Book Report: Taking the Leap

12. Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears (2009) (5/12/19)

I have a set of CDs by Pema Chödrön, Getting Unstuck: Breaking Your Habitual Patterns and Encountering Naked Reality, that I once listened to, on repeat, while driving. She is so friendly and soothing, and every statement, every idea, made perfect sense. And yet, once I was finished, I couldn't have begun to tell you what she'd said!

This book covers essentially the same territory (I'm pretty sure). I do remember that in the CDs she discussed shenpa, aka "attachment" or as she likes to call it, "getting hooked." Shenpa is at the root of all our unhappiness; it is the charge behind negative or uncomfortable emotions. It is the things that trigger us, the stories we tell ourselves about uncomfortable feelings, or about "who we are" (causing, respectively, deflection or rigidity); it's what keeps us from being simply present, what causes us to bolt. She characterizes it as a tightening, a pulling back, in response to a stimulus—or perhaps that sense of dread or discomfort that can sweep over us for no identifiable reason. She says the way to address shenpa is "simple": (1) acknowledge that you're hooked (with humor, if possible); (2) pause, take three conscious breaths, and lean into the energy (open, curious, intelligent); (3) relax and move on. Easy, right? Well, she does acknowledge that it becomes easier with practice . . . She suggests trying it out while driving: learning how to shake off our irritation at inconsiderate drivers is a way of confronting shenpa.

In this book, she also discusses the three qualities of being human, of our essential goodness: natural intelligence, natural warmth, and natural openness. Natural intelligence occurs when we aren't caught in the traps of hope and fear. If we're not obscuring our natural wisdom with anger, self-pity, or craving, we intuitively know what's the right thing to do, what will help and what will make things worse. Natural warmth is the whole gamut of what are often called heart qualities: our shared capacity to love, to have empathy, to have a sense of humor, and to feel gratitude and appreciation and tenderness. And natural openness she describes as "the spaciousness of our skylike minds," expansive, flexible, and curious.

The key to all this—of confronting shenpa, of reclaiming our inherent goodness—is learning how to stay. Just that. If you manage to notice moments of happiness and comfort, and cherish those moments as precious, they will continue to grow as you continue to practice. Contrarily, if you notice that you've fallen back into shenpa, pain and discomfort, it's okay: you've gotten the gift of having noticed, which is a form of attention and consciousness right there, part of our natural intelligence. Rather than beating yourself up, simply take note, and move on. Maybe next time (or the next, or the next) you'll be able to, as they say, avoid the hole.

And a way of practicing staying is to stop, frequently, as we go about our lives, take three deep breaths, being as fully present (and out of our thoughts) as possible, and then move on. She really believes in those three deep breaths. And moving on. The act, the process, gives us access to our natural openness, and hence to "the vastness and timelessness and magic of the place in which you find yourself," wherever you are.

The themes of the book are expressed in the chapter titles: the habit of escape, the natural movement of life, getting unstuck, the notion that we all have what we need, rejoicing in things as they are, the importance of pain (without which, there would be no joy, its opposite), and unlimited friendliness, or compassion, for ourselves and for others.

Here's something she says that I strongly believe, and that I believe is part of what is wrong with the world right now:

Usually when we're all caught up, we're so engrossed in our storyline that we lose our perspective. The painful situation at home, in our job, in prison, in war, wherever we might find ourselves—when we're caught in the difficulty, our perspective usually becomes very narrow, microscopic even. We have the habit of automatically going inward. Taking a moment to look at the sky or taking a few seconds to abide with the fluid energy of life, can give us a bigger perspective—that the universe is vast, that we are a tiny dot in space, that endless, beginningless space is always available to us. Then we might understand that our predicament is just a moment in time, and that we have a choice to strengthen old habitual responses or to be free.

I still have the CDs. Maybe I'll listen to them again, while driving.

Book Report: Under the Egg

11. Laura Marx Fitzgerald, Under the Egg (2014) (5/5/19)

As an antidote to all the mysteries I've been reading, I picked up . . . a mystery, it turns out. But with no dead bodies. And written for middle schoolers. And in many of its basic premises, utterly ridiculous. (The cover blurb says it is "in the tradition of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler," which it sort of is—suspension of disbelief is absolutely key. [My report on that book can be found here, #2.])

The story concerns poverty-stricken thirteen-year-old Theodora Tenpenny, whose mother spends all her time in her bathrobe in her bedroom drinking expensive tea and working on Fermat's Last Theorem. They live in half of a dilapidated old house on Spinney Lane in Greenwich Village, where Theo raises chickens and beets in the garden and spends a lot of time canning and pickling. (It's summer, so school's out.)

Not long before the action gets going, Theo's beloved grandfather, Jack, is killed by a car. She arrives on the scene in time to hear his dying words: "Look under the egg. There's . . . a letter. And a treasure. Before it's too late."

Through a series of accidents and coincidences (remember, suspension of disbelief) Theo—along with a host of new friends she acquires while solving the mysterious puzzle of these words—discovers that a painting above Jack's mantel, ostensibly of an egg, is, perhaps, in fact a priceless Raphael. She also learns, to her surprise, that her grandfather had served in WWII, as one of the "Monuments Men" (featured not too long ago in a George Clooney movie). The speculations start to mount, and in the process we learn about art treasures stolen by the Nazis, and about tracking down Holocaust survivors, and about scientific analysis of artworks, and about Raphael.

It's all a romp, and although I wasn't quite in the mood for something so outlandish, I finished it because it was short and the story kept moving along. It all wraps up quite tidily, with a huge serendipity in the person of the petulant nextdoor neighbor and a nice discovery "under the egg."

In one scene, Theo and her brand-new bestie Bodhi (the only child of some busy movie stars, which gives her plenty of freedom to do whatever the heck she wants) visit a man, Mo, who was captured with Jack during the war and sent first to a POW camp, then to a slave-labor camp called Berga. He tells them the awful story of their time there.

 "You sound angry," [said Theo]. And it was no surprise. Knowing what happened at Berga, I understood why Jack stole back a painting from his friend's killers and hid it away for years. "I think my grandfather felt the same way."
 "Angry? Nah. I don't believe in anger. Only revenge."
 "How did you get your revenge?" asked Bodhi, looking around the room for another painting, waiting to be discovered.
 Mo gestured with one shaky hand to the photos that covered his wall: a patchwork quilt of weddings, bar mitzvahs, and family reunions; generations of baby pictures mixed in with vacation photos and more than one snapshot of someone receiving a plaque or presenting a giant check. "Genesis Fifteen. 'Look up at the heavens and count the stars. So shall be your descendants.' " Mo smiled. "That's enough revenge for me."

Book Report: The Black Echo

10. Michael Connelly, The Black Echo (1991) (5/3/19)

I decided a while back to read all the Harry Bosch books, starting at the beginning—so that I could see how homicide detective Bosch's character grows and changes. Some of the books, including this one, I've read already, but not in a long while. And now I'm off: one down, twenty-one to go.

As I read, there was one, rather central character that I kept thinking was hinky—just a vague memory, but at a few spots in the narrative, this character's actions or words were definitely "off," if you happened to be paying attention. Turned out, I was right, but there was another hinky character that I'd completely forgotten about—and that one really was a bad guy. The first character's motives were basically good. And no one was supposed to get hurt.

The title of the book refers to Vietnam, and "tunnel rats": soldiers whose job it was to go into the VC tunnels and clear them of the enemy. As the story gets going, some fifteen years later, one of those tunnel rats is found dead in a concrete pipe—ostensibly from an overdose, but Bosch is suspicious. His suspicions take him to the FBI and an unsolved bank heist from the year before, which was accomplished by, yes, tunneling.

It was interesting to watch Bosch as he worked things through, carefully fitting clues both new and old into a framework, sometimes stepping back to second-guess or self-correct. Connelly also does a good job of obfuscating, which allows the conclusion to draw out in a series of surprises.

And of course, one thing I especially enjoy about Connelly's books is the "character" of Los Angeles. This one features the Federal Building on Wilshire and the VA cemetery across the street—which back in the day I used to ride my bike through, to get from my house in Santa Monica to UCLA, a five-mile trip. It features the Mulholland Dam as well, Bosch's spectacular view over L.A. from his house on stilts in the Hollywood Hills, Wilshire Blvd. through Beverly Hills, and "Little Vietnam." It's a world I'm quite familiar with, which only adds to the pleasure.

I flagged two sections for the telling writing. In the first, Bosch and FBI agent Eleanor Wish are interviewing a witness, a young graffiti artist who got things rolling when he witnessed the vet's body being dumped and called it in as an anonymous tip.

The boy reached for his cigarettes on the table and Bosch pulled back and got out one of his own. The leaning in and out of his face was a technique Bosch had learned while spending what seemed like ten thousand hours in these little rooms. Lean in, invade that foot and a half that is all theirs, their own space. Lean back when you get what you want. It's subliminal. Most of what goes on in a police interrogation has nothing to do with what is said. It is interpretation, nuance. And sometimes what isn't said. He lit Sharkey's cigarette first. Wish leaned back in her chair as they exhaled the blue smoke.
 "You wanna smoke, Agent Wish?" Bosch asked.
 She shook her head no.
 Bosch looked at Sharkey and a knowing look passed between them. It said, You and me, sport. The boy smiled. Bosch nodded for him to start his story and he did. And it was a story.

The following explains the book title, when Wish asks him,

"Harry, tell me about the black echo. What you said the other day. What did you mean?" . . .
 "There isn't anything really to tell. It's just what we called one of the intangibles."
 "Intangibles?"
 "There was no name for it, so we made up a name. It was the darkness, the damp emptiness you'd feel when you were down there alone in those tunnels. It was like you were in a place where you felt dead and buried in the dark. But you were alive. And you were scared. Your own breath kind of echoed in the darkness, loud enough to give you away. Or so you thought. I don't know. It's hard to explain. Just . . . the black echo."

The next books in the series, in order, are: The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, The Last Coyote, Trunk Music, Angels Flight, A Darkness More Than Night, City of Bones, Lost Light, The Narrows, The Closers, Echo Park, The Overlook, 9 Dragons, The Drop, The Black Box, Switchblade, The Burning Room, The Crossing, The Wrong Side of Goodbye, Two Kinds of Truth, Dark Sacred Night, and coming out in October, The Night Fire. A few of these feature Bosch's half-brother, Mickey Haller, and the two most recent feature a fellow night-shift detective, Renée Ballard.

I will take my time polishing them all off. This will be a years-long project. But one that I look forward to pursuing.