Tiny beautiful things~ Teaser Tuesday

Hosted by MizB at should be reading.

Here's how to play:

*Grab your current read,

*Open to a  page,

*Share a few “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page,

*Please no spoilers!

*Share the title and author.

From Cheryl Strayed's 'Tiny Beautiful Things.'

"Dear Bewildered,

Several months after my mother died I found a glass jar of stones tucked in the far reaches of her bedroom closet. I was moving her things out of the house I'd thought of as home, but that no longer was. It was a devastating process--more brutal in its ruthless clarity than anything I've ever experienced or hope to again--but when I had that jar of rocks in my hands I felt a kind of elation I cannot describe in any other way except to say that in the cold clunk of its weight I felt ever so fleetingly as if I were holding my mother. 

That jar of stones wasn't just any jar of stones. They were rocks my brother and sister and I had given to our mom. Stones we'd found as kids on beaches and trails and the grassy patches on the edges of parking lots and pressed into her hands, our mother's palms the receptacle for every last thing we thought worth saving. 

I sat down on the bedroom floor and dumped them out, running my fingers over them as if they were the most sacred things on the earth. Most were smooth and black and smaller than a potato chip. Worry stones my mother had called them, the sort so pleasing against the palm she claimed they had the power to soothe the mind if you rubbed them right. 

What do you do with the rocks you once gave to your dead mother? Where is their rightful place? To whom do they belong? To what are you obligated? Memory? Practicality? Reason? Faith? Do you put them back in the jar and take them with you across the wild and unkempt sorrow of your twenties or do you simply carry them outside and dump them in the yard? 

I couldn't know. Knowing was so far away. I could only touch the rocks, hoping to find my mother in them." 

"...across the wild and unkempt sorrow of your twenties..." 

I'm trying to think of the last time I heard a description like that. That's exactly what it was but I never knew how to describe it.

'WILD'~ Teaser Tuesday

Hosted by MizB at shouldbereading.

Here's how to play:

*Grab your current read,

*Open to a random page,

*Share a few “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page,

*Please no spoilers!

*Share the title and author.

Today's selection is Cheryl Strayed's 'Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail': 

"As I hiked, the terrain slowly shifted from desert to forest, the trees grew taller and more lush, the shallow stream beds more likely to have a seep of water, the meadows dense with wildflowers. There had been flowers in the desert too, but they'd been less abundant, more exotic, preciously and grandiosely festooned. The wildflowers I encountered now were a more common bunch, growing as they did in bright blankets or rimming the shaded edges of the trail. Many of them were familiar to me, being the same species as or close cousins to those that prospered in Minnesota summers. As I passed them, I felt the presence of my mother so acutely that I had the sensation that she was there; once I even paused to look around for her before I could go on."
                              
                                           ****************************************************


This book has me yearning to hike the Pacific Crest Trail like I never have. It has me aching to start my memoir and wishing I could write with Strayed's raw intensity. Pam Houston calls her a  'deceptively elegant'  writer and that's about as close as I can come to a perfect description. Like all good writers, she makes it look easy, which it is not. 

Strayed's memoir about losing her mother, finding herself lost in wild behavior and then on the wild trail speaks epic volumes to those of us who have lost mothers and grown up without fathers and then had to strive to find out who we are in the world without them. Her voice, (then 26) sounds and feels familiar like the young voice in our own heads and we get to enjoy the trail experience along with her; every ache and pain, every mountain top view and exquisite wildflower, as well her fear and the constant need to reinforce and teach herself how not to be afraid as a woman alone in the wilderness and, in reality, in the world.

This from Cheryl's visit to an astrologer:

"I was not going to nod. Everything that had ever happened to me in my whole life was mixed into the cement that kept my head perfectly still at the moment an astrologer told me that my father had infected me. 
'Wounded?' was all I could manage.
'Yes,' said Pat. 'And you're wounded in the same place. That's what fathers do if they don't heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.'
'Hmm,' I said, my face blank.
'I could be wrong.' She gazed down at the paper between us. 'This isn't necessarily literal.' 
'Actually, I only saw my father three times after I was six.'
'The father's job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse and ride into battle when it's necessary to do so. If you don't get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.' 
'But--I think I have already,' I sputtered. 'I'm strong--I face things. I--'
'This isn't about strength,' said Pat. 'And you may not be able to see this yet, but perhaps there will come a time--it could be years from now--when you'll need to get on your horse and ride into battle and you're going to hesitate. You're going to falter. To heal the wound your father made, you're going to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior."