Rick’s Recommended Reading

Rick has compiled a list of 10 books that he holds in high regard, and would like to share with you.  His list and brief commentary on each book can be found on the new blog page created for this purpose, 10 Books.   Many happy page-turns…  ~W

Jewel in the Darkness in NYC 2/28/09

All,

On February 28^th I am offering a completely new workshop: “The Jewel in the Darkness” at the Open Center in NYC. This workshop is the distillation of my past years of experience with ongoing Pluto transits, and their attendant manifestations (which in my case have been chronic illness, separation from loved ones, and the loss, and recuperation, of a home.)

As a part of this work, I went into retreat from public appearances for six months to nurse my wounds, but more importantly to allow myself to receive and fully experience the total impact of the “darkness” that was enveloping my life. It has been said that some souls inherently open toward the light while others move toward the abyss. In my own case, it has been both. As a result, I came out of this period with a profound sense of the value of darkness and of the gifts that could be received if there is enough patience and openness.

All this occurred in my life before the economy crashed, but I look at the economic landscape as an absolutely analogous situation. If you remain, consciously or unconsciously, in the mode of the victim (“How or why has this happened to me?”) you deeply disempower yourself and pass that off to people in your immediate life. On the other hand, if you can take the words of people like Hilda Charlton seriously, who emphatically declared that every problem is an opportunity, you can grow, not sentimentally, but profoundly.

I share from first hand experience the remarkable gifts of illness and loss – insight,  knowledge, true compassion, and the literal metamorphosis of consciousness from fixated to free. These things are hard to speak or write of, which is why I want to share the passage through the shadows as a meditative experience in which each person can process their own journey.

This was best expressed by C.G. Jung, shortly before his death when an interviewer asked him about his experience of God. Jung replied (paraphrase) that for me, God is everything and everyone that came into my path that was unexpected, unsolicited, and unwanted. Likewise at the end of his essay, “Self Reliance,” Emerson challenges his readers by asking if they think that a new job, a new love, new found health or wealth will actually make their life any better. Nothing will do it, says Emerson, but “the triumph of principle.”

Just what is this “principle” that allows one to deeply receive whatever life offers and turn it into positivity, knowledge, freedom, and peace? It is neither a mystery nor a “secret,” yet we tend to forget it in the clamor and din of events and illusions fostered by contemporary culture.

This workshop functions as a staff of strength, remembrance, and awareness that we all have the power and ability to come through whatever we have to go through with full integrity, power, and peace.

Rick Jarow

Praise from French Connection

When I saw this review of Rick’s book by a woman living in France, I was so charmed I made the executive decision to post it here, without running it by Rick first. (He can be reticent re: blatant self-promotion.) However, I’m sure he’ll enjoy this, as he does love France.  The photo sealed its fate to be posted here. It comes from the new blog http://soardreamfrance.typepad.com/ … should you care to share this woman’s fulfilled dream of living there  (or share her joie de vivre if you already do).  I actually could not find her name or email anywhere on her blog, otherwise I’d love to thank her  personally for her inspiring post, which holds more juice than your typical review. (Presumably she’ll see this and discover my appreciation.) How could a blog packing the words SOAR, DREAM, and FRANCE all at once, backed by deelish expressiveness, be anything but tres bonne?   ~Whitehawk

Books… On the Beam

I’ve titled my TypeList entry “Books…on the Beam” for a couple of different reasons. First, there’s the expression that someone or something is “really on the beam”-meaning that they really know what they are doing, are really good at what they are doing or that something is a good thing. You’d think someone who reads as ravenously as I do, would have a Chatette full of bookshelves. No, I don’t own a one but I have something better-huge beams in my semi-vaulted ceilings where I keep all the books I have and have read. The beam in the guest room is getting full and at some point I won’t be able to stack comfortably anymore. I’ve imagined one of my guests screaming in the middle of the night because Robert Ludlum or Donna Lyon (in hard back of course) has fallen on their head while they were sleeping! Books in English are at a premium here in France. I hate to part with any of them, but am always happy to make a loan. We trade around the village and often go to the market in Villefranche where there is a gentleman who has a stall where he sells English and French books. He’s always happy to see me coming! I would like to tell you that every book on my beam is “on the beam”, and most are. You can expect very high stars from me on any of the books that I choose to share here with you. Why would I want to recommend something that I didn’t enjoy or believe was some of the best I’d ever read?

At the moment I have one book listed-Rick Jarow’s “Creating the Work You Love”. I discovered him quite by accident when I was wandering through the Bookstar that used to be on Decatur Street in the French Quarter. Bookstar regularly closed out my Friday night ritual that began with drinks with friends at the Napoleon House. I was struggling with my job and wanting something to really push me to look at my life and my work in a new way. I found it. I can’t recommend him highly enough. I’ve lent the book to friends and recommended it to clients. As you can see, the book in the photo has been well-loved. What you can’t quite get from the picture is the wonderful aroma of gasoline that wafts by with the turn of each page. The last friend I lent it to left if in the trunk of his car. But this book, highlighted in at least 7 different colors by now, pages falling out and reaking of gasoline had to come to France with me. It helped push me on this journey and continues to help me stay the course when I’m discouraged or need a little tune-up. My books were the most important to bring along when I could, and the most difficult to part with when I had to. I was able to find good homes for all of my books or take them to used book stores in New Orleans before I left. It killed me to give up my whole set of Southern Living Cookbooks to the second hand store. Guess I’m doing another kind of “southern living” now.

I’d like to close with the quote from Rick Jarow’s book that pushed me on my way. I was reading him that fall of ‘97 when my friend Wendy picked me up at the train station in Cahors. The first words that came out of her mouth were: “We have to move to Belgium, can’t you come stay in our house for a year?” It appeared impossible at the time she asked, but after a week of watching the morning mist rise over St. Cirq Lapopie I began to wonder if maybe it really was possible. And then I was smacked by this quote by Robert Johnson found in “Creating the Work You Love”:

“If a fantasy is not responded to, it becomes an energy leak. It is the creative faculty, squandering itself into wishful thinking. Wishing for what one does not have is a symptom of unaligned energy.”