pain & Presence in Parenting).

The other entries are here.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Childbirth Education: Research, Practice, & Theory

I know I've mentioned before that I'm a fast reader. Well, guess what? This week I finished reading a book I've been reading since my birthday in MAY! LOL! I'm so fast. Aren't you impressed? Anyway, it was Childbirth Education: Research, Practice, & Theory, which is a CBE textbook. It is pretty much the only textbook-style CBE book available and I figured it was high time I finally read it. My mom got it for me for my birthday and I started reading it then and have slowly been working my way through it ever since. It was interesting, of course--it is about birth!--but somehow a textbook style of book just never *grabs* you in the way other books can. Plus, in terms of literal grabbing, it is really heavy and unwieldy, which made it very hard to read in bed while nursing, which is where I still do most of my reading. The pages ended up cracking away from the spine, because of how I had to prop it awkwardly on its side to read it in bed. It is over 700 pages and exhaustively researched and had TONS of great content. I'd recommend it to any childbirth educator. I marked so many pages to refer back to later, or to blog about later (I'll do that on Talk Birth though, not here).

I realized when I was about halfway through that I have never in my life read an entire textbook cover to cover before. This tells you how important the subject is to me ;-) It also brought to mind all the textbooks I've had in my life that I've not only *not* read cover to cover, but have not even *opened.* LOL! I was a really good student too and cared about my majors (but not enough to read the books apparently...)

Reading this book is one reason why I haven't read as many books yet this year as I did last year (I think I've only read like 75 and last year it was over 100)!

I have more to say of course, but this will have to be all for today. This may be one of my least-interesting posts ever...