Two Quotes To Chew On Tonight

I have started reading two books today, not sure which I will commit to first. They are both on my 8 x 8 in '08 list. Tonight I was reading the first chapter of The Lost Art of Listening by Michael P. Nichols. Two things have stood out to me so far, and they are as quoted below:

"One of a mother's heaviest burdens is being the primary target of her children's primitive swings between need and rage."

The mothers in the room are surely nodding their heads. I'll have to think about that some more.

The second is a little harder for me to stomach right now. Having struggled much of my life-- at least on an internal level-- with social skills, I have only a very basic ability to be a good conversationalist. One tool I often fall back on is trying to share common ground with the person with whom I am talking. So if they, for example, start telling a story about an awful experience they had the other day at a restaurant, my first instinct is to share an awful restraunt story of my own as commiseration. In fact, depending on the speaker's motivation for sharing this story, this may leave them with the feeling that I am not really just *hearing* them. So, the author says:

"A good listener is a witness, not a filter for your experience."

Huh. Good food for thought as I hit the hay tonight.

A Blog Treasure: "It's Not on the Test" Song

Thanks to a homeschooling mama for posting this video on her blog (which I discovered this evening) along with the following quote:

"Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in." --Leonardo Da Vinci




She also passed on the very clever idea of using rain gutters to house books for the kids, with fronts displayed. I wonder if there is somewhere in the new house where we have good wall space to do this? This is one of the pictures she shared of the "reading corner" in her house:

So I guess that makes two major treasures discovered!

Reading List: 8 Categories, 8 Books For 2008 (8 x 8 in 08)

Okay, so I'm going to need to give myself an extension until June 2009, but I FINALLY completed my reading list for 2008. I already have books starting to go on a potential '09 list!!

Here it is: 8 CATEGORIES, 8 BOOKS EACH

From My Bookshelf-- Never Read ~or~ Started and Never Finished
1. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolfe
2. Daniel Isn't Talking (a novel) by Marti Leimbach
3. The Virgin Homeowner: The Essential Guide to Owning, Maintaining, and Surviving Your Home by Janice Papolous
4. Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew by Sherrie Eldridge
5. Ahab's Wife: Or, the Star-gazer (a novel) by Sena Jeter
6. Black, White, Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker (this may be a re-read...I can't remember whether or not I finished it)
7. The Fruits of Our Labors: The Bicentennial History of the First Unitarian Church of Worcester 1785-1985 by Walter Donald Kring
8. The Ultimate Guide to Pool Maintenance by Terry Tamminen


Fictional Classics and Well-Knowns
1. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith
2. Jane Eyre by Emily Bronte
3. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4. Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
5. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
6. One Flew Over the Cukoos Nest by Ken Kesey (this is likely a re-read, but if so, I remember the play more vividly so would like to explore the book some more)
7. A Street Car Named Desire by Tennesee Williams
8. Animal Farm by George Orwell


Parenting
1. Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Janis Keyser and Laura Davis (a re-read for the fourth or fifth time because I love it that much and it is dense so there is always more to "get..."plus, I am out of practice)
2. Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline by Becky Bailey
3. Conscious Discipline by Becky Bailey
4. Connection Parenting by Pam Leo
5. Siblings Without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
6. Everyday Blessing: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting by Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn
7. Buddhism for Mothers: A Calm Approach to Caring for Yourself and Your Children by Sarah Napthali
8. The Lost Art of Listening: How Learning To Listen Can Improve Relationships by Michael P. Nichols (indirect relationship to topic, but I still felt it was important)


Related to My Vocation
1. Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace by Nora Gallagher
2. Waking Up To What You Do by Diane Risetto
3. The Kingdom of God is Within You by Leo Tolstoy
4. Walk in the Light & Twenty-Three Tales by Leo Tolstoy
5. Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
6. How Then, Shall We Live? Four Simple Questions That Reveal the Beauty and Meaning of Our Lives by Wayne Muller
7. Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence
8. Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross


Poetry and Fiction
1. Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems by Cornelius Eady
2. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
3. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
4. Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
5. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
6. The Boat by Nam Le
7. America, America by Ethan Canin
8. Lady of the Snakes by Rachel Pastan


Nonfiction
1. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (on economics)
2. Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping With ADD From Childhood Through Adulthood by Edward Hallowell, M.D. and John Ratey, M.D. and/or Delivered From Distraction by Edward Hallowell
3. Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights by Thom Hartmann
4. A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery by Benjamin Skinner
5. The Zen of Listening: Mindful Communications in the Age of Distractions by Rebecca Shafir
6. Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships by Sean Barron and Temple Grandin
7. Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News From the Frontlines of Memory Research by Sue Halpern
8. Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human by Elizabeth Hess


Children's Literature (any genre or age level)
1. Goldie the Dollmaker by M. B. Goffstein
2. Punk Farm by Jarrett J. Krosoczka
3. The Giver by Lois Lowry
4. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (I am pretty sure this is a re-read, and that I read this as a child, but I don't remember it)
5. When a Monster is Born by Sean Taylor
6. A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms by Paul B. Janeczko
7. Be Quiet, Marina by Kirsten De Bear
8. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick


Biographies and Memoires
1. Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress by Debra Ginsberg
2. Lucy's Story: Autism and Other Adventures by Lucy Blackman
3. I Had No Means To Shout by Mary Jane Gray Hale and Charles Martel, Jr. Hale
4. The Beautiful Struggle by Tanehisi Coates
5. The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science by Jill Price
6. Step by Step: A Memoire of Hope, Friendship, Perseverance, and Living the American Dream by Bertie Bowman
7. A Remarkable Mother by Jimmy Carter
8. Things Seen and Unseen by Nora Gallagher

A Tribute to Artists and Reflections on my Childhood

Disclaimer in Advance: The following are my own impressions and memories, which of course are colored by the perspective of years and my own feelings. As other family members frequently find my various memories to be inaccurate, I am writing this as a tribute based on my impressions, which may or may not be particularly historically accurate.
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I grew up in a home filled with music of all kinds, and colors rich and deep, and words artfully arranged, and images of intrigue.

This is my mother, the brilliant artist and writer with a creative and powerful mind:
http://www.sarahfishburn.com/ (note if you are at work and want to wander onto her blog to turn down your speakers, as there is music, which you can control using a fixture on the right column of her blog.)

This is my father, the brilliant musician and engineer with a creative and powerful mind:
http://colin-quodlibet.blogspot.com/

If you scroll down the links to other blogs on my mother's blog, you can see the type of people with whom we associated as I was growing up. http://lisahoffman.typepad.com/ and the likes.


We moved around a bit, but my childhood home always included art everywhere, not just on the walls but on and in our cupboards, on top of shelves, on the floor, painted onto furniture...everywhere. For some period of time, if you were a friend visiting my home, and you decided to snoop around in our bathroom cabinets, you would be greeted with a line of those funny fat little plastic troll dolls, artfully arranged as entertainment for the "snooper," which I think my mother might assume we all are.

It also included lots and lots and lots of books, tucked all over the place but many of them on this huge bookshelf made from old barn doors or an old barn fence or something like that. I wonder, mom, if you have photos of that, so people can get an idea of what I am talking about?

Creativity and clarity of thought were values in my home of origin. As was a wonderful, complex intermingling of notions of both simplicity and the value of beautiful things.

We read constantly, and art was a part of our daily lives. We also played a lot. We hiked and camped and played wall-ball and four-square and basketball and frisbee and all sorts of things. My mother does not drive. My father does but hates it. We walk and rode our bikes a lot. I started riding the city bus at a young age. At first my mom was nervous about it, but then she considered my ability to use my cunning conversational skills to get through almost anything ;-).

I mostly would walk around talking to myself. For a while I had a collection of imaginary friends with funny names like "Bookie," and "Stampie," and my "best friend" who I called "Maradawn" (I have no idea how that would be spelled). After my imaginary friends began to fade away, I would talk myself through my imaginary games: I was the attorney, the teacher, the mom. Eventually my self-conversations began to just be fairly straight-forward conversations with myself, imaginary play loosely tossed in throughout. I was always processing! There was so much to take in, in my world.

My siblings still tease me about the ski pole. I used to take one of our ski poles and walk around the back yard at our duplex, jabbing it into the ground and talking away to no one but myself. The kinesthetic feeling of it striking the ground and then pushing it through the resistant soil helped me think. For a long time I have felt ashamed when my siblings would talk about the ski pole. Now I see that child self walking through the yard with it, and I feel so loving and understanding toward her. I am a little neurodivergent afterall, and that is what they call "heavy work" and "joint compressions" and "cognitive ordering through speech" now in my children's occupational, educational, and speech therapy. I am lucky that I had parents who let me do my thing. I was able to develop my cognitive abilities without unecessary impediments that result when one's neurological system is trying to regulate and order the world and is supressed in its natural efforts to do so.

My mind went constantly. It still does. It happens with all of the members of my family of origin including my older sisters, I am guessing, but I've noticed it is especially true in the case of my younger brother and me. When we shared a room, we would talk nonstop until we fell asleep. Deep conversations, I am sure, for people 5 and 7 years old or whatever.

My brother's mind seemed to work mostly in images and words. He was and is an amazing artist. Mine almost always worked in words. And also in feelings. Often thoughts would pass through me as feelings alone. For someone so verbal, so wordy, it is hard when you can't articulate a thought because it comes in a wordless form. But it would happen. It still does. Sometimes I start writing something, and I feel perfectly clear and the words are flowing right out of me, and then suddenly the thoughts come to me instead in waves of purely gut-level feelings, and I will only be able to scribble. If you were to look at a journal of mine, you would find pages filled with just scribbles. At the time I made them, these would be very clear thoughts. But totally nonverbal. Somewhere there is an abstract artist in me who is working through these images, though the images themselves are very unskilled, unpracticed, and completely child-like.

This might be a part I of a II part series. I have to post this before my laptop battery runs out because I don't know where the charger is right now (the red light is flashing-- ack!). I may or may not have more to say in this tribute at this time...we'll see tomorrow or sometime later this week.

A 2008 Reading List

So my friend Sara, who you sometimes see posting comments here, has something brilliant on her website that I have to share. I don't know where it first originated, but it's fantastic! It is called 8 x 8 in '08 (aka the triple 8).

Check it out:

http://learningumbrella.homeschooljournal.net/8x8-in-2008/


The idea is to read 8 books in 8 categories in 2008. I like this way of focusing my priorities for my reading list. 8 overlaps are allowed (The goal is 56 books).

Since I have an inclination toward single-minded obsessiveness and perseveration, a tool that rounds out my world a bit is a very useful one indeed. I'm not sure I'll get through this much reading in 2008, especially since I am starting in April or May and am a slow reader (and I often re-read chapters of books two or three times before moving on). Oh yeah, and I have 2-two year olds LOL. But I love the challenge!

I am thinking these will probably be my categories. I'll post my final reading list once I have it done.

1. From My Bookshelf-- Never Read or Started and Never Finished
2. Classics (Fiction)
3. Parenting
4. Related to My Vocation
5. Historical and/or Political Fiction
6. Historical, Political, and/or Scientific Nonfiction
7. Children's Literature (any genre or age level)
8. Biographies

Oh yes, and I should say that I will also make a goal to get a library card for my new city library. Though for me, the library is a dangerous thing because I forget to take stuff back. Okay, maybe not. We'll see.