Raven O'Fiernan

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February 17, 2021: How Do You Know Who You Are?

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Weekly Update:

So, I realize it has been a few weeks since I have posted a weekly update. Sorry about that. New habits are hard to establish sometimes, and I plain just forgot about it. But that is no reason to throw it all out, so here I am.

This week was a good week. The big issue was that I ran out of paper. I didn’t realize I was so close to being out because I thought I had some new paper somewhere. Turns out, nope, I didn’t. I was going to continue/restart my revision of Cipher with Holly Lisle’s How To Revise Your Novel (Affiliate link), but it involves printing out your manuscript and as I was about to add paper, well… Anyway, so I printed off the first 50 pages and have ordered paper, which I will get on Saturday of next week. So February is looking like it is NOT going to be revision week. I will continue with the website work.

Book Review:

The book I am reviewing this month is The Likeness by Tana French. I really need to reread it. It is gripping and intense. The story is a murder investigation through undercover work. The main character is a detective who, because her appearance is so strikingly similar to the victim’s, goes undercover as the victim, pretending that she is not really dead, so that the suspects might give themselves away and she can find out who killed her double.

It has very believable training, and explores the nature of identity: how much is internal and how much is what our actions are. How memory plays into it. But it is not a literary novel; it is mainstream suspense. I was so engrossed in the story that it colored everything in my life, and I felt I was really there, even when I wasn’t reading. The description was realistic and yet totally alien to anything I’ve ever done. That combination was obsessive.

This is the second book in the Dublin Murder Squad series, but the books are only very loosely connected. There was one small event in this book that recalled the previous book, In the Woods, which is also a great novel (but which I don’t remember at all, unfortunately — I guess I need to reread that one, too!), but otherwise, the plots were completely different and unrelated.

The main thing I took from The Likeness is a deep questioning of who I am as a person, and how much of that depends on my actions, my beliefs, and my memories. Who are we really?

In Closing:

Have you explored questions of identity? Has a book ever made you question yourself? How do you continue to define and create your authentic self?

January 2021 Book Review: Daily Meditations

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So, the third week of each month will be a book review.  This month’s is a little unconventional.  I normally read fiction, but this month I am reviewing two non-fiction books, both of them daily readers.  But first, here’s what I’ve been up to this week!

Weekly Update

This week has been fairly uneventful on the writing front. I got another flash fiction piece done for the Tarot collection and did some website work (mostly learning stuff and applying it to local test sites, not too many changes to the actual live website yet), as well as starting to learn my way around Mailerlite so I can get a newsletter going again, this time without sending myself (and possibly others) lots of spam from who knows where. THAT was an eye-opener and the reason I don’t currently have a list. But yeah, moving slowly, but still making progress.

The main thing is that I have been more committed to my routines. I have a morning, evening, and night routine, and these help me stay sane and also help me to be more productive overall. On that note, one of the things I do is read inspirational passages from day books, and it has been hard to find some that I like, so I thought I’d share the ones I’m currently using for morning and night. I explain more about my morning routine later.

Book Review: Open Mind by Diane Mariechild and Every Day Spirit by Mary Davis

We will start with the night book, because I’ve had it the longest.

When I was in college, my mom bought me Open Mind: Women’s Daily Inspiration for Becoming Mindful by Diane Mariechild. I have returned to it over and over again in my life. Each day is on a separate page with the date at the top, then a quote by a spiritual woman, and finally a few paragraphs by Diane Mariechild explaining what that quote means to her and how we can use it. Today’s quote is from Izumi Shikibu:

Listen, listen;
longing and loss.
In the struck bell’s
recurrent calling,
no moment in which to forget.

And her explanation is about the importance of dealing with loss in a meaningful way.

I recently decided that I wanted to supplement Open Mind. I wanted to read Open Mind at night, but another passage in the morning. It took me a long time, but I finally decided on Every Day Spirit: A Dayabook of Wisdom, Joy, and Peace by Mary Davis.

This book is similar to Open Mind in several ways. Like Open Mind, it has a different entry for each day of the year. Also it was written by a woman. The main difference is that Davis’s book has a more personal overriding theme: some time she spent in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. So there are entries that can be more like diary entries where she discusses something that happened that day. Other entries do have a quote and commentary like Mariechild’s, but not all of them. Finally, Davis’s has two suggestions for focus during the day. A focus for how to approach the world/your daily life/external events called “In The World” and a more internal focus called “In The Heart”.

Appropriately, today’s entry is about developing a morning spiritual practice.

My morning routine consists of the following:

1. Reading a passage from a spiritual book (currently this one)

2. Drawing a Tarot card for the day

3. Doing my coffee ritual, see here:

4. Committing to my ideals

5. Connecting with content related to my ideals.

And that’s what I do, pretty much every day. There are days I miss, particularly when I have to work early on Thursdays and Saturdays, but I often get at least one of those in.

In Closing:

Do you have a spiritual practice or morning routine that gives meaning to your life? What are the key points in your spirituality or non-spirituality?

Note: All ideas/philosophies/faiths are welcome in the comments as long as they do not demonize any others or any living beings, but please do not argue about any being better than others.