Eve Ensler

I recently broke with tradition.

Typically I buy books and store them like ladies in waiting. Usually there are only two or three in the queue. I pile them on the bottom shelf of the end table sitting next to the recliner.

The most ostentatious display of my new found wealth is the increase in the number of books in the queue. I now have six or seven or eight books vying for my attention. So many that I had to create a second stack.

This gives me a warm feeling in my battered gut. I love books. I worship books. They are my religion. They are my life.

I read constantly. I read incessantly. I devour books and cannot satiate the hunger. So I read more.

In fact the case could be made that the most damage this hideous job has done to me, other than to push me to the brink of death, is to greatly disturb my reading schedule.

I need to read every day. There have been times - many times - since 2/22/13 when I haven't picked up a book in a week.

Yup it is all my fault. Yup I can do something about it. Yup there are worse things in the world.

The previous sentence is for those who feel the need to act as my conscience.

I tend to be somewhat methodical. I work my way through the queue. It is not easy to continuously type the word queue.

On a recent commute, listening to NPR, I heard an interview with Eve Ensler.

Eve Ensler is a Tony Award winning playwright, performer and activist. She wrote The Vagina Monologues, which has been published in 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries. She is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls.

This woman is a one person army.

In 2010 she was diagnosed with Stage IIIB/Stage IV cancer. In nine hours of surgery she lost her rectum, sections of her colon, her uterus, her ovaries, her cervix, her fallopian tubes, part of her vagina, and 70 lymph nodes. She survived 7 months of grueling treatments. On May 25, 2013 she celebrated her 60th birthday.

She wrote a book titled "In The Body Of The World", describing the experience and relating it to much bigger topics, which she spoke about on NPR. She spoke so eloquently and excerpts from the book were so moving that I had to have it.

As soon as I received it, I read it.

The following quotes from the book are preceded by Ensler's observation that when you are raped or lose your money and your home or when you have been diagnosed with cancer, people tend to shy away. They don't want to know you. They don't know how to deal with it.

Dig: "What if our understanding of ourselves were based not on static labels or stages but on our actions and our ability and our willingness to transform ourselves? What if we embraced the messy, evolving, surprising, out-of-control- happening that is life and reckoned with its proximity and relationship to death? ........................ What if our lives were precious only up to a point? What if we held them loosely and understood that there were no guarantees?.........................What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart, and all the while - even if and particularly when you were dying - you would be supported by and be part of a community?.........What if this were the point of our being here rather than acquiring and competing and consuming and writing each other off as stage IV or 5.2B?"

This is one small example from this book of the amazing way Eve Ensler thinks. The book is filled with them.

It is also filled with great stories of all the friends who supported her through cancer with all their unique and innovative approaches towards keeping her sane and moving forward.

It is filled with horrific stories of the women in the Congo who are savagely brutalized on a regular basis. As well as horrific stories about how their children - born and unborn - are brutalized.

She relates violence against women and the trauma they suffer to the diseases that afflict them.

She talks about the enormous effort she put into building The City of Joy in the Congo, even as she was struggling with cancer. A city where women can go to heal physically, spiritually, and psychologically.

I am not even scratching the surface of what this book is. It is 217 pages short and it will fill your heart with hope and love and determination, and your brain with new concepts and approaches to life.

It will make you feel small and it will make you feel huge.

Read it.