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Sunday, February 28, 2016. My daughter invited me along with her to a book hunt yesterday. A $5 bag sale at a local library. Such a delight in all ways! There is something accidental by design in studying tables and tables full of thousands of books, looking for those perfect ones among throngs of other people doing the same thing – everyone delightfully finding entirely different kinds of books!
Every one of us there were simply bent on pursuing our personal bent!
The first book that caught my eye as I walked into the room was one on decoupage. I found another on collage, another one on one-stroke painting. I found beautifully illustrated books full of children’s music, books describing cooperative group games for all ages, the history of Abraham and his family (4,000 years ago), the history of the spread of Islam throughout Africa, one on the history of the periodic table, how to write and sell greeting cards, and books full of glorious photographs of flowers to cut up for my art work, including one presenting “100 Orchids for the American Gardener.” (And many more!)
Yesterday was a gloriously sunny, unseasonably warm North Dakota day. After hunting books my daughter and I found our way to our favorite local coffee spot, hauled two chairs out from shade into sunshine, and showed one another the collection of books we had each found. Now, today has dawned the usual chilly, overcast and cool windy day. But within my little apartment I now have new seeds of thought and delight that were not here with me 24 hours ago!
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Among these books I am very delighted to discover the wisdom and simple clarity of this one – which I am highly recommending to anyone who would like to have a simple positive book to use as a kind of compass to moving over to “the positive side” of their inner Mobius Strip!
Thoughts Are Things, by Prentice Mulford. What an unassuming Barnes and Noble little book this is! I am impressed, and quite accidentally so!
Mulford wrote these thoughts down in 1889, yet 127 years later within the delightful cadence of his “archaic” sentence presentations I am finding ideas to inspire and sooth me.
The book is listed as New Age, which I find interesting in itself. There is no DOCTRINE or specific religious theology behind the so-practical and simple descriptions of human processes that involve living as a species with a MIND. Who would DARE (perhaps) to present “spiritual” concepts and practices WITHOUT tying them to an existing “religion?”
Must have been a New Ager!
Makes me smile.
YET!!
The honest solidity and flexibility with such practical applications of Mulford’s ideas seems to me in my personal life to be a much welcomed gift! I did not begin at the front of the book. Nope! Not on these cooped-up, apartment floor-pacing winter days! I always open a book to its center and jump right in – to see if the water is warm.
Yes. It is….
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At the end of Mulford’s short chapter, “One way to cultivate courage,” I peacefully read –
“If in reading this you feel convinced that there is “something in it,” and feel also a conviction that some portion of it suits your own case, your cure has then commenced. Real conviction, the conviction that comes from within, never leaves one or stops working…. It may seem buried and forgotten for seasons, and our erroneous habits may seem growing stronger than ever. That is not so. But as convictions take root we are seeing our errors more and more clearly. We forget that at one time we were blind and did not see them at all.
“If this book brings to you a conviction of a long established error it is not I individually who bring or convince. It is only that I put out more or less of a truth, which takes hold of you and the chord of truth in you senses it. If I apply the torch to the gas-jet and light it, it does not follow that I make either the fire or the gas. I am only a means or agent for lighting that gas. No man makes or invents a truth. Truth is as general and widely spread and belongs to every individual as much as the air we breathe, and there is pleasure enough in being its torchbearer without presuming to claim the power of its Creator.” P. 45
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My personal interpretation of Mulford’s chapter is that we can, no matter how our nervous system-brain and body have been physiologically altered in our earliest development by incomprehensible trauma, learn to begin to take charge of (1) our own life force, and (2) our power to choose what we do with it!
Even as the simple examples in this chapter unfolded to my eyes I recognized the same patterns being described as being the same states of being I lived within – within my own self – as I endured and survived the extremely abusive traumas of the first 18 years of my life.
I thought, “Hey! I already know how to do this!!” This book is REMINDING me of that fact! That my anxieties escalate TODAY, and that my mind often carries itself away in directions that are not focused on what I am living through as each present moment carries me through my life (except usually as I am involved in artwork), might be a correctable process in simple ways that I have never thought about!
Why not?
Essentially because they are so clear, reasonable, “right” and natural that only a CHILD would know how to do them! At the same time it’s too easy for adulthood to snatch from us this inner knowledge and practice – which, evidently, remains within us exactly where we left the knowledge and practice of these processes – the last time WE USED THEM!
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I think it is easy to forget to remember that no matter how horrifically awful the earliest times of our life were that we WERE children during those times. There are gifts to being children that can get left behind – not because they HAVE TO – but because we simply forget that the glorious person we have been since the start of our life is STILL the person we are today!
This book? It is a delightful find and an absolute keeper! This is a soothing read, and for those of us with trauma-altered development anything that creates that soothing feeling within is a true gift.
Adding to this delight is my knowledge that NOW I have a simple, non-demanding resource I can reliably use to help restore myself to states of well-being that I struggle to maintain as a trauma survivor. Reading even short segments of this book makes me feel as though I am sitting upon a knee being told stories by a most wise, loving and trustable grandparent whose words are both 127 years old – and timeless!
Yeah. I want more of this….
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Here is our first book out in ebook format. Click here to view or purchase–
Story Without Words: How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?
It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge. A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.
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Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame
Stop the Storm 