Reading & Writing a Life

Carla Pineda's blog


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Masks

The page is a safe place to take off these masks, to be naked, bare faced, bare voiced.

Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write

So, I picked up my book, Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write that was sitting here on the couch. I opened it to a random page. “Masks” is the seed I opened to. Wow! talk about weird.

I think about masks, we all do today. This piece of cloth that we now pick up on the way out the door the way we do our car keys – don’t leave home without it! We are, hopefully, getting use to putting it on the way we do a seat belt. It is for protection. It is for safety.

Putting on the mask reveals a lot of who we are. Whereas, in the past, we often thought of taking it off as that which revealed the true us. There is a lot to ponder here. How do you see your masks? What do they say about you? To you? Find a safe place/page to take yours off. Pick up a pen or put your fingers on the keyboard. See what shows up.

*thank you to my friend Viktoria http://www.facebook.com/viktoria.valenzuela for my beautiful mask! She is amazing!


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A Book Review

Dancing in the Narrows: A Mother-Daughter Odyssey Through Chronic Illness by Anna Penenberg

5.0 out of 5 stars

A gripping story of hope, desperation, and tenaciousness of spirit

Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2020

I loved this book. A single mother and teenage daughter are thrown into a journey for health and healing that they had no idea how they would navigate but they did! I imagined how I would have been had one of my daughters been struck with an illness that defied diagnosis. I found myself on each page with them, riding years of questions, partial answers, wrong information and desperate quests. I cheered them on as they took road trips to find the right doctors or alternative health care providers. I cried with them when they hit another dead end. I prayed for Dana to heal and rejoiced when she was on the way to recovery. And, I cheered for Anna when she embraced her own life again. It is a story of not just a physical healing but of life transformation for Dana and Anna both.

I did not know much if anything about Lyme disease. I knew it came from a tick bite and what the bite might look like. I knew there was a treatment of some sort for it. This book is also informative and educational about this disease. And, around the growing and exciting fields of holistic healing and alternative medicine. A valuable read.