Finding the Places of Hope

The more we lose, the more we come close to the reality of what it is to be human. Which is to accept our weaknesses, to discover that they’re beautiful. So many people are running around doing lots of things, but they’re controlled by anguish.

Jean Vanier 

Henry, Oliver and I went to LACMA last night and visited The Rain Room. It's a very cool installation -- a sqaure room with constant rain fall, except around yourself. You can walk very slowly through rain yet not under rain, if that makes sense.

I always struggle a bit with the pretension inherent in museums. Then I walked through the room along with my sons and other Angelenos. I was charmed.

If you rush or run, you get wet. If you stand still or walk ever so slowly, you're cocooned and able to hear the rain and see it, but it doesn't touch you. There's all kind of metaphor in that, no?

Have I ever told you how much I love Los Angeles?

We also wandered into the Diana Thater exhibit which was some kind of multi-media show about the imagination.

Cool stuff. We were there less than an hour and home 45 minutes later. Gratitude.




I know I've written quite a bit about Jean Vanier and L'Arche here on the old blog. He's my hero. Ian Brown, the terrific Canadian journalist whose book A Boy in the Moon I wrote about years ago when it came out, wrote this terrific profile about Vanier. Read it if you feel hopeless. Read it if your life is filled with riches, both material and spiritual or delirious and spine-tingling sex.

Jean Vanier's comfort and joy: 'What we have to do is find the places of hope'

Top Five Books #3: Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?

advice from Jeannette Winterson, via dailyfig.figment.com

First of all, I should say Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

And now onto my next mini book review --

I'm a big memoir reader -- I plow through them like dark chocolate and potato chips -- and after a while, one confessional runs into the next, another story of incredible survival, demented parents, religious conversion, and serial adultery. I read so many memoirs that I bought a Kindle to better contain them, ease my spending and make more room in my library for the literature I really love. But occasionally, a memoir reads like literature, is, in fact, literature -- Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast, comes to mind, and Ian Brown's The Boy in the Moon -- and this year, I liked Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeannette Winterson the best of all the memoirs I read. It's a book about language and literature and the necessity of art and reading. It's about deep trauma and sexual identity and mothering and love. It is wise and funny, horrifying and incredibly sad. When I heard Winterson talking about it on some radio show, I was drawn to her speaking voice and cadence, and while reading the book, I heard it in every word. I also couldn't resist a book with that title -- a question asked of Winterson by her painfully inept adoptive mother.

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

Jeannette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 

Moved to grateful tears, again, by Ian Brown and changing the world

I wrote about Ian Brown's amazing book The Boy in the Moon nearly a year ago. Today, I came upon a  snippet of video on Louise's blog from a presentation he gave at Holland Bloorview.

Please watch this:



Did you listen to Mr. Brown's dream? The one about L'Arche and living and working, creating, doing what you do, in these homes between where these people live? For one month? Did you hear him describe his dream of you eating your meals, three times a day and then bathing one person once a week? Did you hear him imagine how that would change the world?

I believe it to be so.

The Boy in the Moon

The beautiful memoir The Boy in the Moon, by Ian Brown, has won a place in the New York Times' annual 10 Best Books of 2011. I wrote about the book's effect on my life here, and I've also had the honor of a small exchange with the great writer himself. I am so happy that a small book of great literary import about a disabled child and his family has made its way to such an exclusive list.

Bravo, Mr. Brown! Thank you for your words, for their resonant power.

Jiggity-jig

Princess Flower outside my bedroom

Despite having to leave my two boys in Hilton Head to head back home to take care of Sophie, I am glad to be home. I am glad for the warm then cool California air, for the breezes blowing through the palms, for the otherwise obnoxious mockingbird on the wire outside my bedroom, for The Husband who had a lovely time alone with Sophie. I am thankful for the brief time spent with my extended family and for the solo trip home, wrapped in magazines and the final chapters of Ian Brown's The Boy in the Moon, a memoir that I believe has changed my life so much so that I had to get up from my seat in the plane and retreat to the tiny stainless steel bathroom where I sat and wept, tissues wadded up in my hand, aware of the world below, one coast holding where I'd been and Sophie on the other, where I was headed, quite joyfully.

Without him, for a short stretch I could do everything as I once did it, in deliberate steps, the way you can when you don't have a handicapped child.

Ian Brown from The Boy in the Moon, a Father's Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son