See the World Hanging Upside Down

Working working, always working.  I miss traveling and school, but the world is not a place where such things are free.  

While I can't travel too far off the beaten path, for Thanksgiving, Peter and I escaped to Belvedere -- the proverbial Eden of my childhood.  

Located close to Ellicottville, NY, Belvedere is a quiet patch of land owned by my grandparents.  For as long as I can remember, Belvedere has been at the forefront of my list of favourite places in the world. 

Belvedere's beautiful pond

Going up the ski hill!

The breath-taking view

We found awesome hats!

As for schooling, while my formal education is taking a hiatus, I am not missing out on my favourite type of education; books that change your life.  My top three picks of the books I read this past month are as follows:

3. Girl With Curious Hair (David Foster Wallace)

On the stripped bed- neatly littered with papers and cards, my notecards, a decade of stenography to Lyndon- lay my lover, curled stiff on his side, a frozen skeleton X ray, impossibly thin, fuzzily bearded, his hand outstretched with dulled nails to cover, partly, the white face attached to the long form below the tight clean sheets, motionless, the bed flanked by two Servicemen who slumped, tired, red, green.

2. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami) 

 Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

1.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)

  The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?