A few years ago a mentor recommended a book called “The Soul of Money: Reclaiming the Wealth of Our Inner Resources.”

As always when a mentor recommended a resource, I promptly went out and bought it.

I then (again, as always) read it. But it didn’t really resonate.

I was having struggles with money back then – struggles that looked less like an inability to balance my checkbook and more like a love triangle where the third party insisted on remaining anonymous.

I had hoped reading the book would help me discover the identity of the mysterious (and seriously pissed-off) second suitor….and the cause for my ongoing financial crises. But as it turned out, all it did was make me feel guilty for not wanting to immediately run out and give away all my money to the poor.

Such was my limited understanding back then.

A few months ago, thanks in large part to a “mystery health problem” and the several expensive diagnostic tests the doctors ordered, I found myself back in that very same love triangle once again. Why couldn’t I just get ahead and STAY there? Why must a financial crisis always arise at the precise moment when I had reassured myself (just five minutes prior) that all things green and profitable were finally right side up for good?

I remembered “The Soul of Money” at this time and went hunting in my book case for it.

In this second older and somewhat wiser reading, I was immediately struck by what author Lynne Twist calls the “three scarcity myths”: there is not enough, more is better, and that’s just the way things are.

In each of these myths, I could clearly perceive my own financial thinking hard at work affirming and proving each one. I saw how I believed these things – or at least had been living like I believed. I saw my own money hopelessness unfolding and growing, rising higher and expanding wider until it touched all other elements of my life from love to career to fun and health and faith and …

Click on the image and get a free preview of “Chasing Silhouettes!”

My colleague and fellow author Emily Wierenga has written a book called “Chasing Silhouettes: How to Help a Loved One Battling an Eating Disorder.” She actually sent the manuscript to me a few months ago, which I assume is when her book was first released.

Me, being the ultra-efficient and organized person that I clearly am not (but sure wish I was!) saved it for after the annual holiday hecticness had ceased and ended up reading it right in the middle of the spring eating disorders awareness hecticness instead!

But as it turned out, that was a perfect time for me to read this helpful, supportive guide for loved ones of eating disorder sufferers.

A word of insight first, however. “Chasing Silhouettes” is Christian-based. As such, not every reader will resonate with the author’s specific approach to spirituality’s place in recovery.

That being said, what I suspect every reader WILL resonate with is how deeply loving, empathetic, compassionate and supportive Emily strives to be through her words on each and every page. You can see it for yourself in this quote from the book’s introduction:

“And I wish I could hug you and tell you that it is enough. You are enough, and one day, you’ll laugh with your loved one again.”

Emily also – helpfully – takes some of the potential fear-factor impact out of words like “anorexia” and “binge eating disorder” by relabeling them as “forts” – walls suffering people build around themselves to keep the super-scary, angry, vicious-seeming world away from them. This makes perfect sense to me. Or as she writes:

“It’s a scary place to be in, this place where you have no one, so you have to become bigger than life itself in order to carry yourself through the pain.”

She talks about why people start to suffer so much that they take their pain out on their bodies. And she talks about why people with loved ones surrounding them might feel like they have no one (I …

Recently my mom loaned me a book called “Peony in Love”. The title sounded vaguely familiar, but included as it was in a stack of other book club books she had recently finished with, I didn’t pay it too much mind initially.

Later, I was hunting around for something good to read and I rediscovered it. The first thing that fascinated me was that the author, Lisa See, was a Caucasian woman but all her books (excepting her own award-winning memoir) seemed to be about Chinese women. This intrigued me. Being a writer myself, I was also interested to learn that the book would share more about the life of wealthy Chinese women writers in the prior century.

So I started to read. I didn’t get too far into the book, however, before I realized that a central theme also revolved around using physical hunger to manage emotional hunger. The term used in the book, and in that era of Chinese society, was not “anorexic” but “lovesick”. Specifically, the “lovesick maidens” were a class of predominantly young, wealthy Chinese girls who, being denied of the love or control of destiny (or both) that their spirits craved, ceased from consuming food and liquids and seemingly wasted away in protest.

Knowing what medical science knows today about anorexia as a disease with complex origins and even more complex symptoms and side effects, I found this simplistic definition oddly heart-wrenching. In looking back over the landscape of my own developing eating disorder, which began around the age of 10, I discovered an element of deep shared truth – a link that spanned the centuries to connect modern day me to these ancient Chinese maidens.

Yes, we do have eating disorders in my family tree, especially on my Dad’s side. And yes, there are traits that I possess that undoubtedly would have predisposed me to developing an eating disorder at some point in my life anyway, whether it happened when and how it did or at another time for a different reason.

But the specific set of experiences I had seemingly just days or weeks prior …

Cosmo is a parrot. Specifically, she is an African Grey parrot and she lives in Georgia with Dr. Betty Jean Craige, a professor of literature and humanities. If you have spent more than five minutes reading my blog here (or elsewhere) you have already likely picked up on the fact parrots often edge out even people as my all-time favorite companions.

Parrots (unlike some people I’ve met) make smart, funny, hugely affectionate companions under the right circumstances. The right circumstances include that the parrot has to be bred and trained to live in captivity with humans, and the human has to be sensitive to what the parrot needs and be willing to spend the time to offer it.

In the way of Dr. Irene Pepperberg and her crew of African Greys, Dr. Craige has spent an inordinate (and no doubt deeply fulfilling) amount of time studying the ways of parrots. Or, specifically, she has spent a great deal of time studying one particular parrot – Cosmo. Dr. Craige has even written a book about her experiences called “Conversations with Cosmo: At Home with an African Grey Parrot”.

With this book, and unlike Dr. Pepperberg in her official role of animal researcher studying African Greys, Dr. Craige is also not shy to claim that Cosmo has done something called “acquiring language”.

Why is this significant, you might ask? It is significant because acquiring the comprehension and use of language is what many humans feel sets us apart from “lower” beings such as birds and other animals. My argument, vastly unscientific though it may be, is that we can spend all the time we like stoking our egos with the idea that we alone possess language. But the more likely scenario is that we simply don’t speak “bird” or “horse” or “elephant”, so we just don’t recognize it even when it is spoken all around us.