The Mermaid Chair

I'm sorry it's been so long since I've last posted, I've been super busy with work and summer school. I started my next class, and I'm not too thrilled about it. I feel like I haven't learned anything yet. It definitely does not seem like a grad level class, more like an elementary level class. Work is going well. I feel like I am getting used to how to do thins there.

I've mainly been doing a lot of reading. I just finished reading this one book, titled The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd. http://www.suemonkkidd.com/MermaidChair/ if you want to look at the description of the book. I haven't been moved by a book like that in a long time, probably not since Christmas when I read Possession by A.S. Byatt. This book was incredible in its imagery. Into its storyline, it twined this legend about the local Saint who used to be a mermaid before she was converted to Catholicism, and there's this sense of duality in every person of the physical and the spiritual aspect, and the sense that each person needs each part of oneself to truly live; we cannot leave out either part or we end up deadened and incomplete. This woman, Jessie, leaves her husband for awhile to go and take care of her mother, an extremely devout Catholic woman, who has seemingly gone mad and cut off one of her fingers. The whole story is intertwined with this sense of the need for the spiritual, and for the importance of sacrifice and redemption, how people aren't willing to sacrifice anymore. Jessie meets this monk on the island who she ends up having an affaire with, and obviously that I don't agree with, but it was interesting why she was drawn to this monk and how he helped awaken a part of herself she had kept in a box for so long, making her alive unto herself. It just made me want to write so much. I would recommend that everyone read this book, it was fabulous.