Evidently, I’m not very good at keeping resolutions.
On Thursday I escaped to Minneapolis, to spend a couple days with my godmother and to use her townhouse as a perch from which to visit friends who live in the area. (As you know, I hate the drive up to Minneapolis—that jarring transition from small town to ugly, urban chaos--but once there, once mired in the muck, I seem more immune to it.)
I told D. before I left that I just wanted to relax my mind—that I’d been feeling a bit run down, and perhaps it was a case of temporary brain strain and soul fatigue, brought on by too much reading, none of which could be classified as “chick-lit”. Eugenics, racism, fascism, and the evils of white Western civilization might be implicit in something like The Devil Wears Prada (just guessing, haven’t read it) but I’d been tackling these subjects head on for the past two years and it was time for a break.
So, having resolved to go on hiatus and stop giving my “mental matrix” (a term I picked up from Nancy Nordenson’s Just Think) any more input, I called my friend Suzy to arrange a celebratory get-together and she suggested meeting. . . in a half-priced bookshop!
I know, I know. She’ll chide me now, when she reads this. I could have said something. But her need for books was probably no less great than my need for no books. Besides, it was her birthday, and it’s the rule that the birthday girl gets to choose and food and wine were to follow and, after all, I was under no government mandate to buy a single thing.
But I did; I bought five single things. Carefully avoiding the Evils of White Western Civilization section, I picked up two books by MFK Fisher, a novel called Elegance, a great consolidating cookbook to end all cookbooks entitled How to Cook Without a Book (the original aim!) and then, the bookshop gnome pushed one out at me hokily entitled The Ancestral Mind: Reclaim the Power. I didn’t deliberate, just grabbed it. Its message of silencing the incessant cerebral chatter of the Thinking Mind and getting out into the sunshine was just what I needed, exactly when I needed it. Those bookstore gnomes never fail me.
I mentioned to my friend that I had resolved to stop reading so much. She was incredulous. “But how can you just do that?” she asked. “I need something to read at all times, even at the stoplight.”
I can see there are a few passages from the Ancestral Mind book I’m going to have to share with her. Intuitively, however, she sent me this humorous link the other day—good belly laughter being a straight shot right to the heart of the Ancestral Mind.
As is fly fishing. For my 40th birthday next year, I may have to look into that.
9:30:28 AM 
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