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Julie Mars’ memoir, A Month of Sundays, takes the reader on an emotional journey of her most intimate feelings for her sister, Shirley, who is dying of cancer. Most readers will find her unique journal-style writing refreshing; I feel that it adds to the book’s very personal touch. She is so descriptive in her feelings it is easy become totally enmeshed in her world. Mars takes the reader with her through the different stages of Shirley’s illness, and how each (as Mars refers to them) “dive” is executed and affects not only Shirley’s six children, but everyone else around her. Mars also includes the humor that sometimes tempered these experiences. After Shirley dies Mars is burdened with the feeling that her sister “checked-out before she was scheduled to go because she did not want her [Mars] to walk away from her on her deathbed.” Her grief for Shirley sends Mars on a spiritual quest. In her search for resolve and relief from her emotional pain she visits thirty-one churches of different denominations in thirty-one weeks; she attends services in traditional Christian churches, mosques, temples, Religious Science centers, the Salvation Army, and many more. Mars’ desire to fully bring the reader into her journey includes describing dreams that she had during Shirley’s illness. In need of comfort, she shares one of her dreams with a friend of Shirley’s; in the dream she tells Shirley that she will be leaving her and that she is not able to forgive herself because of it. The friend replies with a simple response, “It is one thing to ask for forgiveness. But another to feel forgiven.” It is just one of many insights that Julie Mars gains in her search. This book is a touching essay on one woman’s journey for life after loss. —Mary A. Porter
The story is told that Candrakirti, a famed Buddhist master, in order to feed his monks during a time of famine, did so by milking the painting of a cow. Western-trained minds will no doubt scoff at such an idea. How can one draw milk from a piece of canvas? The Buddhist, in response, might ask the same question that sages and philosophers have asked over the centuries: “What then is real?” The author of Milking the Painted Cow, a Tibetan tulku (monk) of a high order, answers this question when he writes: “The thinker is implicit in the thought, the triggering event is inherent in the emotion, the object intrinsic to the act of perception: these are messages which establish what is real.” In simpler language, what this says is that reality is found in our experience at this moment in time. If we want to find any truth of lasting quality, it is here but we have to look to see it. Our first and most important duty is the understanding of our own mind and learning to penetrate beneath its nearly consistent tendency to delude us. The author always asks us to question those things we so easily take for granted. For example: Is the body the same or different from its various parts? When we say “body,” what do we mean? If the body were the sum of its parts, would it continue to be “a body” if we removed a part of it? In addition to addressing some of the basics of Buddhist thought and practice, the author has wisely added a glossary as well as an informative appendix, “Masters Mentioned in the Text.” This is a rewarding read and a straightforward presentation of some of the fundamentals of Buddhist ideas. —Cliff Johnson |
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