Books Read in March, 2024.

“Splinters—another kind of love story” by Leslie Jamison

The baby and i arrive at our sublet tis garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet.

One of the best memoirs I have ever read. 

Jamison weaves together her consuming love for her brand new daughter, the dissolving of her marriage and the guilt that came with it, new relationships and how they fit into her new and old lives as well as the old relationship of her parents and how they impacted her.

I found myself utterly mesmerized by her writing, her honesty and her story. It felt like a masterclass in memoir-writing.

Sentences I underlined:

“If being good enough wasn’t the answer, what was?”

“I said no. Without any explanation, or apology. What little person lived inside me, saying no like the? She was someone I wanted to get to know better.”

“Smell came back slowly. i couldn’t tell of the fait, almost floral taste of cantaloupe was really there or not. It kept flickering in and out, like a stuttering light bulb.”

“Quarantine taught me what I’d been taught so many times before but still had trouble remembering—that there were so many other ways to be lonely besides the particular way I was lonely.”

“Hagitude—Reimagining the Second Half of Life” by Sharon Blackie

When I look back to the early years of my menopause, what I remember most is a quality of experience that resembled British journalist Suzanne Moore’s description of her own: “I don’t really have the mood sings the some talk about. I just have the one mood. Rage.”

As 60 looms on the horizon next year, I find myself for the first time, seriously contemplating my age. Needing to finally get down to it. To stop caring what others think of me. To stop people-pleasing and contorting myself to fit in, to make myself smaller so others are more comfortable. Books like this one really help with that mission.

Blackie explores this second half of a woman’s life through myths, psychology, modern mentors and her own personal experience She frames it as a time for flourishing and profound transformation.

This will sit on my permanent bookshelf.

Sentences I underlined:

“There can be a certain perverse pleasure, as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just when the world expects you to become quiet and diminish.”

“We hide our anger by refusing even to use the word—instead of saying we’re utterly furious, we talk about being ‘annoyed,’ or ‘upset,’ or ‘irritated.” We take refuge in sarcasm, we nurse grudges, or we simply withdraw.”

“As I grow older, I realize that my own writing is very much more than just a pleasureless form of self-expression—at its heart, it’s a way of trying to change the story, of weaving the possibility of a better world into being through the power of words.”

“Living the Artist’ s Way—An Intuitive Path to Greater Creativity” by Julia Cameron

I’ll begin at the beginning.

I recently finished working through this 6-week program with two friends. It is similar to the other variations of the Artist’s Way she has offered over the years: morning pages, artist’s date, walks, questions to reflect on. This time there is one more tool specific to the book: asking for guidance.

I have actually been doing this intuitively for a while now, before I even read this. As I write in my journal, if I am struggling with something or about to spin out into a shame spiral, this wise, nurturing voice appears on the page. 

Cameron advises us to ask for guidance on anything from the mundane to the profound. The more we connect with it, the more we can trust in it. 

Sentences I underlined:

“The essential message of guidance is the assurance that all is well; difficulties will work out; we are safe, guided, and protected.”

“Counting your positives—the things you did right—helps you build grounded and optimistic sense of self.”

“Lessons in Chemistry” a novel by Bonnie Garmus

Back in 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbeltless cars without giving it a second thought; back before anyone knew there’d even be a sixties movement, much less one that its participants wold spend the next sixty years chronicling; back when the big was were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible, the thirty-year-old mother of Madeline Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of jus tone thing: her life was over.

Elizabeth Zott is a chemist on an all-male team. All but one man accepts her and she falls in love with that one man: Calvin Evans. In love but refuses to marry him. She becomes the lone women on his rowing team where, once again, her presence is not welcome.

Elizabeth only knows how to speak her truth and that makes everyone around her uncomfortable, including her new boss who hires her to host a cooking show to fill an afternoon TV slot. Instead of seeing herself as a cook, she sees and presents herself as a chemist and says what is on her mind whether it’s that she is an atheist or that the soup a sponsor wants her to promote is poison. 

Reading this reminded me of how I often felt while watching “Mad Men.” Furious and appalled at how women were treated. Given our present political circumstances, it’s a very timely read. 

Sentences I underlined:

“Sometimes I think,” she said slowly, “that if a man were to spend a day being a woman in America, he wouldn’t make it past noon.”

“Courage is the root of change—and change is what we’re chemically designed to do.”

“Imagine if all men took women seriously. Education would change. The workforce would revolutionize. Marriage counsellors would go out of business. Do you see my point?”

“Chemistry is change and change is the core of your belief system. Which is good because that’s what we need more of—people who refuse to accept the status quo, who aren’t afraid to take on the unacceptable.”

“Radiant Rebellion—Reclaim Again, Practice Joy, and Raise a Little Hell” by Karen Walrond

A funny thing happens when you tell people you’re writing a book about joyful aging.

My age has never really been a thing I focused on or worried over. Now that 60 is staring me in the face next summer, I find I am more curious about aging. How I want to age. Who I want to be as I age. This is my third act so I find myself being pulled toward books by women on growing older. 

I underlined so much in this book. I love the sections she broke it into: Ignite, Disrupt, Connect, Envision. I could write a lot on each one. She offers a toolkit at the end so that we can actually engage with her content instead of merely consuming it. She covers everything from aging parents and an empty nest to finding your own style as well as your purpose. 

It’s a guidebook that I will return to often over the coming decades as I continue to curate my third act.

Sentences I underlined:

“What would it take to greet this new milestone time in my life in a way that set me up for aging gratefully, soulfully, purposefully?”

“No, my goal is to remain bien dans ma peau—to feel “well in my skin.”

“I want to keep my body, mind, and spirit in the best health required to remain curious and optimistic and open, from day to day. Because, really, it is in the living that we create a well-lived life.”

“Class—A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education” by Stephanie Land

My daughter arrived at her first day of kindergarten with a back[ack full of donated supplies.

This book truly opened my eyes. To everything from the barriers people in poverty face daily, to the way I reactively judged her for some of her choices. Hearing her story, in her own words not only opened my eyes, but also my heart. Who the hell am I to judge the choices anyone makes in their own private lives? 

The writing is crisp and elegant, giving a clarifying look at what it truly means to be trying to better yourself (the old pull yourself by your bootstraps schtick) but how so many obstacles are in place to keep you from doing what they say they want you to do: succeed in America.

It’s a story of motherhood and art and how to fit the two together while struggling everyday to stay financially afloat. 

It’s a story of surviving domestic abuse and yet still being tied to the abuser.

It’s a story of finding your voice on the page and in life.

It’s a story of persistence, of stumbling and getting up again over and over because you have no choice.

A riveting and compelling book that I could not put down.

Sentences I underlined: 

“Immediate acceptance of any shitty situation was what most people seemed to mean by resilience, and they needed poor people like me to be that way.”

“My life may be relentless, I wrote in a notebook, but goddammit so am I.”

“Drawing Breath—Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss” by Gayle Brandeis

The girl writes her first poem when she is four years old:

This collection of essays (and that word doesn’t feel large enough to contain the magic that these pieces are) drew breath into my sad, deflated creative lungs.

I inhaled the book in less than two days, underlining along the way, stopping to check her website to see if she offered any writing classes then diving back into the book.

Each piece is structured in such a creative way from the way she braids disparate things together to how the words form shapes on the flat page.

She explores the connection between breath and writing (as a writer and yoga teacher/student I loved this), the grief of losing parents, the fragility and strength of marriage, the impact of long Covid on her body and her writing and so, so much more. 

I want to carefully study and pull apart each essay to teach myself how to write my own essays that vibrate with such clarity and authenticity.

Sentences (just a few of the many) I underlined:

“We are made of breath; breath enlivens us, acts as conduit between ourselves and the elements, ourselves and whatever we might consider the divine.”

“Writing about her death gave me a valve—the story wasn’t always ready to explode from my throat.”

“Maybe that’s what it feels like to have your memory erased—you can just be a mammal in your body, living from moment to moment.”

“How we’re part of all of it—all this budding, all this flowering; all this generous falling away.”

Books Read in February, 2024.

“How to Do Nothing—Resisting the Attention Economy” by Jenny Odell
Nothing is harder to do than nothing.

That is especially true these days with 24/7 news access, 24/7 social media access, 24/7 TV (remember when the stations used to go off the air late at night?). Then there’s the immediacy of texting and feeling like we are on call all of the time.

Odell explores this and so much more in this thought-provoking book. It is not only about setting boundaries with technology for our own well-being but for our collective well-being, including that of our planet. 

She wants us to do nothing, to drop out of the productivity race so we can drop in to how we can have a positive impact on the world we live in. Instead of experiencing it from behind a screen, she encourages us to jump in and make a difference. 

I underlined a lot and can not wait to discuss it at our book club. One thing I really appreciated is how I had to really focus. It is not a book you skim. So, on a book about reclaiming our attention from the commercialized social media whose sole purpose is to keep our attention in order to monetize it, I reclaimed my attention as I read this book.

Sentences I underlined:

“The point of doing nothing as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.”

“But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercialized social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.”

“For me, doing nothing means disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework.”

“I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again together.”

“Happy Place” a novel by Emily Henry

A cottage on the rocky shoreline, with knotty pine floorboards and windows that are nearly always open.

To give my brain a little rest, I picked up this fun, lighter book. While I missed the backdrop of publishing and/or writing, I enjoyed the friendship group and how the landscape of Maine became almost like another character. 

Harriet and Wyn have broken up but have neglected to tell their family and closest friends. So when Harriet shows up to Maine to be with her best friends since college, she is shocked to see Wyn there. They agree to pretend to be together so that they don’t ruin their friends’ vacation. The longer they spend together, the more they still feel the attraction to each other and the more confusion and anger rises to the surface.

It’s a story of friendship, place, secrets and learning to face the truth of what we want, who we want to be with and who we want to be.

Sentences I underlined:

“My best friends taught me a new kind of quiet, the peaceful stillness of knowing one another so well you don’t need to fill the space. And a new kind of loud: noise as a celebration, as the overflow of joy at being alive, here, now.”

“Want is a kind of thief. It’s a door in your heart, and once you know it’s there, you’ll spend your life longing for whatever’s behind it.”

“Broken (in the best possible way)” by Jenny Lawson

You probably just picked up this book thinking, What the shit is this all about?

One of the few writers that make me literally laugh out loud as I am reading.

She is as open as ever about her struggles with mental health and explores trying a new treatment for depression (TMS) in one of the essays. In another, she brutally takes down our healthcare system and medical insurance as she battles them to cover the treatments and meds that she needs. It is spot on.

Her humor is dark and her hallmark raw honesty is on display in this collection which seem to dovetail beautifully with a line from her introduction: “What we really want is to know we’re not alone in our terribleness.”

A sentence I underlined:

“What really brought the world together was dropping the pretense that everything is shiny and perfect so that, for a moment, we could all accept how wonderfully human we are.

“If You Want to Write—a Book about Art, Independence and Spirit” by Brenda Ueland

I have been writing a long time and have learned some things, not only from my own long hard work, but from a writing class I had for three years.

A friend recently sent me a quote from this book. I had read it decades ago but it was still on my  shelf so I decided to read it again.This was one of the first books on writing I picked up back when I first started teaching myself how to write. I remember it being so inspiring. 

Today, easily 20 years (if not more) later, I still found parts of it inspiring but I also found some relief that I am no longer dependent on such books to inspire me to write. I’ve been writing for decades. And I’ve been writing something every single day for seven years.

Her advice is practical. Her voice is sassy, embodying the independent spirit in the subtitle. I remember reading the writing samples she shares way back when and hoping that some day I could write like that. I am happy to say that I do write like that. 

A sentence I underlined:

 “Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks fro himself. But it must be from his true self and not from the self he thinks he should be.”

“The Senator’s Wife” a novel by Sue Miller

From her perch in the middle of the backseat, Meri surveys the two in front—her husband, Nathan, and Sheila, the real estate agent.

Sue Miller is a master at bringing readers deep into the private lives of women. In this case, Delia and Meri. They live next to each other in a duplex. Delia is the the wife of a senator she still loves after forty years of marriage but because of his many infidelities, they live apart. Meri and Nathan are just beginning their lives together: a new home, new jobs and, unexpectedly, a new baby. 

The chapters alternate between Meri and Delia revealing their separate and private, internal lives as well as all the moments where they intersect. One particular moment of intersection changes everything for both of them.

It is ultimately a story about home. The literal homes we live in, that we create for ourselves, the people that are home to us and finding home within ourselves. 

A passage I underlined:

“She’d calmed herself by carefully setting the table on the balcony for her usual breakfast. She’d had to wipe the table and chair dry with a towel. Then she brought out a tray with the croissant, the seedless raspberry jam, the rich dark coffee with steamed milk. She sat down and laid her napkin across her lap. The consolation of the daily, she thought.”

Books Read in January, 2024.

“The Wound Makes the Medicine” by Pixie Lighthorse

These writings are the pieces of me that rose up during deep healing after a shattering heartbreak touched off many older, yet un-healed heartbreaks.

This books shines a light into what we tend to keep hidden in the dark: grief, loss, suffering, pain. She shines a light so that we may heal. 

Emerging from her own deep healing process, she leads us through the four elements and how we can turn to them in times of hardship. How we can lean on them to heal. Each chapter is brief and ends with an affirmation. You can read it in order or at random as needed. 

It is a balm to any battered soul longing to heal.

Sentences I underlined:

 “New grief has a way of stirring up ancient grief.”

“Remember that your liberation begins inside, and can be supported by the cycles of nature moving in and around you.”

“We ‘clear the air’ with caring communication, amends, reflections, validations of our and others’ experiences, and bringing truth to strenuous situations.”

“Hello Beautiful” a novel by Ann Napolitano

For the first six days of William Water’s life, he was not an only child.

That one, essential fact has a ripple effect on several generations, forward and back. 

I don’t even know what to say about this gorgeous novel. I finished it last night and then laid it on my heart and just bathed in the afterglow of the characters and the writing and the story. 

While it is an homage to “Little Women” I also felt an echo of “Virgin Suicides. In all three books, there are the individual sisters, then there is the entity of their sisterhood which becomes a character in and of itself. 

It is a beautiful story of love, family, sisterhood, betrayal, forgiveness and being true to yourself. The sentences are exquisite. It is the kind of book I long to write myself. In fact, the way she structured this novel, has given me insight into how I could proceed with my current novel. 

I don’t often save novels to reread but I absolutely will with this one.

Sentences I underlined:

“Her family was a mirror in which she recognized her reflection.”

“I didn’t know that you could lose someone, and that meant you lost so much else.”

“William rarely laughed, and his hands tingled, as if they’d just woken up from an oxygen-deprived sleep.

“The passage of time, and the details that spun some moments into unforgettable memories and others into thin air, traveled with Sylvie—the swirling atmosphere of her own life—while she walked.”

“She was no longer who she used to be, and she wasn’t yet whoever she was becoming.”

“1000 Words—A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round” by Jami Attenberg

Have you ever made something that has changed your life forever completely by accident?

I don’t read as many books on writing as when I first started out. I used to read more about writing, now write more. But when I saw that this was coming out, I pre-ordered it. 

I have participated in Jami’s mini writing boot camps several times. It feels good to be writing in community. The daily letters of inspiration and motivation from her and other writers do indeed inspire and motivate me. I have kept them all in a specific gmail folder to refer back to. But now to have so many others, plus news pieces by Jami herself all in one book is just what I needed. 

Woven in between Jami’s reflections on being a writer and living a writing life, are contributions from other writers such as Melissa Febos, Benjamin Percy and Meg Wolitzer.

The subtitle promises to offer guidance to stay creative, focused, and productive all year round and I can see it doing exactly that. This will be a book that sits on my desk so I can return to it again and again whenever I need inspiration or motivation.

(It also fits together perfectly with “A Year In Practice––Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Cycles of Creative Expression” by Jacqueline Suskin)

I underlined many sentences but here are a few:

“How do we get out of our own way so we can succeed?”

“Look at the source of the pain, I thought, and track the way it radiates.”

“Reading stimulates growth, both as a person and an artist.”

I especially love this:

“There are two questions I ask myself repeatedly about my writing until I’m so far along  a project I don’t need to ask them anymore:

1. Who are you writing this for?
2. What do you hope to accomplish with this work?

It’s truly the best way to check in with yourself when you sit down to write. When the page feels at its blankest, you can immediately fill it by answering those questions.

“Girlhood” by Melissa Febos

1. First, the knees. They meet the gravel, then street, the blunt hips of curbs.

This is a stunning, powerful look at the bodies of girls and women, what it is like to inhabit them, what it is like  when they change, how they become the lens though which the world sees us and thus, how we see and experience the world. 

Each essay is so thought-provoking and each feels like a master class in writing an essay. She weaves personal narrative with history and interviews with other women. From the back cover: “This is a philosophic treaty, an anthem, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a closed self.”

Sentences I underlined;

“Desire filled my bones with air.”

“My story is an ordinary one. All of ours are. Many worse iterations of it are playing out right now and will continue to until we all understand that slut is a word that men invented, like witch, to maintain power over women and to keep them in service to men.”

“What bodies are more docile, more reflexively policed, than women’s? Not even those of children, I suspect.”

“I had spend most of my life thinking of my body as an instrument, an object connected to my psyche but not integrated with it. My body, I realized, was not the box that held myself, it was my self.”

“The How—Notes on the Great Work of Meeting Yourself” by Yrsa Daley-Ward

We are afraid of small things. Large things. Dead things.

I highlighted the entire first paragraph which is always a good sign that a book is going to resonate  and this one absolutely did.

It is not all new information to me, but she slides in sideways, offering a slightly different take. And the writing itself is just beautiful, poetic. It is a beautiful blending of short reflections on the work of being human with her powerful poetry. 

Sentences I underlined:

“Everything needs upkeep, and it’s tiring.

Everything needs upkeep, and it’s terrifying.”

“We must pay attention to what adds meaning to our life and what steals from it. We have to choose.”

“Be intentional with the story you are designing. You are your life’s work.”

“We remember our bodies in pain or worry about the threat of pain. We remember them in illness or the idea of illness. We fear the fragility of our homes.”

“Day” a novel by Michael Cunningham 

This early, the East River takes on a thin layer of translucence, a bright steely skin that appears to float over the river itself as the water turns from its nocturnal black to the opaque deep green of the approaching sky.

A moving story told over the course of three years on the exact same date, with the pandemic right in the middle. That structure was so interesting and was really the spine of the novel, holding up the narratives from the points of view of different characters. 

In Brooklyn, Dan and Isobel’s marriage is slowly but steadily unraveling. Their daughter Violet  is five and sees more than her parents are aware of while their son Nathan is taking steps out into his own life and friends at the age of ten. Then there is Isobel’s brother Robbie who is staying with them until he can afford a place of his own. He has a deep bond with each member of the family so when he moves to Iceland, the cracks in the family deepen and the pandemic puts additional pressure on them.

The writing is almost poetic. It is fluid and has such depth. While the pandemic is definitely part of the story, it does not overwhelm but rather informs it. It is a lovely exploration of the complications of being family and being human in the midst of ordinary and extraordinary times and all that entails. 

A sentence I underlined: 

“What I do want to try and say is that up here I feel time passing through me, passing through the world, in ways I never have before.”

“White Fragility—Why It’s for Hard for White People to Talk About Racism” by Robin Diangelo

White people in North America live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race, and white people are the beneficiaries of that separateness and inequality.

That is the first sentence. Diangelo just throws us right into the deep end with facts. Hard facts. Facts that we white people try desperately to deny and ignore but that doesn’t make them any less true. All it does is keep racism in place.

I underlined so much in this book. She shines a light on racism and white fragility, white supremacy, white privilege, white women tears, and so much more that made me see it all in a clearer perspective. I see it in our society and, most importantly, I see it in me.

She does a good job of pointing out these hard truths with compassion but without coddling us. She gives us real world examples from her work as a diversity educator. She gives us tools to use to confront our own racism and to call it out when we encounter it in our lives. 

So much to unpack. I will read it again and she offered an extensive reading and video list to continue educating myself. 

Sentences I underlined:

 “When I say that only whites can be racist, I mean that in the united States, only whites have the collective social and institutional power and privilege over people of color. People of color do not have this power and privilege over white people.”

“The simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic.”

Books Read in November + December 2023.

“Enchantment—Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age” by Katherine May

Lately I wake in the night and a few panic seconds pass in which I can’t locate myself.

Struggling with work, family and the aftereffects of the pandemic, May sets out on a journey to reawaken wonder and awe within her daily life. 

Just as her second book, “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times” came out at the perfect time, right as the pandemic locked us down, this book has the perfect timing as we try to adjust as the world rushes to reopen and get back to some level of normalcy.

Beyond the residue of the pandemic and the lingering impacts of it, we deal with astonishing heartbreaking news on a daily basis. This book can help us begin to balance some of that despair with hope and wonder. 

She explores the restorative qualities of the natural world through earth, water, fire and air. She shows us how quiet wonder and subtle magic surrounds us if we only awaken to them.

Some sentences I underlined:

“Those rolling news cycles, the chatter on social media, the way that our families have split along partisan lines: it feels as though we’ve undergone a halving, then a quartering, and now we are some kind of social rubble.”

“I mean committing to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, to actively looking for small distillations of beauty, to making time to contemplate and reflect.”

“The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” by Suzanne Collins

Coriolanus released the fistful of cabbage into the pot of boiling water and swore that one day it would never pass his lips again.

I’m a sucker for a villain origin story and I had to finish this before seeing the movie. 

We discover who President Snow was as a teenager. How he thought, what he dreamed of, how he related to his family and friends. We see him struggle with choices to protect himself, his family and his female tribute, straddling the line between good and evil, between the personal and patriotism. It offers insight into how he eventually came to be the power-hungry president of Panem. 

A sentence I underlined:

“I think there’s a natural goodness built into human beings. You know when you’ve stepped across the line into evil, and it’s your life’s challenge to try and stay on the right side of that line.”

“Thicker Than Water” a memoir by Kerry Washington

I got a text from my mother.

Little did she realize what a journey of transformation this text would initiate.

Washington can write. The prose is lovely. The story is structured in a beautiful way that weaves together the past and present as well as the personal and public sides of her.

It was revelatory to discover that a woman as successful and beautiful as Kerry Fucking Washington struggles with the same issues as me: body image, food, people-pleasing and good girl syndrome.

It’s a story of secrets and truth, of the truth setting you free.

It’s a story of looking deeply at a life and becoming who you were meant to be.

It’s story of looking back and seeing the clues that had been dropped like breadcrumbs to lead you to the truth of who you are. 

It’s a story beautifully told and breathtakingly honest. 

A couple of sentences I underlined:

“With Jamie’s help, I remembered that acting was about discovery, about messy, flawed humanity, and about being open to something new each and every time, not about being perfect or doing the same thing twenty times in a row.”

“They were opportunities to move closer to myself, not some version of me born out of perfectionism and people-pleasing and being the good girl, but a version rooted in authenticity and the courage to be my true self, even as I grappled with knowing less about where that true self came from.”

“What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About—Fifteen Writers Break the Silence” edited by Michele Filgate

“On the first cold day of November, when it was so frigid the I finally needed to accept the fact that it was time to take me winter coat out of the closet, I had a craving for something warm and savory.”

Filgate writes, “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re alway trying to return to them.” 

Each essay explores these journeys home. The stories vary wildly from a mother who discloses too much to her daughter to a mother who is horribly abusive and everything in between.

Each essay is brutally and beautifully honest as each writer grapples with one of the most intimate and complicated relationships we have. 

Sentences I underlined:

“Sometimes I had the impression that she was saying these things aloud for the first time, as if the memories were dawning on her, unfiltered.”

“There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with ‘mother’ as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us.”

“That wouldn’t jibe with my long-established, uncontested role as The Good Daughter.’

“I hope this helps” by Nakeia Homer

Here you are.

I came across this quote online and immediately ordered this book:

What if what you want the most can’t find

you because you are dimming your own

light, hiding your own magic, downplaying

your own brilliance, and denying your own power?

As I read it, I discovered that she wrote another quote that I share often:

You are not lazy, unmotivated, or stuck.

After years of living you life in survival mode, you are exhausted.

There’s a difference.

I remember almost crying with relief the first time I read those words. 

Each page is a sigh of recognition, of feeling seen and heard and most importantly, accepted. Considered daily “pep-talks you didn’t know you needed,” this is a book I will turn to again and again to nourish my soul.

Sentences I underlined:

“How do I find my way back?

I write. I write the words I need to hear.”

“You’ll change when staying the same becomes unbearable.”

“The other thing is: healing will cause you to show up differently.”

“You don’t need another resolution.

You need a declaration.”

“A Year In Practice––Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Cycles of Creative Expression” by Jacqueline Suskin

If you picked up this book, if you’re drawn to its title and concept, you’re likely interested in the intricacies, possibilities, and cycles of creative practice.

 At the yoga studio here I teach, we often weave into our classes the sister science of Ayurveda which is about living in harmony with the seasons. I’m surprised I didn’t think about applying it to my creative practice. Luckily, Jacqueline Suskin did.

She takes us thorough each season, exploring the energy of each and how we can connect with  and/or balance that energy to inspire our creativity. Many of her lovely poems are interspersed throughout, along with questions for reflection, suggestions activities to celebrate each season and how to transition between seasons.

It’s a beautiful book that I will turn to again and again as I look to nature for creative guidance.

Sentences I underlined:

“Each season is a Muse that evokes a particular artistic possibility if we take note of the instructions offered.”

“Every winter I end up clarifying which creative projects I want to spend time with during the rest of the year.”

“The Perishing” a novel by Natashia Deon

My name is Sarah Shipley and I’ve slept with five women.

Lou is a young black immortal woman who wakes up in a Los Angeles alley in the 1930’s with no memory of how she got there or her life before. She is taken in by a foster family and later becomes the first black female journalist at the Los Angeles Times. She soon meets a man that she has no memory of knowing but recognizes him as the face she has been drawing for year.s 

Alternating between the 1930’s and 2102, between the stories of Lou and Sarah, we encounter a mystery as well as a history lesson on race in America in a profound, genre-breaking novel.

Sentences I underlined:

“Change a pattern in your own life, you change your whole life. But I tell you the truth, the only pattern worth repeating is kindness.”

“We’re all on the edge of somebody else’s violence.”

Join Me on Substack!

Still not sure if Substack will be replacing this blog or supplementing it. Figuring it out as I go.

But you can join me here.

Thank you for taking time to read my words. I know we have all have our attention being pulled at constantly so I appreciate you.

Week 2 Without Social Media.

Image found via Pinterest.

After my second full week without social media, I am noticing all this new white space in my life.

I learned about white space in art school. It is a basic design principle that refers to any blank or empty space surrounding all the other elements in a design composition whether it’s a painting or a magazine spread or a resumé.

Without social media filling up every empty moment in my days or taking up all the space in my mind, I am noticing and/or creating that white space in my days and in my mind.

It reminds me a bit of The Artist’s Way tool of Reading Deprivation. Julia Cameron’s intention is to see how we use reading as a distraction from our creative work. She challenges us to not read for a week and see what we do instead.

That is exactly what I am doing but instead of reading deprivation, it is social media deprivation. Only, it doesn’t feel at all like a deprivation. It feels incredibly nourishing.

With the free time my social media break is creating, here are a few things I’ve been doing:

~ Playing in my art journal

~ Created a fall display with branches from our yard

~ Walking outside

~ Back to meditating

~ Lots of reading. Like 100 pages a day.

~ Playing with my pup

~ Relaxing in the hot tub

~ And, course, writing

Are you aware of the white space (or lack of) in your life? Feel free to share in the comments.

Week 1 without Social Media

October 1

After writing on WIP for 20 minutes I got restless. Did Wordle. Part of Connections. Put it away.

Immediately after deleting the apps off my phone I felt lighter.

October 2

First full day without social media. I woke up excited instead of dreading it. Flowed into my intended morning routine: yoga, Rituals of Transformation and meditation. After breakfast I wrote my morning pages.

Noticing how often I curate my life for content. Taking photos of my food or writing or hot tub or hammock instead of just enjoying the moment by immersing myself in it. 

Noticing how often my attention is drawn away from the moment, thinking of how to share it.

Feeling less pressure now.

Had immediate response to wanting to share a story I read. Instead, I just read it and had my own thoughts about it.

I taught and felt more present and joyful and connected than I have in a long time. It’s almost like social media is this wall that isolates me from the world when it was meant to connect me.

I was drawn to my phone between classes. I see I use it as a transitional space from one activity to the next. Now I am writing about that experience instead of just mindlessly transitioning.

October 3

Feeling crappy with a fever after my flu shot and Covid booster. Would’ve been a day that I mindlessly scrolled. Instead, I am napping, watched a good movie. My focus is being slowly mended as I leave my phone alone while watching a show.

I am watching the vote to recall the Speaker. Normally I’d be online voicing my opinion and gathering opinions of others. I felt that pull at first but then was relieved that I don’t have that platform to turn to. All it does it churn me up.

October 5

Fourth full day.

I’m sleeping better and falling asleep more easily.

I read close to 200 pages yesterday.

My days seem slower and more spacious instead of fast and cluttered. 

October 9

It’s been a full week without social media. Can’t say that I miss it. Can’t say I don’t miss it. This week has been a week of awakening and observing. Awakening from a trance. Observing my mind and how often I am pulled toward my phone.

I can’t be surprised. I understand that my attention is their commodity. And they know all the tricks to lure me into their apps.

Without social media, I am consistently reading between 100 and 200 pages a day. I can feel my focus being mended. It’s a relief to know that the damage isn’t permanent.

Not at all sure what my relationship with social media will look like after this month is over but I am truly enjoying my non-relationship with it now.

A Red Leaf in July.

While walking the other day I came across this lone, red leaf on the pavement.

It is mid-July yet time is marching on.

It’s still summer yet autumn is getting ready to step in. 

Change is always right in front of us as much as we try to run from it or deny or ignore it. 

It is both unsettling and comforting.

Today I am choosing to be comforted by it.

It’s heavy week as we approach the 3-year anniversary of my best friend’s unexpected and devastating death. 

Even as I find myself drawn back into those early days and weeks of grief, I am reminded that it is temporary. The grief comes and goes and it changes each time. It never stays the same.

The one thing that will stay the same is the immense hole her loss left in my life. But the hole doesn’t dominate my life. I navigate around it. Some days it feels like this huge abyss I am teetering on. Other days it is  crevice that I easily step over.

That little red leaf reminded me that everything is temporary. That used to scare the hell out of me because that means my life is temporary as well as the lives of those I love. But it also means that the heavy feelings are temporary so I know I can get through them. It means that joy is temporary so I try to savor those moments. 

When I first saw that red leaf, I found myself yearning for fall, my favorite season. But then I stepped back and let it be a reminder to enjoy the season I am in for it is temporary, to enjoy the moment I am in for it is fleeting.

Glimmers are Having a Moment.

Image found via Pinterest.

Glimmers are having a moment. They are meant to be opposite of triggers. When we encounter a glimmer it sparks an internal feeling of joy, contentment, safety or connection. 

Glimmers leave me feeling light, hopeful and connected. Triggers leave me feeling heavy, despairing and isolated. 

Where I find glimmers:

~ snuggling with my pup

~ swaying in a hammock

~ walking around the lake

~ biting into a perfectly ripe, sweet peach

They will be different of reach of us. Seek out those moments that make your whole body sigh with relief, with gratitude. 

I love how I am now experience my writing practice as a glimmer. It was my safe place to land throughout the pandemic, throughout my grief. It is always available. It demands nothing of me except to show up as I am. It brings me into a cocoon of connection and contentment.

The process itself is the glimmer. I focus on the writing and trust that it will make its way out into the world in whatever form it takes, and will then be a glimmer for someone who connects with it. For someone it is meant to find.

How will you receive or radiate glimmers today?

Enough is Enough.

Image found via Pinterest.

I woke up this morning with this thought: Each day is a struggle to make the right choices.

Now, I am grateful that I have the luxury of being able to choose how to spend the majority of my days. I fully grasp what a privilege that is. 

What I am struggling with is more internal. What is this “right” choice I am struggling to make? Where does it come from? Who declares whether it is right tor wrong?

It is the harsh, judgmental voice within me that tries to guide me toward the so-called right choices. It is the voice of perfection. It is the voice of all or nothing. It is an uncompromising voice. 

The problem is, I know this voice and whatever I do is never enough. Ever. 

If its job is to judge then it is always going to find me lacking in some way. That is what it is programmed to do. 

I write for an hour. But the voice says why not 2 hours? Why not treat it like a real job and write for 8 hours?

I get a story published. The voice says but you didn’t receive any money. And it’s just a story, why not a book?

When I publish a book I know it’s going to say but it’s not a best-seller. It didn’t win any awards. It’s not being reviewed in prestigious magazines. 

That voice is relentless.

And it is exhausting. 

No wonder I wake up tired and dreading the choices I make on how to spend the day ahead of me. 

When I was practicing micromovements, the dread and that inner voice eased up a lot. Maybe that is what I need to go back to. Set up tiny, very doable goals. Build up that trust in myself again. Because right now I have zero trust in myself.

People who know me well, if they read this, are going to say I am being too hard on myself. 

I know this. I am extraordinarily hard on myself. I have extraordinarily high expectations of myself. 

I am not happy about this but I know this about myself. I have accepted it. I try to work with it. I try to give myself grace. 

Setting very small goals gives me grace.

Remembering all the things I have done consistently gives me grace:

~ writing something everything single day for over 2,342 days

~ writing reflections on every single book I’ve read for 16 years

~ finishing an entire novel-in-stories

~ finishing a draft of a novel

~ almost done with the draft of  YA fantasy novel

~ not drinking alcohol for almost 4 years

These are not small things.

They are evidence of my ability to show up, to be consistent, to do the hard work. 

I think the best way to give myself grace is noticing when I start my day if the word “should’ pops up. Should shows me that it is coming from an external source wanting to shame me. 

Instead of thinking what I should do, I need to focus on what I want to do. 

(The stigma of a woman wanting something/anything will be the subject for a whole other post very soon.)

Today I wanted to get out the house to write so I came to the bookstore.

Today I wanted to explore this space of shame and making right choices so I am writing this blog post.

Today I want to read some poetry some I pulled a few books of the shelves here to explore. 

Today I want to make some progress on my novel so it is opened and I will write but without a word count. Today is about just showing up. Connecting with the story. 

Today I wanted to work on my focus so I set up two distraction blockers to help with that. 

Today I want what I am doing to be enough so it is. 

Enough with the shaming.

Enough with the dread.

Enough with the shoulds.

Enough is enough.