I am currently otherwise occupied at the moment.  Attempts at blogging may? resume before too long.

A few things I’ll mention as a place holder until I get back.  I’m not getting around to as many blogs as I’d like and my reading as such around the net is limited at the moment.  I wanted to mention the prayer vigil for the dead in Connecticut.  Maybe someone else noticed this and wrote about it, but as I mentioned, I haven’t been out and about reading much so I don’t know.  The pastor/reverend/clergy-person who opened the vigil, I think he was from a Methodist church, included in his list of people who are gathered to remember the dead – “people of no faith.”  Not sure if those were his exact words and maybe there is a script available online somewhere that shows the quote.  I remember at the time wondering if any non-theist or non-religious people heard it and what they thought about ‘being included.’  I did not sense at all his inclusion of non-religious people as derogatory.  I heard an acknowledgement that we are out here.  That we too care and that we are around and helping too.  Compassion, mourning and activism do not belong to the “God-believers” alone.  At any rate, just wanted to mention that and see if anyone else out there heard him include us and if so please feel free to share what you heard and thought about it.

I also thought I’d mention the titles of books I managed to read since my last grouping that I posted about.  I decided to do some reading about bipolar disease by an author who has it.  I do not have bipolar but I have wondered for a long time about a family member of mine who though never diagnosed might be on the spectrum of bipolar, if indeed the term “spectrum” is part of the discussion regarding bipolar.  The author is Marya Hornbacher and I read her books titled Madness and Sane.  If you don’t have bipolar, by the time you finish the book Madness you feel like you do.  This is not any kind of suffering that I’ve ever had.  You can read more about Marya on her website if you are so inclined.  I don’t do good reviews of books.  I just know that for me, this was helpful in getting inside the lives of those with bipolar.  Her book Sane is basically a 12-Step book along the AA model for Alcoholics Anonymous.  I didn’t quite finish the book because I had to give it back to the person I borrowed it from and can easily finish it at another time but I am going to buy her book titled Waiting.  I’m more interested in her approach to recovery and wellness in that book because as I understand it she looks at it from a non-theist point of view.

Before I read the bipolar books I finished reading my favourite book of 2012.  I learned about this book at The Agnostic Wife blog.  An Unquenchable Thirst by Mary Johnson is the story of a young woman’s calling to Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity Order and her journey to fulfill that calling.  I loved reading about the very simple and quite complicated way of becoming a nun and the austere experience it was in every way.   I could relate so very much to her young sense of calling and her efforts to obey not only God but those God put in authority over her.  Obeying unquestionably leaves ones bereft of their own reasoning and identity and she just seemed to never be able to abdicate neither reason nor identity.  I could relate.  There is so much to say and I can’t say it.  It’s because in so many ways I too have a book inside of me but still I can’t bring order to my thoughts.  They, my thoughts, are much too much clothed in emotion.    Mary starts her journey as a sincere young teenager who senses a calling and heads in that direction with the greatest of intentions and a heart that does not yet know what this calling entails.  She trusts in a God that is there and the faith of those who have paved the way – Mother Teresa.  In the end Mary leaves the order and pursues a life outside her Catholic faith.  I highly recommend the book for those who enjoy reading the stories of women who embrace a calling and later leave it.  Religion looks down on them as spiritually weak for leaving.  I look up to them as having the courage to look reality in the face and obey their own hearts and minds.

At some point after leaving the Order, Mary left Christianity.  That’s the part of story you don’t hear about in this book.  I can only hope one day we will read the rest of the story.

For those who are interested to read more about Mary, Adam Lee at Big Think interviewed her.  You can read that interview HERE.

Waiting in the wings, I’d like to finish the book titled Scared Sick; The Role of Childhood Trauma in Adult Disease by Robin Karr-Morse with Meredith S. Wiley.  I read up to Chapter 6 in 2011 and then put it aside.  This often happens with me when I read books dealing with trauma, recovery and healing.  I recognize that I can only take so much at a time and it’s okay to put a book down and come back to it later when it is likely that I am strong enough to continue.

My latest new purchase is Oliver Sacks new book, Hallucinations.  I hope to get a start on it soon.  I don’t know anything about Oliver but I plan on starting to get to know him with THIS VIDEO that I found.

So, we come almost to the end of the year 2012.  I want to wish my readers well for the upcoming year and to thank you all for reading (even the lurkers) and for participating when and if you can.  I’m always aware that any time I post it might be my last, but not necessarily because I planned it that way.  Life and death have a way of dictating our next day, hour, minute &/or second, right?  :-)  Though I don’t plan on not being here, one just never knows . . .