Be back soon!

This will be my last post before the big departure for the Dominican Republic. I'm as ready as I'm going to be. I have enough reading material to carry me through a Siberian winter. I have a knitting project that is small, lightweight and portable ...socks. The passport is secured in my new travel purse/tote I found for $39.00 at TJMax yesterday. My IPOD is full to capacity of the best music that's ever been conceived or composed. I probably won't read a word, knit a stitch or listen to a song, but it's part of my personal comfort package! Then there is a whole suitcase dedicated to things Jean asked me to bring, plus stuff I've been picking up for her over the last few weeks: Target clothes, Trader Joe's dried apricots, pecans, almonds, organic peanut butter, honey, "American Candy" (requested item), tea, tons of Luna bars, a cheap new yoga mat, air mattress with pump, and assorted other things that have slipped my mind. The fact that all these things are safely packed and not causing the suitcase to bulge at the seams is one of the things that signaled the beginning of my settling down and just being excited about this adventure, rather than worried and fearful. I suspect prayer and surrender helped too. I can be 1)torqued up and angst-ridden, or 2)I can breathe into the unknown of it all and go with the flow. I chose option 2.

I haven't been hungry at all today, and actually made myself eat 3 meals because I know I need to. This is not a usual state of affairs for me, and it's kind of nice. Of course, once I ate dinner and had a handful of almonds, I started feeling like I could eat half a cow. But I'm done for the night and need to go to bed soon because I didn't sleep worth a flip last night. I ended up getting up and catching up on some email - and haven't been to sleep since. We live for the airport at 5:30 a.m., which will come very quickly. So I'm off to night night as soon as I publish this post.

The following is a link sent to me by my friend Laurina, who is in the Children's Publishing industry. She's been following my blog on occasion, and given its content and knowing my love of and interest in writing, she thought I'd find it interesting. I'm posting it now because it will likely awhile before I'm back on line. It's a post from a blog of a woman also in the business of publishing children's books. It is apparently directed largely to authors, and this entry deals with the portrayal of "fat" characters in their writing. I've read posts in other blogs - PastaQueen's comes to mind - about the treatment of "fatness" in the mass media: literature, advertising and film, and the portrayal of characters who are overweight. I know others of you have written about this so may find this piece interesting. Take time to watch the embedded video - maybe fast forward through the first 1.20 minutes. It's pretty entertaining. When I wrote back to Laurina, I speculated on how the video would be regarded and presented had it been the woman who was overweight. Let me know what you think if you get a chance to look at it.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/blog/660000266/post/1700050170.html#comments


Finally, I rediscovered this poem while browsing for something in My Documents:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousnes.

Give me your hand.


~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~