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Synopsis
Reflecting on the past and a hard-won sense of self, Mary O’Reilley is determined not to sacrifice or waste herself. At midlife, she writes, she is finally learning to withhold after years of struggle on paths set by her suburban childhood, her Catholic upbringing, and a failed marriage. With a new perspective, O'Reilley discovers the pleasure in overlapping worlds and the intersections where rules break down, and she cultivates this border ecology. An animal rehabilitator, she feels the nearness yet difference of the universe the animals know. An apprentice potter, she sees in a Japanese teabowl the ultimate balance of action and contemplation. A woman who lives alone but has a life partner, she knows the joys of both solitude and companionship. And as a Quaker, she can both sit still and sing. This thoughtful book brings readers into a “demo” life that conveys new ways of seeing and a fresh vocabulary for exploring issues of the spirit.
Publishers Weekly
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.