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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE EXPERIMENT OF A LIFETIME : JUMP IN !, October 25, 2001
I floated an experiment with this book. You know the sort of assay: let the book fall open and follow your gaze to a line, any line. As a personal venture, such experiment, homely and amateur, has, over time, yielded me an efficient, effective test of a writing's worth. In the present case, the line from Jump Time that caught my gaze referenced the Iroquois "Ceremony of Condolence." The ceremony is, at once, a mystical practice and a practical device which affords immediate succor and, in the long-term, transforms grief into life-affirming perspective.Any book worth your time will afford such affirmation. It will transport you even as it grounds you, affirms the richness of the "every day." As with the single line from the "Ceremony of Condolence," the whole of Houston's Jump Time achieves a delicate balance between the transcendent and the quotidien. The book rewards the investment of your time. Why? On any page, you will find Houston's signature blend of the numinous and the no-nonsense: blueprints for education (with real-time examples); "a harvest of spiritual practices" (leave the paltry single crop to Fundamentalists); a model for international peace-making (underscored by the author's solid diplomatic work) which is downright prescient in its aptness for our era; finally, a privileged glimpse into our own interior riches, our "entelechy." Ultimately, then, the signature blend is the keenest of provocations. Houston's anecdotes and antidotes provoke because the blend is packed into the loaded stuff of Jump Time. Houston takes care not to restrict the definition of Jump Time. With mastery, she draws with a broad metaphysical brush. She variously defines the phenomenon as "radical change" and the "time of the parenthesis" (whet your appetite?) Nevertheless, she astutely avoids force-feeding her reader with a facile, definitive take. Ultimately, we all know, instinctively, what Jump Time is (if you don't, turn on CNN), and Houston knows, respects that fact --in spades. She is here, at our private altar of the arm chair, to evoke and provoke -- to enrich the intimations we already possess deep in our psyches --collective and singular. Among the many joys peppering Jump Time, the reader will experience Jean Houston as an exuberant, proximate, compassionate narrator. Forget disaffected cynicism. This book is Jean Houston, plain and not-so-simple; not so simple because Houston has a preternatural knack for gifting us with the complex while sheltering us from the dogmatic. In the final analysis, Jump Time were better dubbed Jump Timely. Prescient and topical, the tome is a lifeline in a world where all bets are off. In this new world, this post-September 11 realm, we are, as nations and individuals, struggling to quell our fears, define our next steps. Our spirits falter under the weight of our leaders' well-intentioned but wan rhetoric -- rhetoric that, with another major wave of terrorism, may go the way of bankrupt metaphor. In this mind-numbing hour when, as Houston reminds us, "affairs are soul-size," Jump Time appears as a manual for meaning, as primer for the "New Mind" that is a prerequisite to personal and global survival. Do yourself a cosmic favor: buy the book, try the experiment. It is the experiment of a lifetime.
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