A Sabbath Life:
 One Woman's Search for Wholeness
 Kathleen Hirsch
 (Associate Writer & Reviewer - Dr. Alma Bond)
 2001 North Point Press/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
  ISBN: 0865475989

A woman's journey of awakening & change in her middles years toward a wholeness she did not know or care to find as a younger woman.

Kathleen Hirsch's intention was to share with other women her efforts to achieve in her middle years a wholeness she did not know or care to find as a younger woman. By listening to her inner voices & to the many inspiring women with whom she came in contact, she learned what it means to genuinely honor the Self.

Today she lives a life not as the culture would have her live it, but as she understands its underlying purposes & callings from within. Hirsch believes that success is a manifold & changing thing, & that when women embrace their own ways of seeing the realities around them, they create lives that are varied, abundant, fruitful, & rich in wisdom & peace. They then lead what the author calls “Sabbath lives.“ In honoring what makes them women, they transform the world around them.

Associate Reviewer Dr. Alma H. Bond writes:

Kathleen Hirsch was a successful journalist when she realized that she was little more than “a name on the title page,” that her true self had somehow gotten lost. She had lost touch with her center. She quotes Anne Lindburgh to the effect that without a center we aren't the people we were meant to be, “just a bundle of reactions and defenses and biases and opinions.”

Hirsch learned that in order to find her center, the old form of her life had to break open & die. The journey began in her forties with her first pregnancy when she discovered that to be a good mother, one must first learn to mother one's self. That new self for Hirsch had to reach far beyond the detached persona of a successful journalist. Restored to oneself, Hirsch believes, we can create our own paradise, in which there is no conflict between being both a mother & a force in the world.

As she began to change, she felt that words were returning to her from “a long-dead and secret place.” This language spoke to her as much through her body as through her mind. For Hirsch was pregnant with both her child & her new self.

Hirsch's bible, as for many feminists, was Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. When Woolf wrote, “The book has somehow to be adapted to the body,” she was not just writing about the creativity of books, but of all women's creative work. What she meant is that “Women ought not to settle for the standards and terms of work set down by men. Rather, we need to establish the terms that suit us and if we do, we will create works of genuine originality.” Woolf speculated that not only the form of the work but its contents will be different from men's. The new shapes will be based on the sensibilities of women, & might take forms as yet undreamed of.

Hirsch began to search out women who have achieved a satisfying rapport between the public & private parts of themselves, between mind & soul, spirit & creativity. She joined a group of women who based new works & ways of living on their personal development, woman who were able to face the unacceptability of life as they were living it. None of them were primarily concerned with finances. Rather, they wanted their work to have greater relevance to themselves & society. All sought to mold their lives into a new reality. This process went on from anywhere from one to three years, & when change did come it was gradual. For these women, the goal was not “to have it all;” it was about “being all.”

As she went about finding her authentic self, Hirsch began to realize that her art had changed, too. Her writing became different from anything she had ever done before. It was now “an assemblage of soul moments, a narrative of a woman's life written from an interior point of view.” At the same time, she discovered that her tastes were changing in life, too. For example, she surprised herself & her painter by selecting colors of periwinkle & bright yellow, in contrast to her usual shades of off-white. Hirsch ends her book by saying that she has planted & cultivated the garden of mid-life, now it is time for her to step out into the world again in ways she still has to learn. Of one thing she is certain, that inside of her, flawed & seasoned as she might be, “a new thing wants to bloom.”

A Sabbath Life is an interesting story of a mid-life crisis & how it was resolved. While Hirsch's method seems to have worked for her, there are other paths than the one she took to finding one's inner self. For the reviewer, it was psychoanalysis, for some it is Far Eastern philosophy, Yoga, or meditation. Whatever the path, a crisis does occur at mid-life, & one either finds one's own way in life or one dies, if not physically then emotionally. While Hirsch' story is true & perhaps helpful to the uninitiated, it seems to this reviewer that the author brings little that is new.

More from Kathleen Hirsch: A Home in the Heart of the City; Songs from the Alley.
(01/13/02)

Dr. Alma Bond
2002©Alma Bond
A RebeccasReads.Com Sr. Associate Reviewer

A RebeccasReads author featured in Authors & Books

Reviewer's Bio:
Dr. Alma Halbert Bond is the author of ten published books, including:
The Deadly Jigsaw Puzzle;
The Tree That Could Fly;
Tales Of Psychology (2004);
I Married Dr. Jekyll And Woke Up Mrs. Hyde (2000);
The Autobiography Of Maria Callas, A Novel (1998);
On Becoming A Grandparent: A Diary of Family Discovery (1994);
Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography (1998);
Profiles of Key West (1996).

She recently recorded her new manuscript, Old Age Is A Terminal Illness, as an audio book.

She is also the author of a just published children's picture book called The Tree That Could Fly.

Dr. Bond teaches Psychology & Writing online at WriterSchool.