Ordinary laziness, meet Geoff and hurray for Susie Orbach

I finished this book at the weekend, sitting on my green plastic chair outside the front of my little white cottage.

In it John Tarrant, Zen teacher and psychotherapist, shows us how we can mine joy and learning from dark times. It's very quotable, but here is a passage I particularly liked about not-doing.

Unlike ordinary laziness, in which we merely avoid something we think we ought to be doing, the laziness of not-doing has a refined and charged quality. By comparison, ordinary laziness is hard work and requires distraction. When we truly do nothing, a fertile, widening silence appears. [...] When we tryly do nothing, we allow that falling can be good, that arms might catch us when we do fall, that the world may sustain and suprise us at the same time. We respond naturally, witnessing the web of life of which we are a part, just as water runs downhill and the white clouds run before the breeze.

I like the idea of 'ordinary laziness' being an avoidance. I think I know how that feels - sort of heavy, more of a 'giving up' than a 'letting go'. It's a diamond of a book - I'll definitely be reading it again, and I'll probably quote from it again here.

In other news, my second reader interview is up now at 100 Readers - meet Geoff Sawers. I liked that he had a criticism about The Blue Handbag - it makes the good things he (and other people) says feel more real.

Red Bird has written a lovely review of my poetry collection, Living Things - have a read here. Thank you RB!

Finally there's a good interview with Susie Orbach in the Guardian today, here, where she talks about our bodies and what we women do to them. She's one of my heroes, and has written some fantastic books including the simple and brilliant On Eating and an excellent collection of astute and funny short stories based on psychoanalysis - The Impossibility of Sex.