Ninth House Archives - Owl Medicine: Shamanic Healing

Ninth House

Although I’ve started a couple of posts this evening, I keep deleting them. Nothing seems relevant. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that nothing I can think of feels worthy of my or your attention.

I’m feeling a bit distracted. I can’t put my finger on anything in particular, other than to admit that perhaps it just an overwhelming desire to lose myself in a good book.

I have about 30 pages left in the novel I’m reading, Ninth House*. I know I’ve said it before, but it just feels great every once in a while to immerse myself in story that has nothing to do with anything going on in my life at the moment. My problem (if you can call it that) is that I’m a really slow reader. If you add to that the fact that I almost never give myself permission to ‘read for pleasure’ during the day, it means it usually takes me f-o-r-e-v-e-r to finish a book. That’s especially true now that I’m writing these posts every night.

Honestly, I usually manage to read between one and two pages a night before nodding off. That is not a recipe for plowing through my list of wanna-reads at a decent clip.

Maybe if I finish this book and begin the one that’s been on deck for a good month or so, The Murmur of Bees (recommended by a dear friend whose taste I trust implicitly!), I’ll be inspired to write about something new or different.

It’s time.

*Affiliate link

(T-475)

Tohickon Creek – 1 August 2020 – Photo: L. Weikel

Early Night

I’m tired. I’m going to try to wrest an early night out of this Saturday evening.

The weather today was a classic August day: quite exquisite, if just a scootch on the warm and muggy side.

Karl and I took a short jaunt to the banks of the Tohickon Creek late this afternoon. We sat on rocks jutting out into the creek, dangling our feet in waters swollen by the torrents of rain that lashed our area late Thursday evening. The cooling comfort of the creek’s steady stream was a perfect complement to the pleasure of losing ourselves in our books.

As Karl approaches his birthday, he was delighted to recently discover an author whose work he can totally immerse himself in. (Double bonus for me – since now I know something he’ll love that I can get him for his birthday.)

Needed to Read

While I’m savoring the last few chapters of a novel, Ninth House,* dubbed as fantasy (but which actually feels more real-life than most would think…), I have to admit I fell down the rabbit hole and interrupted my ‘fantasy’ novel with Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough*.

Because I am fascinated by what feels like an eternal quest to understand why people are the way they are and do what do, I’ll admit it: reading the stories in this book does shed some light on the forces that shaped our current president. His background is terribly sad in its own way. But as bad as the treatment may have been, it’s pretty obvious that the tendencies to react in the bizarrely cruel ways he did to his childhood were there from the very beginning.

I guess I’m saying that, approximately halfway through the book, I feel compassion for his dysfunction. But I’m also, at the same time, appalled that he was permitted to, as the author says, ‘fail up.’ Repeatedly. And continues to have his glaring inadequacies covered up or explained away or simply glossed over, all the while people, including children at the border, are literally paying for that dysfunction with their lives.

It’s funny; I sort of feel as though it’s my responsibility to at least try to understand him. Perhaps it’s a form of self-preservation. If we can somehow figure out his endgame, maybe we can somehow avoid the horrific ending to this debacle that’s barreling toward us.

But I’m sensing that’s not going to be achievable no matter how well we understand him. And that is terrifying.

Enjoy the beauty that surrounded us as we read.