Susan Gorman

The First Day of The Rest of My Life

Well, it happened. My boys are off to day camp this summer. Harry will be in first grade in the Fall, so basically my semi-empty nest is all mine from 8:30-3:30 every week day. Last week Harry even brought me a "nature gift" from a walk he took with our babysitter in the woods, a bird nest that had fallen from a tree. I loved looking at its many layers of materials, everything from Christmas tree tinsel, ribbon, dog and cat hair, the usual dry grass and twigs, to long pieces of what looks like plastic pull-ties. It is a masterful piece of engineering. Very snug and comfy and incredibly well built. I hope the next we have built our boys is exactly that.

I am admittedly a bit out of sorts. It has only been a couple of days, and the wildness of the freedom I have is quite unsettling. I've noticed a tightness in my chest and random panic throughout the day-a nagging feeling of, "what am I forgetting?". Rather than being footloose, and I off-balance, trying to learn this new dance. Instead of juggling three or four tasks at at time, I am doing one or two. I'm not sure what to do with all the.....space. In my head, I mean. I'm not used to being so even-tempered, so available, so free from the brain fog that comes from constantly being harried.

Of course I am going to devote time every day to my writing, and I will have more flexibility in scheduling readings. I can exercise when I want, largely. It's the emotional waves that I am riding that take a different kind of energy to get used to-and I expect that will take a while.

In the meantime, I'll content myself with the heady thrill of never having to take my kids to the grocery store again. Gosh, with the money I save every week, I can treat myself to a pedicure, or two!!

Summer Movie and Reading List

I'm asked quite often for recommendations for books that have a good spiritual message. There are many good "how to" books on intuition and spiritual development, but I stopped reading them a long time ago. There are two reasons for this: firstly, I'm working on my own book of that type, and I don't want to be influenced by anybody else's message. So it's a way to guard the purity of what comes through me. Secondly, I absolutely love books (and movies) that carry a spiritual message through the plot. It's far more entertaining and subtle to watch a spiritual story being played out than to be lectured to. Here's a list of some of my recent favorites, just in time for the beach and vacation:

Movies:

The Men Who Stare At Goats. Alan and I watched this movie recently and could not stop laughing. Clooney is just perfection in this, and Ewan MacGregor is so earnest that it is positively endearing. Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey are also totally captivating. You begin this movie thinking you're watching a black comedy, which you are, but at the end you realize you've been taught something about your own spiritual power and the journey we all take to uncover it. There's a great meta joke about becoming a Jedi-Ewan MacGregor's character becomes obsessed with achieving this as his goal, and it's beautiful how MacGregor plays it so straight, it's as if he himself never even heard of Obi Wan. Perfection.

Resurrection. Staring Ellen Burstyn, this is an older movie from the late 70's or early 80's that is sometimes hard to find. It's worth the search, however. Burstyn plays a fast-living successful woman who has everything going for her, seemingly, and then becomes paralyzed in a car crash that claims the life of her husband. She ends up convalescing in her father's house, and in her determination to get out from under his abrasive negativity, discovers she has the ability to heal herself. She teaches herself to walk again, and then goes on to heal others.

The Matrix. I know, I know. Some of this movie is creepy and a little geeky. But that scene when Neo discovers how to dodge the bullets? Come on, tell me it's not spine-tingling! What a metaphor for discovering how we give our power away to our fears! I actually prescribe this movie to my classes and clients when they need a breakthrough in this area. If nothing else, the bad-ass costumes and cast are easy on the eyes.

Coraline. This is an incredible movie, animated ala Tim Burton (I believe he produced), about unleashing feminine power. Coraline is a one-of-a-kind, funky (I totally dig the blue hair) girl whose parents are busy and boring. In her explorations of their new house she has all sorts of adventures, until it turns dangerous and her parents are kidnapped into the underworld....but this kid is no victim. Instead of running for help, she stands on the balcony, screams, "I AM NOT AFRAID!!!" into the sky, and goes and gets her parents back. It's a little scary for kids under 6, but absolute required viewing for tween girls. Go girlfriend!!

The Razor's Edge. Also from the 80's, this was the movie that Bill Murray got slammed for doing because it was a serious role. But watch it and see if you agree with me that he's beyond brilliant. In fact, I think he was perfectly cast. Based on M.Somerset Maugham's masterpiece, Murray plays a wealthy young man just home from WWI, shell shocked and completely disillusioned by the pretenses of society after being so affected by the horror of battle. Unable to rejoin his friends in their return to "normal" life, he decides to reject convention and travel the world in search of spiritual meaning. There's a scene where he's huddled against the cold in a little shack in the Himalayas, surrounded by all his spiritual texts, trying to read to uncover the meaning of his life. He's been sent on this retreat by a Buddhist priest, to meditate until he has his answer. The fire starts to go out, and what happens next is some of the most amazing acting I've ever watched.

Contact. I love this movie specifically because I'm not a UFO-gal. While I certainly don't think we are the only ones in the Universe, I don't hold with a lot of the popular theories about who else is out there and what they want with us. But this movie is so intelligent and tender, while at the same time so exciting, I am riveted by it. And when she makes contact, I just blubber all the way through that scene. It rings true to me.

Books:

If you want to work on opening up to your spiritual path, the books I usually recommend are the Oren series channeled by Sanaya Roman. Start with Living With Joy and go on from there. I love these books because they are a really good education on how we must stretch our thinking in order to understand what our guides are trying to teach us. They also confront the constant fear, negativity, and isolation that we have taken for granted as part of life.

Some really great reads with responsibly good spiritual themes in them, and by that I mean, fiction that doesn't make fun of spirituality or champion it either. These are authors that don't have an agenda or anything to prove, and so the spiritual themes speak for themselves in very honest ways:

The Law of Love by Laura Esquivel

People of The Book

The Year of Wonders

March, all by Geraldine Brooks

Second Glance by Jodi Picoult

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

The Green Mile

Hearts in Atlantis

The Shawshank Redemption--all by Stephen King-movies are excellent too!!

The Temple of my Familiar, by Alice Walker-this is fun for those who loved The Color Purple I once read an interview with Ms. Walker where she stated that writing her masterpiece was a matter of sitting down and waiting until the voices spoke to her. The very definition of channeling.

Anything by Amy Tan!

Anything by Anne Lamott, especially her non-fiction books on spiritual journeying.

A really good non-fiction read about surrendering our need for material consumption is

Not Buying It.

I personally really love books and movies that explore the connection between an object and its owners through time, like Accordion Crimes by E. Annie Proulx, The Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland, and the movie, "The Red Violin".

Now chickens, I'm sure I'm forgetting some and haven't listed some that you love-so keep me on my toes and let me know what I should watch and read next!!