myself. I am in constant judgement of myself and my own abilities to do the things that I really want to do most. "I want to work for myself", part of me says. "You can't do that, you won't make any money and you won't be productive at all", the other part of me reports. My creative free-spirit slinks back to its corner. My judgemental mind is much kinder to others. "Oh, wow, look at what they are doing! That is amazing! If they can do it, so can you." "Yeah, right", my judgement chimes in. "You think you can, but can you really?" And the two sides part of my mind battle back and forth like that. All the time. So I fight back. I do meditaton. I go to a yoga class and slide into a deeper state of awareness. I can not let judgement win.

I am reading a book called Among Flowers by Jamaica Kincaid. I picked it up because I really have liked Kincaid's work in the past and this particular story takes place in the Nepal Himalaya, a region of the world which facinates me. I started out really like the book, which is a non-fictional piece of the authors journey to collect seeds for her garden with her friends. I am not sure what I think now...as I find some of her commentary about being in a foreign place kind of hypocritical (after reading another book by her called A Small Place) which is all about the little island of Antigua and the way that she views tourism and tourists as a native to that place. It was a very insightful little book and I was hoping for that same kind of insight when it came to this new story, but I am a little bit disappointed to find that the author fields the same sort of ingnorance as a tourist that she poked fun at in her other story. It is interesting. I have not finished the book, so perhaps the insight comes to the author later on in her tale...but we shall see.