Barbara Ehrenreich is an unambiguously serious writer. She reliably produces powerfully convincing books and essays about politics, history and social justice, moving people to outrage and action without ever obfuscating her subjects in a cloud of her own emotions.

In Ehrenreichs own words: As a journalist, I search for the truth. But as a moral person, I am also obliged to do something about it. She traffics in facts and brooks no nonsense, and therefore one has not previously found her books shelved cozily near to those with spiritual themes.

But Ehrenreich is a seeker, and clearly powerless to resist a full dive into a subject that captures her, so she now gives us Living With a Wild God: a reluctantly begun but vigorously rendered book she describes as a philosophical memoir and/or metaphysical thriller.

Ehrenreichs best-known work to date has been Nickled and Dimed, in which she described her year spent undercover subsisting on the minimum wage in America. Ehrenreich an accomplished writer of social justice journalism with a Ph.D. in cell biology chose to work as waitress, hotel maid, etc., as a way of revealing the challenges and costs of this work to those who do it by necessity.

Over 20 books into her career, Ehrenreich is a builder of strong cases who does not mince words, and shes reliably not only unsentimental, but often ANTI-sentimental (even when chronicling her own cancer). So, one does not expect her to indulge in much belly-button gazing: shes an activist, and theres work to be done.

Living With a Wild God does not introduce us to Ehrenreichs belly-button, but it does take us deep into her history, her mind, and her experience of her own spirit, soul, essence or whatever one calls it. What DO we call it? What is it anyway? What are we? What is The Other, and where do we stand in relation to it? Ehrenreichs journalistic attentions have turned to the Mount Everest of truths: an oldie, a biggie and likely too challenging for any lesser explorer to surmount.

Living With a Wild God begins with Ehrenreich discovering an old journal while gathering her papers for donation to a university. The journal reconnects her with her childhood self, and reminds her that she was already taking on the big questions as a small girl. She encounters these questions at various points over the course of her life, bringing her eventually to the answers she sees now, from her vantage point on the brink of old age.

Ehrenreich lays out her autobiographical details as plain matters of fact, but theres no avoiding their emotional impact: she clearly did not have a pleasant childhood, and lived largely in alienated isolation, accompanied by an alcoholic father and an intense, troubled mother whose life eventually ended in suicide. Ehrenreich by her own generally reliable description was a ferociously intelligent, curious, emotionally endangered child, whose temperament and circumstances positioned her to seek more, and ultimately find it.

Ehrenreich through her present-day words, and quotes from her adolescent writings describes her young self as having been on a quest that climaxed in the central drama of her spiritual life, at age 17. Throughout her atheist childhood she experienced occasional dissociative episodes that she was capable of describing in detail yet less capable of contextualizing for herself. The ultimate episode came when the teenage Ehrenreich found herself on a strange and vaguely dangerous errand in the cinematically named town of Lone Pine. She describes the transformative experience she had there, but cautions:

Here we leave the jurisdiction of language, where nothing is left but the vague gurgles of surrender expressed in words like ineffable and transcendent. For most of the intervening years my thought has been: If there are no words for it, then dont say anything about it. Otherwise you risk slopping into spirituality, which is, in addition to being a crime against reason, of no more interest to other people than your dreams.

See the original post here:
Barbara Ehrenreichs Living With a Wild God will enlighten, inspire, comfort

Clad in Spandex, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and still sweaty from her exercise class, Missy Turner collected her two most important possessions: her sons, ages 1 and 3.

While Turner cooled down from her workout Wednesday, the trio lingered in the lobby of the mega-complex that has become one of the region's hottest fitness venues - the Haverford Area YMCA. "It's so new and state-of-the-art," said Turner, who lives in Drexel Hill and joined in January.

Free child care, plus the classes, an indoor track, and three swimming pools are among the amenities that have helped make the Haverford Y into what one organization official describes as the fastest-growing YMCA in the country.

With more than 20,500 members, it has become so popular that as cars pull into the expansive parking lot, attendants with flags direct them to the few available spaces - la the Wells Fargo Center and Citizens Bank Park during games.

Since it opened in October, the Haverford Y's membership numbers have far exceeded expectations and surpassed those of Philadelphia Freedom Valley YMCA's 16 other branches. Every day, about 2,500 people exercise at the shiny building on Eagle Road.

"We couldn't be happier," said Haverford Township Commissioner Mario Olivia. "And our residents couldn't be happier with the services."

The unprecedented growth - YMCA officials set a goal of 15,000 members in the first year - is due in large measure to the location and demographics of Haverford Township, a populous Delaware County community.

It is also a manifestation of a national trend, as YMCAs expand into suburban areas where amenities such as child care, group fitness classes, and waterslides are drawing crowds.

See the original post here:
Boom times for fast-growing Haverford Y

Health

What you can do in 40 minutes

By Tony Wagner Citizen Columnist

Dear Mr. Fitness:

Thanks for your column in the Key West Citizen. I enjoy learning from the questions you answer. Given that I have a family and a career with erratic hours and there are only 24 hours in a day, and I need to lose 20 pounds. That and I only have a chance to do something three times a week. I have a question I would appreciate you answering:

Will I do better to walk for 40 minutes a day, or attend an aerobics class, or would the 40 minutes be best spent lifting weights to build muscle?

Thank you. I look forward to reading your response.

-- DM

Dear DM:

Thanks for reading! It makes it all worthwhile. This is a good question for those challenged with the time to be able to do exercise. Try this:

Follow this link:
What you can do in 40 minutes

Bangkok Bank, the country's largest by assets, will reopen a branch in Cambodia. Although that country's economy is small, the bank has determined that having a presence there could help it make investment and trading connections with regional companies, BBL executive vice chairman Deja Tulananda said.

BBL will consider opening branches in other Asean countries when it sees its Thai customers setting sufficient footprints in those markets. However, the goal of its re-entry to Cambodia is to support financial services for non-Thai companies.

Deja said the bank would focus on corporate customers doing business in Cambodia, noting that the sugar industry had high potential, followed by retail.

Meanwhile, the bank also plans to open one or two more branches in Vietnam, where it already has two in Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi, he said.

The Vietnamese government is restructuring the economy and amending regulations to stimulate economic growth and attract foreign investment, which would present opportunities for the banking industry, he said.

Krungthai Bank, which has two branches in Cambodia, is upgrading its financial-services centre in Chong Jom, a border town in Thailand's Surin province, to a branch to cash in on rising border trade, first senior executive vice president Weidt Nuchjalearn said.

He said the prospects for trade and investment in Cambodia were brighter than in Laos because Cambodia has a greater population, providing a market for Thai consumer products and services.

Meanwhile, Kasikornbank plans to establish a 'footprint' in Vietnam and Indonesia. In the first phase, it will open representative offices in those countries to offer trade-finance services to Thai companies, said president Predee Daochai. It will upgrade these offices to branches as the next step.

He said the bank last month also submitted a proposal to Laos to reopen a branch there. It is expected to be opened this year.

KBank is the only Thai bank that is active in China apart from BBL, which has acquired local-bank status in that country. KBank recently opened a sub-branch in Longgang district of Shenzhen.

Link:
Thai banks set to expand across region

Jelly via AP file

Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder.

Line up all the elements of Twitter co-founder Biz Stones success story and what you have is a list of all the things you shouldnt do: skip homework, drop out of college, run up credit debt (despite his extraordinary success Stone still had debts until as recently as 2010), and show up to crucial job interviews worse for wear. Stones path may not have been traditional, but it is certainly inspirational, and it is explored in depth in his new book Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind.

Part memoir, part business manual, part creative treatise, Stones book traces his success (non-linear and not without its bumps), all the way back to his school days and reflects upon the qualities that set him on the path to achieve the extraordinary things his young self always sensed he would.

Here, Stone, a generous and committed philanthropist, discusses the more empathetic, evolved success metric he now aspires to and explains how it relates to his new venture Jelly (an app which enables users to tap into their social network to get answers to lifes questions). He reflects on the risks he took, the rules he challenged, the stuff he can live without, and how our digital evolution has only just begun.

You once toasted your future self who will pay for all this. You say you felt destined for something extraordinary. Was that intuition or ambition?

I guess it was more of an intuition. I wouldnt describe it as an ambition. I just felt like eventually something really important and big would happen, I just didnt know what it was. When I was a little kid I always dreamed that I could fly, and then I thought maybe one day Ill actually be able to fly, and then as I got older I was like, well, I dont think Im going to be able to fly but maybe something big -- I just didnt know what it was. I was just sort of constantly in search of that. And it finally came true.

You were raised by a single mom who struggled financially. Did your early awareness of how money impacts quality of life and social standing, influence your attitudes to work and risk?

Thats a good question. Well, my attitude towards work was that I just always had to work. I started working when I was nine years old mowing lawns. I just always had jobs, I was always working, so I mean there was no question that work had to be done; you had to make money somehow.

With regard to risk, thats an interesting question because you would think that I would be averse to it -- having achieved any level of homeostasis would be good enough. There was just always this intuition that there was something greater. My hunch was always that I should just follow the next thing that I felt was right, but was also very, very intrigued by, and they could turn into big opportunities. First it was becoming a designer and making that into a career, and then it was my first start-up, and then it was this idea of democratizing information, and I became very passionate about that.

More:
Conscious Captalism: Biz Stone's New Success Metric