O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

I have often quoted Robert Burns, “To a Louse” in my blog, and the quote came back to me this morning as I reflected on the gifts I received yesterday. The gifts we receive give us some indication of how others see us. They are based on assumptions about what we are interested in, what we find enjoyable.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently. A couple months ago, a group of people whose vision of who I am has a significant impact on who I may become said that they see me in a very different way than I see myself. It was, and continues to be, jarring. One person suggested I read Parker J. Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. The suggestion says something about how that person views me and based on my reading so far in Palmer’s book, it is a view that clashes with how I see myself.

Another book I was given was The Agpeya: The Coptic Prayer Book of the Seven Hours. In the fall we visited a Coptic Orthodox church in Hamden for their Egyptian fair. My wife, knowing my interest in liturgical prayer from many traditions, picked that up for me. I find the different words and traditions used to pray helpful as I think about prayer and I have started using The Agpeya in some of my prayers.

My wife also got me a copy of Upstream by Mary Oliver. It is a selection of her essays. I really enjoy Mary Oliver’s poetry, but I’ve never read any of her essays. I read the first essay last night, about going upstream, and I really like it. As I reflect on Mary Oliver and Parker Palmer, I suspect that Oliver may have more to say to me than Palmer and that this is something I need to reflect upon in my own writing.

My middle daughter, who built a tiny house as an art project she now lives in, gave me the book, Living at the End of Time by John Hanson Mitchell. From reading the cover, it sounds like the book is about the intersection of my interests and my daughter’s interests; a simple life reconnected to art, beauty, simplicity, and spirituality. I have not yet started it, but I am looking forward to it.

Yet, lest people get too one-sided a view of my interests, my eldest daughter got me Colin Cremin’s book Exploring Videogames with Deleuze and Guattari: Towards an Affective Theory of Form. I often talk with my eldest daughter, over Skype as I am driving to work in Connecticut and she is coming home from school in Japan about Deleuze and Guattari as well as about videogames. I’m pretty excited about reading this book.

I hope to bring thoughts from each of these books into my writing here for the next several weeks.