“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion it has taken place.” Tell me friends: do you not love this quote? Oh my. You better believe my kids know it by heart. Ha.

Happy weekend to everyone today! Hope you have some relaxation and down time figured into your weekend plans. We were originally slated (by forecasters, that is) for a Nor’easter today and then it fizzled here in NH. So the shovelers are all doing the happy dance. And others like me, who clutch to every remote excuse for hibernation, feel cheated. So there you have it.

Especially hope you’ll hang with me to the end today: I’ve got a question for you.

So back to communication. The ability to communicate is actually quite a gift. Easily taken for granted, especially if you can’t remember a time when you couldn’t communicate.

Most of you know about my little Hudson. (He’s five, has Down syndrome.) So when Hudson’s hungry, he goes over to my stash of cutting boards, gets one. Next he heads to the pantry, snags the peanut butter jar. Puts it on the cutting board. Then moves on to the fridge for the grape jelly hunt. So even though there aren’t so many words, there’s lots of communication taking place. I get the message loud and clear he’s hungry when he collects all the PB & J supplies. Communication is quite a gift, and I’m grateful Hudson has his own way of telling me he’s hungry.

I was contemplating communication last week, chatted with a few friends about it. When I was little, maybe four or five, I remember my mother taking me along to a nursing home to visit a friend of hers who was in a coma. Unresponsive. We’ll call her Cindy. I don’t remember all the details that put Cindy in that state, but she was a relatively young woman in her twenties who had a stroke. Cindy had blank, unseeing eyes, and was covered with tubes and wires. No one seemed to know if she could hear and understand, and the doctors and nurses treated her as if she couldn’t. I remember my mother being convinced we just couldn’t know whether Cindy could hear or understand. So on our visits, we gave her the benefit of the doubt, acted as if she could see, hear and understand everything we said. We’d talk about the weather, her family, what was going on in our family. Chat about whatever we could think of that might interest her, including reading verses and singing hymns. It’s not as easy as you might think having a completely one way conversation for an hour at a time.

And I can only imagine it would be quite a horrible imprisonment to be trapped in an unresponsive body if your mind is fully present and engaged. To be unable to communicate in any way. A travesty and perhaps one of the worst hells on earth.

But I’m hearing more and more stories of people who were once in a coma or an unresponsive state that miraculously come back around. What a story they have to tell on the other side. One such fascinating and poignant story is about a twelve year old South African boy named Martin.

“In January of 1988, Martin Pistorius came home from school complaining of a sore throat. He never went back. Within a year, Martin had degenerated into a mute and quadriplegic. By his fourteenth birthday he was a hollow shell, unseeing and unknowing; he spent his days at a care center, sitting blankly in front of the television while his family waited for him to die.

And then his mind came up for air.

For an unimaginable ten years, Martin would be completely conscious while trapped inside his unresponsive body, secretly aware of everything happening around him and utterly powerless to communicate it.

Ghost Boy is Martin’s story, as written – shockingly and triumphantly – by Martin himself. With unflinching candor, Martin describes the chilling details of his life as a Secretly Lucid Vegetable – from the perversion of some who believed him to be brain dead, to the grace of those who sought recognition in his eyes.

For an age when prolonged illness and misdiagnoses are too common, Ghost Boy is the hopeful story of a discarded life awakening from passivity to action, despair to hope, captivity to freedom.”  (from the back cover of Ghost Boy)

Martin’s is a shocking and amazing story, nothing short of a miracle. And here’s my question for you. I’ve not yet read the book Ghost Boy. But I’m about to start. And I wonder if you might like to read it too. And then in a few months we could come back and talk about it here. An on-line virtual book discussion of sorts. (Not live.) So let’s pick a Saturday in March. Does the 19th work? That gives you a week or so to get the book at the library and hopefully enough time to read.

Here’s an Amazon link with more info. on the book. And then I’ll post about Ghost Boy on Saturday, March 19th and you can share your thoughts and impressions too. (If you want.) Just think about it.

So let me finish telling you about Cindy now. Despite the medical staff’s opinion, my mom was convinced Cindy was lucid. One day she brings in a white board and marker, places the marker in Cindy’s clenched fingers. Cindy’s fingers clutch the pen, and laboriously and painstakingly she draws letters onto the white board. A word forms. A word and some numbers. A scripture reference. You can imagine the shock of the medical staff. But I don’t think it surprised my mother.

Eventually, over months, Cindy comes out of her unresponsive state. Her life as a Secretly Lucid Vegetable. Tells us how much she enjoyed our visits. That she remembers our conversations, each detail. Also the verses and singing.

And that’s one of the reasons I believe in miracles. That and the first glimpse of each of my newborns’ precious faces. Miracles. To me, miracles are just divine glimpses. Glimpses reminding me to look Up.

(If you’re new here, I post recipes during the week and muse on the weekends. Thank you for visiting today.)

If you’re a book worm like me, here’s a list (and short reviews) of other books I love that you might like too: Reading List 2015

The post Life As a Secretly Lucid Vegetable appeared first on Through Her Looking Glass.

Hi friends!

And how are you today?

Happy 4th of July and Happy Birthday America! Hope you’re out and about, enjoying the festivities of the weekend with friends and family today. It’s a bit of a different 4th for me. As I write, Jon and my older boys are airborne, on their way to Romania with a missions team. It’ll be quieter around here and I’ll be missing them. Looking forward to hearing of their adventures. So glad they have this wonderful opportunity, and the little guys and I will make the most of our 4th here. Might even light a few fireworks. That’s what Charlie says anyway. (Gulp.)

So if you’re a book lover, keep reading. Truth be told, I’ve been dying to write this Summer THLG Reading List 2015 for some time now. I love to read. There’s nothing better than a great book to take along on vacation. And if I can’t get away, a good book is vacation. There’ve been stages in life when I’ve read like a fiend. Other times, I’ve barely picked up a book in months. It’s all a matter of available time….

I’ve read all the books on the list below. Some I found on The New York Times Best Seller’s list. Others in the library. But most from friends, word of mouth.

In my book (pun intended), a good book is a real luxury.

And uninterrupted time to read? Now that’s extravagance.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, just a few favorites that came to mind.

Summer THLG Reading List 2015

• A Girl Named Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel. Haven’s a storyteller. And that’s why I love this memoir. She’s quirky and she’ll make you laugh (out loud) with tales of her unusual childhood in Moreland, Indiana. Moreland is a sleepy little town with one stop light. And a boatload of characters. (And you know I do love characters.)
• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Novel by the author of The Kite Runner. Hosseini is also a storyteller and he weaves a fantastic and believable tale set to true to life events in Afghanistan’s history during the last four decades. This is a moving book, violent at times, draws you in from the beginning. I was particularly struck by the poignant relationship of two women, main characters in the book. They start out as enemies by a strange twist of fate, but realize on the journey they desperately need each to survive. What an incredible friendship.

• Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. A mother of five. Aviator. Deep thinker, writer. In 1955, forty-nine-year-old Anne spent two weeks alone in a New England coastal cottage, penning her thoughts on aging, relationships, solitude, being a woman, caring for the soul. Those thoughts morphed into this thought provoking book.

• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Jeannette is an accomplished writer and journalist, a former MSNBC news correspondent. Had the most unusual upbringing in a very poor and highly dysfunctional family. Her mother: a distracted starving artist. Her father Rex: a brilliant man, but an alcoholic out of touch with reality. Can’t hold a job, moves the family from state to state avoiding bill collectors. Draws blueprints for a glass castle he’ll build as the family estate when his latest invention takes off. But it never does. You’ll laugh and you’ll cry.
• The Insanity of God by Nik Ripken. But it’s not really Nik Ripken. That’s just a pseudonym. “Nik” traveled around the world preserving the stories of more than six hundred Christians in over sixty “closed” countries. True stories of how faith survives, let alone flourishes in places that are overcome by darkness, despair and hopelessness. These God stories will floor you, blow your mind. This is what’s happening behind the scenes, the insanity of God.

• Essentialism: the Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Greg outlines a “systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that’s not so we can make the highest possible contribution toward the things that really matter.”
• The Invisible Wall by Harry Bernstein. Harry Bernstein recently passed away, but he penned several memoirs, his first after he turned ninety. His is an amazing story. On the eve of World War I: “In a small English mill town, Harry Bernstein’s family struggles to make ends meet. Harry’s father earns little money at the Jewish tailoring shop and brings home even less, preferring to spend his wages drinking and gambling. Harry’s mother, devoted to her children and fiercely resilient, survives on her dreams…. Then Harry’s older sister does the unthinkable: she falls in love with a Christian boy. But they are separated by an “invisible wall” that divides Jewish families on one side of the street from Christian families on the other. When Harry unwittingly discovers the secret affair, he must choose between the morals he’s been taught all his life, his loyalty to his selfless mother, and what he knows to be true in his own heart.”
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. Laugh out loud funny. Definitely one of the funnier memoirs I’ve read. Don’t be deceived by the cover. This book is not intended for children and has considerable language. ( Cuz that’s how it was…..)

So have you read any of these books? Throw in your two cents today. I’m always pining for a great read, and I know others are too. Take a second and give us your book recommendation today!

The post Summer THLG Reading List 2015 appeared first on Through Her Looking Glass.