Reading Rerun

I am a notorious re-reader. Or, at least, I was in my more youthful youth. I used to snuggle up to a book like it was an old friend or well-loved stuffed animal. Certain books provided a comfort akin to listening to memory-enducing music, eating cucumber salad (a Grandma Hope special), or smelling spring lilacs. It's always struck me as funny, though, which books ended up re-read, as the characters or plots themselves were not particularly comforting characters or plots. Case in point: I once read "Gone with the Wind" EVERY SINGLE SUMMER for something like six years. It used to take me the entire summer, and by the time I was finished, I had forgotten the details of the beginning, so I simply read it again--a year later. But "GWTW" is not a snuggly story about friendship and bunnies and rainbows. It's about hardship, war, poverty, and other angsty Southern Belle drama.

A book I read at least fifteen times during my late-elementary to middle school years was entitled, "Anywhere Else but Here" (Bruce Clements). Among the details of the plot is a girl whose mother died when she was a child, a troubled youth who tries to light himself afire, his whack-job mother that runs off to self-help meetings run by a cultish figurehead, and an old man who takes a liking to the main character's dollhouse--a relationship that seemed certain to run into slimy waters (but doesn't). Again, not exactly pre chick lit material.

But this time, while re-reading "Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert, I wholly admit that it is as chicky as chick lit gets--except that it's autobiographical. The first time I read it, I was deeply moved by the second section, "Pray." Capsulized, it's Elizabeth's (see, I've read her book twice, so we're on a first-name basis) journey to India to study yoga for many weeks. When I first read this section, I was pregnant and studying yoga for the first time. Well, okay, "study" is a stretch. My pregnant friend and I used to show up for class and try not to pass out while we forced our disproportionate bodies to bend and stretch in ways we'd never dreamed possible. Then we'd hit the Starbucks. But I digress....Elizabeth's yoga journey included not only the Hatha part (the stretching and holding of positions), but also the meditation part, which was never something I considered in seriousness, and certainly not something covered in prenatal yoga.

Until my adulthood, "meditation" was not a noun I heard in regularity, rather "prayer" was the implied verb of choice. I find this interesting, since "meditation" and "prayer" seem to be linked. As it is described in the book, "prayer" is about talking to God, while "meditation" is about listening to Him. Yes, you can go on and on about whether or not the God the Christians believe is in the "same" God the Yogis believe in yadda yadda yadda, but you'd be missing the point, in my opinion. The point is that to do one without the other is like trying to solve math equations, but never checking the back of the book to confirm that you're on the right track.

What's the point?

Not sure that I have one...today. But one of the struggles Elizabeth documents in her meditation practice is the inability to keep her mind "still." And THAT, my friends, is something to which I can assuredly relate, almost on a daily basis. Sometimes I physically and literally cannot write. I cannot keep my mind still long enough to get my thoughts on paper (er, screen). And other times my mind is so frantic that I cannot sleep. Sometimes I wake from a dead sleep to write myself a reminder on the pad I keep in my nightstand. Sometimes I have to whip out my phone in mid-sentence, to write a note to myself. Maybe it's a sign I should spend more time in meditation, the practice of teaching one's mind to be still.

Then again, other times it feels as though my mind is stuck in a swamp filled with Tired Mommy-Brain Mud. And then I can't write simply because I feel I have nothing to write ABOUT, or I can't remember what it was that I was going to say. It's exhausting being inside my head, really.

In any case, I'm enjoying reading this book again....though I admit that this time I'm drawn less to the part of the book that discusses hard work in the form of yoga study, and much more attracted to the part about eating pounds and pounds of Italian food. Maybe THAT's a sign.