Did You Ever Think Life Was Gonna Be This Way?

Long ago and far away, before I was a cancer patient (or even married to my current husband, or mother to my children), I taught yoga - and of course, I practiced yoga, almost every day. My yoga of choice was power yoga - an almost aerobic form of yoga as fitness (think Baron Baptiste), practiced in a very warm (but not Bikram hot) room with high humidity. At my peak, I could do all kinds of fun  asanas (poses) and had terrific breath control and great flexibility. I even took some acroyoga workshops, and I loved those! After finishing grad school and starting my career and getting married and having two babies, yoga took a bit of a back seat and I stopped teaching. But I still practiced several times a week and kept yoga close to my heart, part of my central identity. It was the first time, really, that I had excelled at any physical endeavor - I never played on any team sports or anything like that. So it was really a shift in my own thinking about what my body could do, and how...

I've been neglecting you, my dedicated blog readers. I'm so sorry. Don't worry, I haven't been languishing in the hospital or crawling from bed to rocking chair and back. I haven't even been in hiding. Nope! I've been out and about, and I've been busy! I've been...SPRING CLEANING.  This is a momentous event. Long, long ago, in a world before I was diagnosed with cancer, I was a tidy person. An organized person. A person who would work all day, come home, parent and perform various household tasks, and then end the day with some reading or hanging out with my husband. And then I would get up and do it all again the next day. I had energy! I'm sort of amazed, looking back now, on all that I was able to get done. Spring cleaning was one of those things. On a somewhat regular basis, I would tear apart the closets, purge the dresser drawers, weed out the bookshelves, and all the rest. But that was a long time ago. In my post-diagnosis life, some days...

This summer has been deeply satisfying in a number of ways, not the least of which is that several of my favorite series published their concluding tales. Below are two of my very favorites: The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness and The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman.   Deborah Harkness made that two year wait worthwhile with her masterful ending to the All Souls trilogy. Diana and Matthew have returned from their trip through time and the problems surrounding them are more pressing than ever. Oh, and Diana is pregnant with twins of course, as all readers of the trilogy already knew! As they race to uncover the secrets held by the Book of Life, Diana, Matthew and their growing list of friends and family find themselves forced to confront the darkest secrets of Matthew's past.  This book is suspenseful and beautifully crafted. If you were expecting Harkness to end her tale by allowing gory violence and death to take center stage, prepare to be disappointed. What re...