I chose this book Leaning into the wood over Eudora welty's short story collection. I wanted to listen to new voices. The pieces are very short and hook you with their lack of fabrication and the directedness of their life choices for place to associate with.

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This time at the library, imagine my horror when I found my sacred shelves of poetry and non-fiction littered with trashy books. Somebody got an idea to compress the books from different sections into one. It must be that the funding has dwindled and so the new books can now do with less shelf space.

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Winter song by Mary Kathryn Stillwell.
Planting trees - Twyla Hansen

Response to Sally Tisdale's 'Letting Myself Go'

It doesnt matter that whole human epochs have celebrated big men and women, because the breif period in which I live does not;.....
The author is looking to the society for the kind of person she has to be to be accepted. When you are on the block, you could be accepted or not. In a society like America, not 'fitting in' has never stopped people from self assertion.

In trying always to lose weight, we've lost hope of simply being seen for ourselves.
Can our fat self and thin self reconcile? How do we know that the fat version is our true self. Does body have the lesson of 'balance' inbuilt?

For ages humans believed that the body helped create the personality..... The modern culture of dieting is based on the idea that the personality creates the body.
What unsettles the author is how the world thinks now. If one accepts the general thoughts from ages, one should feel more at ease with current day norms.

Now, I try to imagine a world where we eat only food we need, and it seems inhuman.
What animal on this planet eats for pleasure other than satisfying hunger? Why are we shying away from accepting that our indulgences can have consequences?

I felt no joy in being thin - it was just work, something I had to do.... I hated the very idea of maintenance.. but at the same time the author 'used to be attracted to the sharp angles of the chronic dieter' and 'dreamed of having a boy's body, smooth, hipless,lean'. Maintaining weight takes effort. If it were easy would the talk on how fat people are viewed in the society be different? I cannot imagine how much more accusatory the glances would be.

By letting go of dieting, I free up mental and emotional room. By letting myself go, I go places.
On the contrary, having an unhealthy relationship with food will limit movement in no time.

I felt truly reduced then, reduced to being just a body and nothing more. Yet we want to revel in our bodies, not all too perfect. Its our idea of beauty and perfectness that needs fixing.

Books say that

women follow their mothers in birthing
the mother had seen the baby's lung spring
into action even if to stop after a day
the daughter had fears of what might happen
of wanting a girl and not having enough
to know even if it was a girl or a boy
She is still a mother cause she cared
about the baby.

"Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist." Michael Levine

After reading 'Letting myself go' by Sally Tisdale Scoot over skinny, I wished she had a different viewpoint about losing weight.
A shorter version of that article.
Sympathetic pregnancies
Couvade
The man who could not stop overeating
response to fat like him essay
In the Fat lady essay, countertransference, process and content in therapy,not to keep news of a parent's illness from kids, sympathy fast, 'pounds flowed off in rivulets'.
Dagwood sandwich
I couldnt go on reading Big game hunters and Big time. For some reason I thought the latter was by a woman even after reading the line about the author's difficulty with women.
In 'Fatland' Stephen Kuusisto says that 'no one who visits that country ever forgets it' and that he 'was only a tourist in the world of fat'. A reflection on how a body's existence is transitory in the fat land. With his newly attained fat by choice, people start noticing him. This popularity contrasts the oblivion faced by Natalie Kusz in 'on Being Invisible'. Being the designer of fat, he has the same cockiness as Stephen Shaw in Fat guys kick ass.
In 'Hunger', from Anne Lamott's therapist..'If I(AL) was feeling very other, sad and....'
The other sounds less like unknown more like the avoided.
Queen of the gym

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Force field of fat in This is why I am fat
Fat acceptance movement

Jungle activity

Reading Fires by Rick Bass in The Big Sky reader, the initial description of the hare activity takes me back to the sunday mornings we watched Mowgli, especially the water sounds, the birds, hops of the animals.

In Sparrow, I couldnt connect to the poems initially. Towards the later half, the subjects of people and birds became more relatable.

The child had
to believe
the father was
righteous
to build virtue on own

The house in France
pedalo
Portofino

Morning, noon and night

Perri Klass with her 'different narratives' in Becoming a Doctor, recognises a patient not just as a victim of a disease but as a person in a family, a carrier og gene pool and all the other threads of stories that a person carries in him/her.
Lauren Slater

When a billion chinese jump

Baiji
soft shell turtles
Zipingpu dam

Immersion

Running Away to Home: Our Family's Journey to Croatia in Search of Who We Are, Where We Came From, and What Really Matters 

In running away to home, author Jennifer Wilson 'hungry for connections with land and food and family' sets in search of her ancestral family in a Croatian village with her own family. Although the writing was good, I was straying off the reader path and had to push myself to finish the book. In the end, knowing the history of her ancestors and what she was saved from by her family's immigration she returns with a great sense of gratitude. During her travel, she faces many moments where she is glad for having taken this unthinkable step of moving to an unfamiliar place with its new language but a place where the residents make her feel at home.
With a search specific for her ancestors, the author shows the reader, the history of the region. While that is something a writing maestro might appreciate, it is in this generalization that the story of the search lost its appeal. I am also biased from a reading of  The foremost good fortune  by Susan Conley, where we see a country through the struggles the author goes through in adjusting to a different culture. It could be the rural, low profile culture of Croatia which didnt lend itself to any major revelation.

The Foremost Good Fortune: A Memoir by Susan Conley

Reading TriQuarterly99, Spring/Summer 1997 issue, Kanai Mieko's short story 'When treading on soft earth' I cant help but wonder that I have never read this much description in fiction.
Another Mieko short story - The Rose Tango

I remember reading of Operating instructions by Anne Lamott and picked it up when I found it at used books sale in the library.

Lamott talks about a Sam with one arm. I wonder if this is that wonderful kid, embracing the tennis racquet all out.

Sandtray therapy
lomilomi massage
Bouvier puppy
odie dall
plastic Beatrix Potter bath book

Childhood

If we could write as children, how much of the world we could store.