Savor An Adventure In Optimism!
"Even when headlines clamor, or life deals tough challenges, we can find numberless reasons to feel grateful and hopeful."
Excerpts from Glad to Be Human by award-winning author Irene O'Garden
“Glad to be human in the twenty first century, where people spend lives designing, dancing, building, writing, studying their minutest fascinations, people dedicating lives to food or fashion or philosophy, creating and creating, absorbed in their work for love of it, as now they marry for love. People hungering to understand each other and their families, reading, talking, tending the earth and their dreams, and the playing of games and of sport.”
“Glad to be human for cooking and slicing life, looking for meaning and searching and finding the missing word, the lost sock, the thrilly scary moment reaching around in your purse and not finding your wallet, rummaging, rummaging, knowing it’s there, finding it under your fingers with pleasure, and finding with pleasure at last that the meaning of life’s like a cell on the field of your vision, you know it is there, but each time you look it springs out of your sight, but looking at anything else, it springs back into place and you’re looking right through it. Glad to be human, abundantly answered.”
From the Author
Isn’t reading wondrous? Words appear before us and, like the faces of dear old friends, we can’t help recognizing them. So it is with feeling glad to be human. We all recognize that wordless joyous whoosh.
I wrote this book to remind myself— and you— how often that shapeshifting grace arises. It spirals in simple moments as we repot our plants, tackle creative projects, or tenderly hang an heirloom ornament. It suffuses us when we witness or perform acts of beauty in the face of our common sorrows.
It’s my hope that this book inspires you to recognize what makes you glad to be human, weaving and sharing your own brocade of joy.
What makes you glad to be human? Will you share?
Praise For Glad to be Human
"Glad to Be Human takes a defibrillator to your creative center!
"Get ready to devour the offerings at this table set by word weaver and poet Irene O'Garden.
Order Now From These Booksellers
About Irene O' Garden
IRENE O’GARDEN has won or been nominated for prizes in nearly every writing category from stage to e-screen, hardcovers, children’s books as well as literary magazines and anthologies.
Her most recent book, Risking the Rapids: How My Wilderness Adventure Healed My Childhood, was published by Mango in 2019. The memoir opens with the shocking death of her problematic older brother in 2014.
Irene’s writing is anthologized with Eleanor Roosevelt, Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem and others in The Greatness Of Girls (Andrews McMeel) Included is an excerpt from her memoir Fat Girl, which describes how she came to peace with food and body after a decades-long struggle. Harper San Francisco published it in hardcover with her drawings.