Some things i've learned from Louis L'amour

The indomitable Sackett clan: longtime feuders, hillfolk, and woodsmen - eking out an existence on the sidehills, hunting and trapping, and defending their own.

Logan Sackett - a clinch-mountain Sackett, the less respectable branch of the clan, inadvertently runs into one of his kinfolk out in Colorado Rockies. She's in trouble. Widowed and old Em Sackett is tough as nails. Her sons have been sent word that she is dead and a local bigshot is determined to take her lush well set up ranch and vindicate his knees that she broke defending her place with her gun.

Logan rescues a put upon girl and takes her to Em, then he takes on the role of knight errant once he realizes her situation. 

The funny thing is I don't really remember ever reading this one. 

Here are some things I've learned from Louis L'amour, that are totally applicable to my daily life.

1. Don't ever undertake something hoping for help. If you can't do it alone, best not start out at all.

2. Watch your backtrail.

3. build your fire under a tree that will screen your smoke.

4. Don't go into the rocks after a wounded apache.

5. Tell your love interest they will marry you, don't ask.

6. Don't wait for them to come to you - take the fight to your enemy.

7. Choose the spot and timing for your battle.

8. Your enemy may expect to "yo'mama" for awhile before the actual fight, skip that and punch/shoot first.

9. Be mean enough to refuse to die even if you're shot multiple times.

10. Use moccasins for scouting, not boots.

11. Put your cowboy hat on first, when you get dressed.

12. Make your first shot count.

13. Don't pull the trigger. Squeeze it.

14. Take care of your horse first.

15. Read Plutarch's Lives. 

Maybe my readers have a few things to add to this list?

retreat reading

I was recently blessed to attend a three day silence and solitude retreat in the mountains near where I live. 

During the time, I included two books. 

This one is an old favorite of my mom's. It's packed with thoughtful, wise words - and written from a mother in the middle years of life (to a mother in the middle years of life so it seems).

As she secludes herself on an island for a holiday from her busy Connecticut life, husband, and five children, she writes and meditates on the art of contemplation, and how difficult it is in "modern" life.

She doesn't idealize the past and its many hardships, but she recognizes how the luxury of time and labor saving devices have given women the possibility to fill their time with many pursuits and tasks, many of which are not conducive to contemplation. This is even true today many years later. I am reminded when I do take the time to chop vegetables, pull weeks, or herd cattle that there is something - a call to simpler life and a quieter mind.

So it's a call to build in contemplation so that we can remain true to our hub - the inner life that sustains creativity and fruitful life. 

Each chapter is dedicated to a different sort of sea shell with a metaphor relating it to human life or to her own life - very tastefully.

I hope to have a chat, no a walk on a beach somewhere someday with Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Perhaps we will talk and then perhaps we will be in companionable silence. 

I love the chapter describing her time with her sister - the possibility of natural artless compatibility. 

A wonderful conversation with Lois here. 

I won't try to summarize the book. You know how I hate doing that. Suffice it to say - this book is part of a pursuit my family and I have ambled into through a longtime friendship. The pursuit could be described as the attempt to learn more about Jesus and his teachings in a Jewish and more historically accurate context. 

It is so refreshing to move away from the controversies that have imbued the church over the past centuries and to merely try to look at the scriptures with (less) of a lens of the ages. As we recognize that we no longer identify with a particular sect, movement, denomination of the Christian Church - we can unreservedly pursue knowing God through the tapestry of his text and stories - and through our own hearts and experiences as well.

This book will be a good companion for my little shelf. (the one that's easily accessible - not too high,)

Nature worship at its best

I confess, I have read this multiple times as an adult, and I love it more now than I ever did in my girleenhood. I cried twice this time. Once when Bets dies and then in the end when Jingle goes off to college and Pat is convinced that things will never be the same as their idyllic threesome is disbanded. He wants more than friendship and she shakes hands with him warmly.

I love how Lucy Maud weaves the scotch/irish folklore into humorous little tidbits. I laughed out loud a few times - to be completely fair to the whole spectrum of human emotion.

The housekeeper Judy really is who makes up the bread and butter of this yarn - literally and figuratively. She's always cooking and I got so hungry while I was reading this.

I have to be very cautious whilst reading LM because she triggers my nature worshipping tendencies and I begin to research greener pastures. As Pat wanders the garden soaking in the beauty of the moon, lingering in her secret spot with Jingle by the brook that they have dubbed "happiness," and loitering beneath the birch trees, or meandering down the lane towards the sea - I wander the paved earth amongst the roar of traffic. sigh. Or worse- walk the trail wherein lie the fragrant deposits of those too lazy to find the dump.

Anyhoo - the sun still rises and sets in Bakersfield or in the enchanting isle of Mistawis and at Silver Bush on PE Island.

the silver disk rises - Construct 11 Part 2

The characters that were introduced in Construct 11 Part 1 really came to life here. I really like the vulnerability that I experienced in the characters as they begin to realize that not all is at it seems in their hyper-controlled world that seems to be coming unraveled. 

Parts of this book really reminded me of how I felt as a teenager - especially the guy/girl dynamics. So sweet!

The book ends with plenty of mystery. Not only are there relational questions that need to be untangled, but what is the outside really like? How will this group of teenagers manage their emotions after their discoveries?

This carefully crafted tale is well worth the read!

"They all paused to watch as the full circle of the silver disk rose big and golden, actually, over the jagged edge of the sky..."

visceral nostalgia for small town life

I originally checked out this audio book on Overdrive for my husband and I to listen to together on a trip we were taking. It turns out, we weren't driving that far and we ended up talking, so I just listened to it over the course of the next few weeks.

I don't normally read mysteries but I have discovered that I sometimes like watching some mystery or crime tv shows (as long as they're not too dark or creepy.) This falls into that same category.

The main draw of this story is that it's set in semi-rural contemporary North Carolina. I love the way she weaves real life seeming lore and folksy personalities into her story. The story is interesting because it moves between three narrators:

 - flashback to 1940s - protagonist Deborah Knott's mother Sue- written from the first person perspective

 - 3rd person narrative from the perspective of Deborah

 - omniscient narrator? - following Dwight (Deborah's Policeman husband following crime tales.)

The story unpacks a mysterious friendship of Sue's that changed the course of her life, whilst solving a contemporary murder that is semi-linked to the other story.

The main things I got out of this story are: a desire to experience fishing and the subsequent deep frying of stuff that follows, a whimsical yearning to meet my relatives at a locally owned barbecue restaurant where afterwards we all play our bluegrass instruments and dance, and a visceral nostalgia for small town life. 

This story is also narrated by the author, so there was definitely the dialectical accuracy. Love it.

Oh, spoiler alert. I was sure that the abused wife, finally up and killed her husband after one smack too many, but I was dead wrong.

the plunging darkness of the human tide

I guess I haven't been reading much lately. I've been writing. I've been piecemealing this in at night and here and there on the week end. I see that there is a tv mini series based on this story.

I think I read Taylor Caldwell's autobiography On Growing up Tough when I was a child. Somehow I had an impressive impression of her, but I believe this is actually the first novel of hers I've read.

The woman wrote over 40 novels I believe. She was a brilliant novel spewing writer with a capital W. She wrote her first novel at age 12.

First I was impressed with her sheer intelligence just jumping off the page. I was pulled into the story immediately. She's a masterful wordsmith and character builder.

I love history, and this is definitely a historical novel.

She reminds me a little of Pearl Buck - both my impression of her character and her drive, ambition, and genius. I just confirmed that they were contemporaries - born around the beginning of the 1900s or so.

Taylor Caldwell isn't just telling a story here, I soon realized. She's inserting her political philosophy and perhaps hoping to influence the reader against the wiles of socialism and globalism. Her main protagonist, bitter, cunning, ascetic, and complex Irish immigrant Joseph Armagh (love that surname) uncovers the secret society that direct the affairs of finance, governments, and apparently the world. She continually mocks "common man" in its perpetual pursuit of a "rajah." They pretend to want independence but they really just want a charismatic leader to tell them what to do. I suppose we're all to some degree tribal. There's a reason why CEOs are usually tall. There are certain physical traits that people are drawn to and it comes straight from the amygdala, or wherever that grey matter is that goes underanalyzed.

If you're wanting to read a happy book, hurl this one in the opposite direction. It begins with starvation and tragedy, leads to wealth gained by vice and trickery, a mystical curse which leads to everyone's death, and unhappy marriages with intense idealized extramarital relationships that provide only temporary solace from the plunging darkness of the human tide.

I walk away wondering if there is a secret society with quiet men who plan wars. I did enjoy the way she portrayed such a variety of personalities and bents. There are some great characters in this book and kind of like Tolstoy - there is a real psychological study that has gone behind this - informally perhaps - but a kaleidoscope of people and their varying motivations and temperaments. She also inserts some analysis of the Irish and I love cultural studies. Hofstede's cultural dimensions are almost as interesting as Keirsey's Temperament sorter, but not quite. Don't worry Keirsey, I will stand by you.

I may pick up On Growing up Tough again and read it. I find myself more interested in the author than in reading more of her fiction at the moment. Also because I don't like to read fiction that's too sad. Life has plenty of sadness already. Thankfully I don't need for us to wait to figure out the perfect governing system in order to be filled with gratitude, love, and hope in this very moment.

freeloadering sissies

After America, by Mark Stein

The United States hit its height of glory around the 1950's. Now we're basically all a bunch of free loading sissies on a steep path to decline that will mimic that of Europe only more accelerated and with more disastrous results.

Mark Steyn manages to convey all this while still being hilarious at the same time. I pretty much resonated with all of his points - even though his premise doesn't overly stir me. Bloated government, overlicensure, wimpy people, leaders who are all blather (is that a word?), over emphasis on expensive education and lettered names that mean less and less, an economy based on borrowing and fluff rather than industry, over reliance on "experts" and not enough common sense and tinkerology, (ok I did invent that word) - hyper sensitive....

He has a bunch of pithy statements. Here's one: "Islam is playing for tomorrow, whereas much of the West has, by any traditional indicator, given up on the future. We do not save, we do not produce, we do not reproduce, not in Europe, not in Canada, Vermont, or San Francisco. Instead we seek new, faster ways to live in an eternal present, in an unending whirl of sensory distraction."

If I put my hope and identity in the United States of America first and foremost, this would have been a prophetic downer. Whilst I don't want to undervalue the ideals and freedoms that we have enjoyed, I choose to focus more on spiritual freedom, and the growth of an invisible kingdom - the one that superimposes physical borders. (No, I'm not talking about the globalism that Steyn ridicules.)

He offers a short chapter of suggestions for an antidote to this tidal wave: de-centralize, (don't talk about "changing the world" - go out and do something for your family, neighbors, and town) de-governmentalize, (do everything you can to lessen the growth of government) de-monopolize ("we also need a new trust-busting movement to bust the dominant trust of our time - the big government monopoly that monopolizes more and more of life.") de-complicate - (tried to have a medical procedure lately?, gone to At&t? - I finally asked the girl, how much does this actually cost? Can I just pay for the darn thing?) de-credentialize - (too much studying, not enough doing) did-entitle, - "Entitlements are the death of responsible government" de-normalize - I guess this means that things should be understandable - like "trillions of dollars" - I know I can't wrap my mind around that, I guess only politicians can do - learn how to do stuff - tinker, build, create, produce live free or die -  I just watched Rogue One. We need more people like that.