Stuff I'm Reading

Hey, I skipped a day. So what? What are you gonna do about it? Yeah, that's what I thought... I can take days off whenever I feel like it — nothing wrong with that, he argued against no one.

For instance, I took the day off work today. I've come down with that cold I was fighting. Burning a lot of candles at a lot of ends, and it's catching up with me. E.g., I didn't have time to blog yesterday.

But so today I stayed in bed, ate some soup, worked on a new song, answered easy work emails, slept, and started reading Waging Heavy Peace, Neil Young's book that came out last year. So far, it's just a rambling, conversational bunch of reminiscences from his 65-year life, plus some depictions of his daily life while he's working on the book. In other words, highly compelling stuff, if you're a big Neil Young fan. Which I am.

I'm also in the middle of Martin Amis's Lionel Asbo. It's kind of a return to form for him — preposterous and funny in the same kind of way as London Fields, for instance, rather than ugly like Yellow Dog, limp like Night Train, or morbidly sad like House of Meetings. Self-consciously clever, sure, but that's just what you've got to be in the mood for if you're going to read an Amis novel. So far I've been consistently in the mood.

Finally, The Power of Divine Eros, a new A. H. Almaas book put out by Shambhala Publications, has been blowing my mind for a couple of weeks now. I borrowed it from work, so I'd better try to finish it up, in case someone else wants a crack at it. I was going to try to describe its premise myself, but I find that the back blurb is one of those rare ones that express exactly what the book is about:

What do desire and passion have to do with our spiritual journey? According to A. H. Almaas and Karen Johnson, they are an essential part of it.

Conventional wisdom cautions that desire and passion are opposed to the spiritual path — that pursuing desire will take you more into the egoic world. And for most people, that is exactly what happens. Wanting is experienced as self-centered. The Power of Divine Eros challenges the view that the erotic and the divine are separate. When we open to the energy, spontaneity, and zest of erotic love, we will find it holy and sacred. Thus desire and passion become a gateway to wholeness.

The authors reveal how our relationships become spiritual opportunities to express ourselves authentically, to relate with openness, and to discover dynamic inner realms with another person. Through embodying the energy of eros, we can learn to be real and alive in all our interactions.

If it's not apparent from the description, it's not just about convincing you through reason that the two kinds of love are actually one, but about helping you find the place within yourself where you can feel that to be the case. Great stuff!