What I wrote yesterday applies to Norwegians, too. Or basically anything you don't know anything about. What made me think of it was a documentary about herring research in Norway, and the commentator called one Norwegian was called "Oyshtine" (at which point I yelled, "We're not Germans!") and another "Leef". You'd think that whoever was doing the documentary knew the names of the people they worked with. "Øystein" is pronounced sort of like Oystine, and "Leif" is pronounced Layf. If you're going to use names like that in your story, know at least how their owner would pronounce it.
I love you. Thank you.
Some time last month, I was listening to a new spiritual podcast, and the speaker said that we can all heal ourselves and each other by stating, "I love you. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you." Apparently, this series of four short statements healed all the patients of a psychiatric facility, simply by being uttered by a doctor while he was looking at the patient files. I was intrigued. So I googled the phrase and discovered it comes from a Hawaiian spiritual ritual called ho'oponopono .* I found a blogpost that described this "cleaning" process. I found an online article claiming that you can heal the whole planet with ho'oponopono because everything that comes into your sphere of experience is your responsibility.** I searched Amazon for books describing ho'oponopono. I bought Mable Katz 's book "The Easiest Way" .*** And her title may not be an exaggeration. After reading her short book, I have replaced my usual rit...
