The Love of Impermanent Things: A Threshold Ecology

by Mary Rose O'Reilley

Overview

At midlife, Mary Rose O’Reilley writes, we are called to an “archaeology of memory”—turning over a potsherd here, a fragment there—to assemble something whole out of the messiness of experience. Excavating her own life, she traces the middle-class Irish American background that shaped her, with its mix of antic humor, terror, and mysticism, and finds meaning in the seemingly smallest, most transient encounters.

But O’Reilley’s purpose is less to recount these moments than it is to find the language for a different kind of story, in which the narrative of daily life opens to admit the holy and its corollary, the comic. Encouraging all of us to contemplate our own deep story, she calls hers a demo-life, in which the facts of personal history ground a narrative of consciousness and perception.

Earthy and luminous, unconventional and profoundly illuminating, The Love of Impermanent Things offers a threshold ecology for readers of all ages.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571312839
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	04/20/2006
Series:	The World As Home
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Prologue
Family Recipes     1
Bloodroot
How Should I Live the Life That I Am?     15
The Corseteer     23
A Week Until Christmas     37
The House of Memory     44
Mercy     49
Homes and Gardens     58
Sacred Space     67
When I Was a Boy     76
Parallel Universes     84
Born Into Time
The Luckiest People     91
The Bardo of Winter     95
The Owl Tree     107
Long Dance in the Sogn Valley     111
Letting In and Letting Out     116
Blue Grass     124
Great Lake     135
Abandoning Control     139
Love Story     146
The Soul Flies in Circles     150
Fire Keeps the Memory of Form
Walking Point     161
Pacing     166
The Teabowl of the Heart     170
Passages     179
Boundaries     183
Learning the Coast
Echolocating     193
What Are You Doing Here?     200
Winter Coast     205
The Productive Animals     209
Rapture of the Height     214
The Danger ofSomething Happening     218
Half-Assed     221
The Hermit's Candle     224
Sea Lions     227
Easter     230
Credo     236
The Wager on Rebirth     240
Recessional     244
Going Coyote     248
The Red Plush Heart
The Door to the Ocean     255
Transitional Care     258
Care Conference     261
Nausea     266
Being-With     269
The House of Dreams     278
Phases of the Moon     282
Selling     285
Controlled Burn
Writing the Wolf     291
Driving Meditation     297
Little Marais     301
Works Cited     304

Editorial Reviews

At the outset of this quiet, quirky book, O'Reilley (The Barn at the End of the World) declares that she has written neither a memoir nor a collection of essays: rather, she has collected ephemera. In vignettes that recall Barbara Holland's work, O'Reilley discusses the meaning of vocation-her job as a college English professor, she says, would not begin to capture her passion for pottery or her call to the ministry of spiritual direction. Her mother, recently dead, casts a long shadow; some of O'Reilley's strongest prose is about grief. She also pays good attention to nature and animals: dogs, goldfinches, elk and deer meander through her reflections. And this is a deeply spiritual book. O'Reilley equivocates about her belief in God, but she wakes up every morning praying and practices walking meditation. She lambastes the kind of Christians who have tamed and domesticated Jesus. The genre of occasional prose invites annoying, if forgivable, repetition-too many uses of the same Sufi phrase "The soul flies in circles," for instance. A Catholic turned Quaker, O'Reilley rebels against tidy religious language. "I want every spiritual word to be new, minted that second. Or else I want silence." Her language is not grandly new every second, but it certainly is lovely. (May 25) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly