I couldn’t wait to read my friend Lauren Miller’s debut novel, Parallel.  I was already wowed by what I knew of Lauren’s story, that she’d written the first draft of this book during her daughter’s infancy.  Then, I read Parallel and found it an entirely engrossing, tremendously fun experience.

Parallel is a compulsively readable story that combines the tremendous fun of life in one’s late teens with huge, earth-shaking (literally) concepts about time, meaning, and the order (or lack thereof) that exists in the universe.  Parallel tells the story of Abby Barnes, a college senior, who experiences in a unique way the theory that parallel universes exist running alongside ours, populated with parallel versions of ourselves, making different choices, walking different paths.

Parallel‘s central characters are interesting and relatable: Abby’s best friend Caitlin, a brilliant science nerd in a gorgeous blonde fashionista’s body, Tyler, their mutual, handsome, funny best friend, and Dr. Mann, the Nobel-prize winning absent-minded professor whose theories about the entanglement of parallel universes guide the book’s narrative.

More than anything else, I finished Parallel thinking about both the universal human need to plan our lives and the fallacy of that instinct.  For someone whose blog is called A Design So Vast, there was much to ponder, also, about the interplay of order and chaos in our universe.  Abby’s mother is an expert on Seurat, and the metaphor of pointilism, where a field of seemingly random dots up close crystallizes into a clear image from far away, recurs throughout the book.  At one point, looking at a Seurat painting, Abby observes:

“Up close, all you see are the pieces, strewn about, heaped on top of each other.  Total disarray.  But step away, and a picture takes shape.  When you make sense of the chaos, the chaos disappears.  Or maybe, what looked at first like chaos never was.”

Another piece of art that figures prominently in Parallel is Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia.  Abby tries out for a play at Yale and is crushed not to be cast.  But then the director surprises her by saying he’d had an ulterior motive in not casting her, becuase he thinks she would be perfect for the part of Thomasina in the next play that’s going up: Arcadia.  Startled, Abby reflects on Thomasina, a character she has always loved but who has taken on new resonance since she has begun experiencing the entanglement of her parallel lives.  Thomasina, “…a  young girl who believed that everything – including the future – could be reduced to an equation.  Maybe this is part of the formula.”

Miller doesn’t entirely let us off the hook: she reminds us also that individual agency has an enormous role in shaping our stories.  In one scene, Abby watches her roommate heartbroken over a breakup for which Abby’s parallel bears some responsibility and thinks, with anguish: “Everything we do matters.”

Ultimately, though Parallel reminds us that our choices help direct our path, it celebrates most of all the mystery behind the way the pointillist dots that make up the story of our lives coalesce into a clear picture.  Towards the end of the book, Abby reflects on something Dr. Mann said early in the book: “You are a uniquely created being with a transcendent soul.  A soul whose yearnings can’t be predicted or effectively explained, whose composition can’t be quantified, whose true nature remains a mystery, as mysterious as it ever was.”

The last scene of Parallel draws together the various strands of narrative in a neat, surprising conclusion.  Abby’s thoughts emphasize the primacy of right now over someday, and remind us of the power of trusting that the universe will take care of us even when things seem chaotic and scary.

“Suddenly, it all makes sense.  The path doesn’t dictate the destination.  There are detours to destiny, and sometimes that detour is a shortcut.  But it’s more than that.  Sitting here, in this seat, Bret on one side, Josh on the other – wedged between my past and my future – is exactly where I’m supposed to be.  It doesn’t matter how I got here or where I’m going when I leave.  The point is, I’m here.  In this place, with these people. Te dots coming together so exquisitely, crystallizing into something greater than the sum of its parts.  All of the past made whole in the present.  The picture of my life is more beautiful than I could ever have imagined.  More beautiful than I ever could’ve planned.”

The design is vast, but oh, how it is beautiful.  I highly recommend Lauren Miller’s debut, which is as thought-provoking as it is un-put-downably fun to read.

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I couldn’t wait to read Courtney Sullivan’s new novel, The Engagements, which comes out June 12th.  I was fortunate enough to read it recently (for disclosure, we share an agent, and I was given an advance copy.  The views expressed here are absolutely my own).

The Engagements opens in 1947, late at night, as Frances, an advertising copywriter, works on the DeBeers account.  A master procrastinator, she’s left coming up with a new, catchy slogan until the last minute.  Right before she goes to sleep, she comes up with “a diamond is forever.”

The rest of The Engagements demonstrates the veracity of this single line, the importance of which belies the casual way in which it was born.  The book traces five particular couples, in five distinctive voices: we have Frances’ stories and four very different marriages. The stories, each distinctive and unforgettable, wind together into a hopeful song of life, love, and family.  About three quarters of the way through the book a character observes that “in life you could only connect the pieces after they’d been put in motion,” which serves to underline the ways in which the connections between The Engagements‘ various pieces and narrators reveal themselves slowly.

In 1972 we meet Evelyn and Gerald, who are coping with their son’s desertion of his wife and two small children in the name of a new love.  They represent long marriage, the relationship that unfolds after many solid, seemingly placid years together.  The complicated, scandal-tinged beginnings of Evelyn and Gerald’s union are only revealed later in the book.

In 1987 we are introduced to James and Sheila, who live in a Boston suburb with their two sons.  James’ work as an ambulance medic, which often takes him into Cambridge and Harvard Square, offered me some laugh-out-loud moments of recognition of my neighborhood.  As their story unfolds, we see that James and Sheila’s lives of quiet desperation are shot through with a strand of real and enduring love.

Delphine’s story opens in 2003, as she is methodically and comprehensively destroying her fiance’s apartment.  In flashbacks we trace the arc of this engagement, and its genesis in the ashes of her first marriage.  Dephine’s is the most obviously sorrowful story in the book, but even so it comes to a redemptive conclusion.

Kate and Dan, who we encounter in 2012, are The Engagements‘ modern couple: they are unmarried, and their story revolves around the gay marriage of Kate’s cousin Jeffrey.  In their scenes, however, as untethered as they are to the traditional world in which the book begins, we witness deep commitment and love, whether or not marked by the presence of diamonds.

Individually, each marriage is multi-faceted, honest, full of both flaws and beauty –  not unlike a diamond.  Collectively, they show us that even when things go badly, even in times of heartbreak and sorrow, people persevere, family bonds endure, and love lasts despite all odds. The diamonds are both figuratively and, we understand at the end, literally forever.

And then there is Frances, whose story opens The Engagements.  She hovers over the book, the single person who created the world’s powerful association between diamonds and eternal love.  She recognizes the “irony of her situation … a bachelor girl whose greatest talent so far was for convincing couples to get engaged.”

The Engagements is a rollicking, entertaining read and a thought-provoking one too.  Several of the characters’ voices have stayed in my head, and even days after putting it down I am left with a sturdy, hopeful sense of the fundamental goodwill of people and the abiding power of love.  I highly, highly recommend Courtney’s book and am certain it will be one of this summer’s big hits.  Order it now to be sure your copy arrives in early June!

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I’m thrilled to offer a giveaway copy of this marvelous book to a reader.  Just leave a comment and I will choose a winner on Sunday.  Just as I loved Launa’s blog, I love this book.  Launa’s voice is lyrical and funny at the same time, and she has achieved the holy grail of memoir, which is to take something deeply personal and make it powerfully universal.  Home Away is, in the end, Launa’s love letter to her husband and daughters.  Sometimes it takes going far away to realize the value of what is right in front of us.  Some of the tenderest parts of Home Away, in opinion, could have happened anywhere on the globe: they are beautiful evocations of the relationship between husband and wife, between mother and daughter, between sisters.

I’m happy to share a short excerpt from Home Away: A Year of Misapprehensions, Transformations, and Rose at Lunch.  It was extremely hard for me to choose what to post here, because I love so many passages from this book.  Read it: I know you’ll love it too!  And leave a comment here, and I’ll pick a winner on Sunday!!

from Home Away, chapter 1:

So, on a sunny day in June nearly two decades ago, my stability-craving heart pledged itself to Bill’s adventurous one.  We made our promises in the firm grasp of a series of big ideas about about one another, the most important of which was that we were opposites who belonged together.

We promised all the usual have-and-hold, sickness-and-health, forsaking-all-others business, of course, but we added a few pledges of our own.  Knowing our proclivity to want to do different things at the same time, we promised to live our lives in the same place(s).  We foresaw the tortured negotiations it would require for us to decide whose job or school or flight of fancy would take precedence, and naively decided to take turns.  In our marriage, nobody would compromise any more than anybody else.

We also decided that we would inspire one another to bigger and better contributions to the world.  In retrospect, I have come to understand just how insane that particular vow must have sounded to the older-and-wiser married people witnessing our ceremony: “I promise not to make your life easy, but to make it meaningful,” we actually said aloud, beamingly pleased with ourselves and one another.

Another vow we wrote went something like this: “I promise to be married to you every day of our lives.”  Through this promise, we would recognize each day as a choice, not the default, and thus never feel trapped, and never take our marriage for granted.  We would grow and change together, creating in each day of our marriage yet another opportunity to say, “I do.”  We chose a forever made of days.

And finally, we promised that someday, when we had children, we would live overseas, recapitulating the trip that launched a thousand stories.  This last promise was entirely Bill’s idea, and I only agreed because the promise had the word “children” in it.  The whole living overseas part I would deal with later.  Much, much later, and only if he forced the issue.

Sometimes, with love, you hold a little something back without admitting it, even to yourself.

…..

“Bill, I’ve had it with this stability I keep clinging so hard to.”

“You and me both.” We had talked hundreds of times on this point, always in circles.  He had no way of knowing what I was about to say.

“It just keeps not working like I thought it all would.”

“Yeah.  Why is that?” He rolled towards me, and pulled me close.

“I don’t know.  But I wanted to ask you something.  Remember how we promised that someday we would live overseas?  And then I kept pretending I hadn’t really promised that?”

“Yeah.” His voice was quiet, but I had his attention.

“A year from now, Abigail will be finishing first grade.  She will know how to read and write.  Grace will be finishing fourth grade, and not yet in middle school.  The girls aren’t too young, and they’re not yet too old.  I will have finished five years at my job, and the school will be in solid shape so I can pass it on to the next head of school with a good conscience.”

Even while busting out, I had to have a careful plan.

“Let’s quit our jobs, rent out our house, and go.  I think it’s time.”

He looked at me as though I had just thrown him a winning lottery ticket.  And a pony, and a beer.

His eyes widened, and then he pulled me close and squeezed me tight. “I knew if I waited long enough, someday you’d say that.  I’ll take care of everything.  You can trust me.”

I should have known just how fast and loose I was playing with the future by even whispering Bill’s sacred word: travel.  Once he had the green light, his idea of taking care of things meant he would spring ahead, dragging the rest of us behind him like noisy tin cans bumping on the highway.  With a new adventure to motivate him, he was suddenly filled with an enthusiasm that had escaped him in his every day life.

But here’s the thing: while I had only wanted to leave where I was, he was dying to go somewhere else, and those two impulses had surprisingly little in common.  I wanted to step out of my life, but he wanted to be in Rome.  Or Bulgaria.  Australia came up.  Northern Africa.  Iceland.  Mars.

Soon enough, and for only the flimsiest of reasons, his somewhere became southern France.

We moved for the experience of spending a year away from our two-kid, two-job, too-chaotic New York life, but we were still utterly divided about what we were searching for there.  Would we find the adventure Bill had lost?  Or the stability I so craved?  Did we even know that each of our searches imperiled the other’s?

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” Zora Neale Hurston began Their Eyes were Watching God.  Our marriage vows had focused our eyes on one distant ship.  When it floated into port, we discovered that neither of us could find quite what we had expected packed into the hold.

When we started planning our year in France, we gazed together at another distance ship.  Our wishes would be on board that one, we were sure.

See? Isn’t Launa wonderful? Leave a comment here to win Home Away: A Year of Misapprehensions, Transformations, and Rose at Lunch.

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When I think about food and family, my mother comes immediately and always to mind.  I wrote about her, years ago, about how she embodies the sentiment that casseroles are grace.

I am deeply honored to share a beautiful essay by Lisa Catherine Harper here today.  I love everything she writes, and this is no exception.  I know you will too.

I’m delighted to offer a giveaway copy of The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage.  I can’t recommend this book enough: you will love it.  Please leave a comment here – if you want to share a story of food in your life, that would be terrific! – and I will choose a winner on Sunday. 

Still Life with Orange

By Lisa Catherine Harper

In our backyard, we have a gorgeous, old orange tree. Its leaves are thick and glossy, and come winter, it’s studded with more bright fruit than we know what to do with.  We snack on it, and make arancello, and squeeze gallons of fresh juice, and still, we have sacks and sacks to give away.  In the spring, when the blossoms for next year’s crop are budding like tiny, fragrant constellations, we have a few brief weeks when we can picnic under its sweet-smelling shade.

For me, the orange tree is a California dream and everything the fruit of my northeastern childhood was not.  No matter how many years I live with them, those oranges still seem to come from a faraway place. For my children, though, the tree is ordinary, the stuff of home.

And this is where things get interesting. I think that it’s in this tension between the extraordinary and the ordinary, the unusual and the mundane, that traditions are made. The fact that those oranges are a part of our everyday life is what makes them special.  We wait for them, we watch them grow, we harvest them, we eat them. Most of the time, it’s just there, a pretty tree that stands beyond our kitchen window, as much a part of our yard as the cats.  But when I bother to pay attention, in those out-of-time moments when I become aware of its natural cycle, then I know that–without trying or doing anything special–we have a tradition.

What are family food traditions? How do they come about? And why should we care? These are the questions I’ve been thinking about for the last four years as I worked on my new book, The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat.  As my co-editor and I selected stories, submitted by a wide range of food writers, fiction writers, essayists, and journalists we found ourselves thinking hard about our own family food and we realized we wanted to tell a different story, one that moved away from mantras and manifestos and talked about the real issues facing real families every day. Not what we feed our families, but how, and why, and why should we care?

The stories we included in Cassoulet share two important things. First, family food isn’t just the food we feed to our kids.  Husbands feed wives, dads feed kids, siblings feed each other, children feed parents. Second, family food doesn’t necessarily involve special occasions or long-standing traditions. As the stories accumulated, we had accounts of everyday food, snack food, despised foods—these were at least as important as celebratory food, or recipes sanctioned by generations. Writers remembered the absence of food, too, because for better, for worse, in sickness, and in health, every aspect of our relationships is implicated in our family food. It’s something of a cliché to say food is love, but our tables rehearse—explicitly, implicitly—the joy and connection of our most intimate relationships as well as the conflict. What became abundantly clear is that family food is shared in relationship, and it reflects these relationships.

The point, though, is not to give us parents one more thing to feel guilty about. We don’t need more rules, or more people judging us.  What many of us need is simply to broaden the conversation and understand that what happens in the kitchen or at the table is at least as important as the ingredients that end up on the plate.

And here’s where my orange tree comes in.  In a very simple way, it reminds me to pay attention to what I already have. Sometimes, the simple act of picking an orange is enough to restore us.  In the midst of all the rush and bustle of family life, in the middle of work and homework and carpools, sometimes, a sustainable family food culture is more important than sustainable food. My family’s food will not look like yours-and this is the whole, beautiful point.  In our family, we have the tree. Your family will have something else–a red sauce, or a pancake recipe, or a garden.  We can start by telling our stories: this is what family food means in our life. What does it mean in yours?

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But the book haunted me.  I couldn’t turn around, interact with my children, or look out the window without thinking of Emily and Ronan.  And I decided that I wanted to at least try to express how powerful a book Rapp has written, with a deep bow and clear statement of tremendous humility about an experience that I can’t even come close to knowing.

The Still Point of the Turning World is about mothering a terminally-ill toddler. I know several people who say they can’t bear to read it, because of the subject matter.

But the thing is, The Still Point of the Turning World is really about how to live a life.

In prose that is clear and sometimes unflinchingly stark, Rapp tells the story of her son’s tragic diagnosis and of the months that follow.  Every chapter has an epigraph, and that is only one way in which this book is strewn with references to literature.  Over and over again Rapp cites phrases from poetry, prose, and nonfiction, religious and secular, modern and ancient.  With these quotations she demonstrates both the depth of her own knowledge and the ways in which the written word can support us in times of anguish.

Rapp quoted many lines I know and love.  As I read, I had Yeats’ The Second Coming so powerfully in my mind that I tweeted that I couldn’t get the falcon and the falconer out of my head.  I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that two hours later, still reading The Still Point of the Turning World, I got to a passage where Rapp refers to that very poem, to the center not being able to hold, to things falling apart.  She weaves references to literature through her story, making manifest her belief in “the power of stories to make life cohere, to create a necessary order around us, [which] can, in turn, help us fully live.”

Perhaps the single biggest criticism I receive of my writing is that it’s sad.  This is where I worry that I’m skirting the line of disrespect; I intend no comparison whatsoever between my life and Emily Rapp’s.  But it is true that my writing – and my living, by the way – is suffused with a sense of loss, with a very real sorrow about time’s passage.  I can’t get past that feeling, much as I wish I could.  As I read The Still Point of the Turning World I finally understood why.  When I read this sentence, I gasped, underlined, and proceeded to read it again a hundred times: “rendering loss is a way of honoring life.”

Yes.  That is a truth that beats in my veins as surely as my own blood.  It is the story I can’t stop telling.

Rapp asserts the irrevocable omnipresence of loss and grief, and perhaps more importantly, the writer’s role in our human experience of it:

This is precisely why grief, like love and any other foundational, deceptively simple human emotion or state of being, is the terrain of artists.  And it is a writer’s even more specific job to give voice to loss in whatever ways she can, to give shape to this unspeakable, impermeable reality beneath all other realities.

In Ronan, Rapp meets her greatest teacher.  He doesn’t experience his own life as tragic or as doomed.  It is simply what it is.  As Rapp describes their day to day routines, their walks on the arroyo path and his sitting in his bouncer chair, we see the calm intimacy that fills even these deep, jagged lacunas of grief.  Whole scenes in the book bear witness to the fact that “there existed within this helpless, frantic sadness exquisite moments of pristine happiness and an almost-perfect peace.”  Ronan embodies “that rare, raw enchanting experience that many of us render impossible because we analyze and criticize and categorize what we see and think and feel: wonder,” and his pure, without-agenda engagement in this world is a revelation and an example.

Even though life with Ronan is full of hurt, anger, and pain, it is also beautiful.  When Rapp says that in mothering Ronan she learned about “the joys and costs of refusing to look away” I found myself emboldened, inspired, enormously moved.  The Still Point of the Turning World closes with Rapp concluding that Buddhism, which “instructs its followers to be at ease, always, with not knowing, with uncertainty,” may be the belief system that resonates with her the most.  Life is uncertain, we inadvertently brush up against the gossamer border between this world and another every day, and all we have is this bounty and barrenness spread before us.  Of course I can’t imagine with how many more orders of magnitude having a terminally ill child brings this truth home, but I do know it is true for all of us.

There is heartbreak and deep, unthinkable, apocalyptic sorrow at the heart of The Still Point of the Turning World.  But believe me when I tell you this is one of the most life-affirming books I have ever read.  It tells me what I’ve always known, but in words more passionate, eloquent, and convincing than I’ve ever had.  It tells me the three words that are the only tattoo I would ever get: be here now.

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I recently read all four books in Lois Lowry’s Giver quartet.  This book, Son, is the final book in the series.  I was hugely moved by both the entire foursome and by this book in particular.  I’m happy to be reviewing Son on Great New Books today.  I loved, loved, loved this story and highly recommend it.

Please click over to Great New Books to read my thoughts on Lois Lowry’s parable of mother-love, Son.

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I am delighted and honored to be joining the team at Great New Books.  I am proud to be a part of the site, whose motto is sharing our favorite books one week at a time.  Our reviews are published on Wednesdays, and we will also be featuring authors talking about what they love to read.  We’ll often be hosting giveaways, so please follow us on twitter (@GreatNewBooks), check out our site (GreatNewBooks.org), or visit us on Facebook, to make sure you don’t miss anything.

This week I am reviewing Katrina Kenison’s gorgeous new book, Magical Journey.  As you know from yesterday, I adore this book.  I adore everything Katrina writes, in fact, and Magical Journey just takes my appreciation to new heights.  I hope you will click through and read my review, and while you’re there, explore Great New Books.  I know you’ll like it there.

Following the lead of my friend and fellow GNB contributor Nina Badzin, I’d like to introduce you to the incomparable team I’ve joined.  These women are all passionate readers.  They also happen to be excellent writers.  Come to Great New Books to see us all.

Nina Badzin is a writer who lives in Minneapolis with her husband and four children. Her stories have    appeared in various literary magazines, and her essays have appeared on numerous blogs, including Huffington Post’s books, parenting, religion, and technology pages. Find her on Twitter @NinaBadzin, or at http://ninabadzin.com, where she blogs weekly. Some favorite books “of all time” include East of Eden, The Age of Innocence, Love in the Time of Cholera, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Recent favorites include Gone Girl, The Age of Miracles, and Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. Nina loves to read. Period. She keeps track of her weekly reads and let’s you know what she thought of them here.

Jennifer Lyn King is a writer and author who loves to read and share great books with others. She’s an American expat living in Prague with her husband and three sons, and enjoys photography, oil painting, tennis, and traveling. She is currently at work on a novel set in New Orleans and coastal Italy. Her 5 favorite books are (in no particular order) Jane Eyre, The Language of Flowers, State of Wonder, The Shell Seekers, and The House at Riverton. For more about Jennifer, visit her website and blog at http://jenniferlynking.com. She can also be found on Twitter @JenniferLynKing.

Jessica Vealitzek is a mother and writer near Chicago. She recently finished her first novel, The Rooms Are Filled, and is at work on her second. When she’s not blogging at True STORIES, writing for Rebellious Magazine, or composing ditties for her children, she enjoys writing anything else. Some of her favorite books are To Kill A Mockingbird, anything by Steinbeck, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, and The Killer Angels. Recent favorites include If Jack’s in Love, Train Dreams, and Up from the Blue.

Hallie Sawyer is a freelance writer/blogger with a passion for history, photography, travel, and books, of course. She lives in the Kansas City area with her husband and three kids, as well as her goofy Wheaten Terrier. She has been published in local parenting magazines and blogs for a local website called JOCOmoms. She is currently writing a historical fiction novel that she hopes to complete before the end of time. Her favorite books are Outlander, Ride The Wind, Little Women, The Fault in Our Stars, and Life of Pi. You can find her at her website: www.HallieSawyer.com and on Twitter @Hallie_Sawyer.

I’m closing comments on this post, and hope to see you over at Great New Books!

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To say that I was excited to read Katrina Kenison’s new book, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment, is an almost ridiculous understatement.  I read The Gift of an Ordinary Day a couple of years ago in one breathless gulp, astonished to have found someone whose writing so closely – albeit more beautifully and more eloquently – mirrored the contents of my own heart and spirit.  Quickly, I read Katrina’s first book, Mitten Strings from God, which moved me as well.  And then, in a twist of events that reminded me of how benevolent this universe can be, I bumped into Katrina at a coffee shop less than a mile from my house.  Although we had never met, we recognized each other immediately.  After that, we began corresponding, and I am now privileged and honored to call Katrina a teacher, a mentor, and a friend.

Reading Katrina’s writing is a unique experience for me.  It feels like a call and response chant with my own thoughts.  In her trademark sensitive, lambent prose, Katrina touches on things, topics, and feelings that are among my most fiercely-believed, deeply-buried, and profoundly-felt.  Many times as I read Magical Journey I gasped audibly, when I read lines from my very favorite poem or the description of a sentiment I know so well it feels like it beats in my own chest.  Perhaps most of all, Katrina and I share the same preoccupation with impermanence; our spirits circle around a similar wound, which has to do with how quickly this life flies by, and with how irreplaceable these days are.  Both The Gift of an Ordinary Day and Magical Journey are suffused with a bittersweet awareness of time’s passage that is keenly, almost uncomfortably familiar to me.

Magical Journey opens with enormous twin losses: Katrina’s sons have both left the house (her older son to college, and her younger son to boarding school) and soon thereafter one of her dearest friends dies after a multi-year battle with cancer.  These two events form a cloud that stands between Katrina and the sun, and the book takes place in their shadow.  Magical Journey is Katrina’s reckoning with life on the other side of these two farewells, and with entering the “afternoon of life,” when she is “aware as never before that our time here is finite.”

Though different, each of the losses that Katrina experiences are both irrevocable and life-altering.  I related to both.  I read about Katrina grieving the years when her children lived at home with tears running down my face.  She describes the particular, poignant reality of life with small children at home and I weep, because while I am in those years, right now, I am already mourning them.  No matter how I avert my gaze, I can’t stop staring at the bald truth that these days are numbered; I cry daily for the loss of the days I am still living.

At times my nostalgia for our family life as it used to be – for our own imperfect, cherished, irretrievable past – is nearly overwhelming.  The life my husband and sons and I had together, cast now in the golden light of memory, seems unbearably precious. 

I can’t read this paragraph without active sobs, because if I am aware of the preciousness of these days to the point of pain now, how will I possibly exist with their memory when they are gone?  This question stymies me regularly, and brings me to my knees with its resolute, stubborn immovability.  Luckily for me, Katrina provides a guide, lights a lamp, and has she has for several years now, shows me that there is a path forward.

Katrina’s other seminal experience, that of walking with her friend Marie through cancer and, to death, is familiar to me because my mother did the very same thing with her best friend, my “second mother,” who died at 49 of cancer.  Katrina shares with Marie the intense intimacy of late-stage cancer and death.  “Staying – in mind and body and spirit – was in itself a kind of journey, and traveling quietly at her side to death’s door was, apart from giving birth, the single most important thing I have ever done.”  Katrina’s description of the last weeks and days of Marie’s life evokes the immense power in simply staying.  This theme, of the vital importance of abiding with our friends, our emotions, our lives, recurs later in the book, when after a month at Kripalu, Katrina observes that “going away, even for a short time, taught me something about it means to stay.”

Marie dies only a few weeks after Katrina’s second son leaves home.  Though she returns to her own home and her own life, Katrina finds both changed and foreign.  She is reminded that “no matter how much effort I pour into trying to reshape reality, I am not really in control of much at all.”  Thus commences a dark season for Katrina, months of finding her balance in a world that looks the same as always but that is in fact utterly changed.  Her empty house swarms with memories, she watches dusk fall early over the mountains outside of her kitchen window, and she finds herself turning more and more to her long-time yoga practice.

I have to surrender all over again to the truth that being alive means letting go.  I have to trust that being right where I am really is some kind of progress, and that there is a reason I’ve been called to visit this lonely darkness.

It is literally fall and winter when Katrina enters this phase of change, of letting go, all over again.  She decides to participate in a month-long teacher training program at Kripalu, and finds herself profoundly moved by the experience.  Katrina is drawn to Kripalu by some power that she cannot name, some force that has directed all of her perambulations since Marie’s death and her son’s departure.  Of this time she writes,  “…I have been lonely and adrift, as if some current is tugging me down, pulling me beneath the surface of my life to go in search of something I have no words for.”  At Kripalu Katrina does indeed go beneath the surface: of her life, of the lives of her roommates, of her own expectations, of all that has been known.  And she emerges feeling “as if I’ve put on a pair of 3-D glasses and the whole world, instead of being out at arm’s length, is right in my face: intense, complex, exquisitely beautiful.”

Katrina begins to reimmerse herself in her “ordinary life,” one whose shimmering beauty she now appreciates more fully.  She revisits her undergraduate alma mater and has an encounter with a shop owner that reminds her of how the past continues to echo into the present.  Even when those vibrations are not consciously felt, they are there.  Katrina reconnects with college classmates and sees their connections in new ways; she and a roomful of her exact contemporaries end up in a deep, honest conversation about what it is to face this next season of life.  In keeping with Magical Journey‘s theme that letting go of what we thought allows us to touch what is, Katrina notes how differently she measures her life now than the 21 year old starry-eyed college graduate thought she might:

How could I have known that the freedom that seemed so desirable and elusive in my twenties would come not from escaping myself, but from finally accepting myself?  Or that liberation – that world we threw about so earnestly as undergraduates – would turn out not to be about grabbing the brass ring, nailing the dream job, or getting the life I always wanted, but rather about fully experiencing the startling beauty, the pain, the wonder and surprise of the great, winding journey itself?

My copy of Magical Journey is full of underlined passages, stars and exclamation marks in the margins, and indentations where tears fell, dark on the page, and dried.  I have always loved Katrina’s writing, found wisdom that makes me gasp and expressions of things I’ve long felt and held dear, and this book is no different.  Magical Journey is composed of gorgeous sentences and full of images I will never forget.

Magical Journey is a powerfully hopeful book, one that starts in a morass of loss and winds up, with a palpable sense of both peace and freedom, in a cabin in Maine.  Katrina’s journey – which is indeed a magical one – is internal, quiet, invisible to the eye.  She is grappling with nothing less than her own mortality.  Mortality – and its irrefutable handmaiden, impermanence – is the heartbeat of this book, running through every line, limning the entire volume with the piercing, and temporary, beauty of this human life.  The conclusion of the book’s titular journey is that there isn’t one.  Life, and particularly the second half of it, is about learning to embrace paradox, to release expectations, and to look carefully around so that we don’t miss a minute.

Perhaps the central work of aging has to do with starting to realize that each of us must learn how to die, that falling apart happens continually, and that our own experience of being alive is never simply either/or, never black or white, good or bad, but both – both and more.  Not life or death, but life and death, darkness and light, empty and full.  Two currents sometimes running side by side, yet often as not entwining into one, our feelings and emotions not separate and discrete but instead streaming together into a flow that contains everything together and in constant flux – all our love and loss, all our happiness and heartache, all our hope and our hopelessness as well.

I wish I could convey how powerful and beautiful this book is.  Unfortunately I don’t have the words.  I hope you will read it and see for yourself.  Happily, Katrina has offered a signed book to a reader of this blog.  Please comment and I will pick a winner on Thursday evening.

The book’s video, below, offers another lovely glimpse into Magical Journey.  I keep watching it, and every time I’m touched anew.

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A Thousand Mornings – Mary Oliver’s new book of poetry is a balm, as is the rest of her work.  The slender volume practically radiates wisdom, and I know a great many Oliver worshippers who are looking forward to reading this.

Help, Thanks, Wow – Similarly, Anne Lamott has a legion of committed and adoring readers.  Her latest work is a worthy addition to her canon; I read it in a single sitting, wiping away tears, giggling out loud, and underlining madly.

The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy – Priscilla Gilman’s gorgeous love letter to her son is a great book for any of us who have been surprised by life not going precisely as we thought it would.  And for any of us who have found tremendous joy in the surprising and sometimes disorienting terrain of real life.  Which is to say: all of us.

The Light Between Oceans – I loved this beautiful novel, in particular the first half, which contains some of the most breathtakingly gorgeous imagery of light, ocean, space, and the sky I’ve ever read.

Wild – Cheryl Strayed’s memoir lived up to all of the hype.  This book is inspirational, comforting, and a powerful testament to the human spirit’s ability to grow, overcome, and see beauty.  Plus, Adrienne Rich’s work, The Dream of a Common Language, on which I wrote my senior thesis, beats through the story like a pulse.

The Age of Miracles – I read this book in a plane ride and it floated, gossamer, shimmering, in my mind for weeks.  I felt like I’d woken up and couldn’t quite tell if the story, a thought-provoking meditation on change, fear, the wild unpredictability of the universe, and our human need for control – was real or imagined.

The End of Your Life Book Club - I loved Will Schwalbe’s memoir of the end of his mother’s life for the palpable love it exudes for his mother, but also for the ways it celebrates a lifelong love of reading.  This book made me want to re-read some of my most treasured books, first and foremost, Crossing to Safety.  That’s next on my list.

The Fault in Our Stars – John Green’s narrator may have my favorite voice ever, in all of literature.  This book made me weep but also reminded me of the immense bravery and strength that is contained in some of the youngest, most ostensibly fragile people.  We all want love, and wow, does Green give it to us.

There are so, so many more books I loved in 2012, and of course a long list from other years.  These are just a few that came immediately to mind.  If you are giving books for Christmas this year, which?

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