Books on my nightstand as September comes to an end

Ahh, cooler weather comes, bringing with it more minutes of darkness to fill with reading, cozy things that are knitted, hot tea, and 6 year old snuggles….

Here’s my line up….from top to bottom…

Educated by Tara Westover

Finished reading it last night. Read it in just a few evenings. It caused me to stay up well past my bedtime and look forward to picking it back up that next evening. The author writes in beautiful storytelling ways with impressive descriptive skills. Not to mention the serious psychological themes that she’s grabbling with over the course of the book - some intense and hardcore humxn issues that are highly personal as they are self-love and love of family versus survival.

Likely, my attraction to this book also is deeply personal as I am now processing. Her account of how she became educated in life, family relationships, and formal schooling brought up my own memories long forgotten. The texts between a cousin and I this weekend were long and full of “do you remember” and “ohhh, I get it.” We did not grow up Mormon as the author did, but we do share some evangelical upbringing and influences, which I had never paused to reflect on it honestly enough to label it with the word, evangelical, until now. My cousin and I weren’t homeschooled but our other cousins were and their fathers were preachers. While my grandma, trained as a preacher – quite an anomaly for the time, lived with us. She was my main religious influence albeit not the only since I also attended parochial school up until 6th grade. Anyway, before reading this book, I would have just said we grew up in the highly religious South. I have a new lens and some areas to keep processing. Phew…good stuff, people.

Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling our Stories Transforms our Lives by Louise DeSalvo

Timing of the universe, I tell ya. I ordered a used copy of this book weeks ago and lo-and-behold it arrives yesterday afternoon just as I was wrapping up Educated. Timing, seriously. It seems evident that the writing of Educated was a source of healing for the author and I also believe in the power of writing. I took an online writing course a couple-ish years ago called Write into Light with Dr. Martha Beck, who is the person I did life coaching training with (I got to the coaching from the writing course). Anyway, from that course, I witnessed with myself the power of deep reflection paired with intentional writing to produce serious healing of old wounds and the creation of new stories and meaning. I started this book last night before falling asleep and am excited to read some more ways to be intentional about writing for personal healing.

All about Love by bell hooks

This is one from bell hook’s trilogy on love. I have been making my way through it slowly and intentionally for the last two months. Her work to reframe the conversations on love through a feminist perspective has been very instrumental to me of late. I instagramed back in August on the day of divorce court about her message of how we can learn to truly love. Since then I’ve reflected on the definition she gives of love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” (p. 4). How care and love are not the same thing. Care may be a component of love but is not the manifestation of love.

hooks builds the case, as many Buddhist and others do, that love is all there is. Love is everything. Yet our educational systems, family patterns, and work life all undermine the importance and true meaning of love. Two months reading and I’m only half way through because I need to process it as I go.

This will be my Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America by Morgan Jerkins

Just picked it up from the library and can’t wait to get into it and find ways to incorporate it into my seminar class in the spring on Womxn and Non-binary. I picked up this collection of essays though because my understanding is it is about all those intersections of the author and RAGE, which I am so intimately interested in and will be addressing in class next semester, too. Stay tuned.

The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds by Gavin Van Horn

I met the author at my weekend in New Mexico lead by a different author, Dr. Sharon Blackie, from Ireland. Haven’t started it, but my understanding or why I got it to begin with is this idea of even in urban landscapes we can create and have connections to nature because opportunities are there. Gavin writes from the streets of Chicago about the diversity of animals and his connection to them.

City of Girls by Liz Gilbert

I doubt this needs anything said. I haven’t started it. It’s my next ‘fun’ read to balance out the heavy, the heart, the hurt, the work, etc, of all the other things I read.

Contemplative Approaches to Sustainability in Higher Education edited by Eaton, Hughes, and MacGregor

What to say that’s brief. I am so fucking rage-filled over climate change and how much we’ve done to destroy the planet in a short amount of time. This book gives me language and direction to make changes in higher education that might help individuals create a connection to nature and the Earth through reflection and mindfulness so maybe the next generation aren’t the assholes we are. This read fits in with my interest on unlearning and writing new meaning to do better, be more ethical, be more connection to each other and the universe, which includes nature and the Earth.

And then these two, they stay on my nightstand these days and I pick them up and read or re-read when I need.

The Dark Side of the Light Chasers: Reclaiming your Power, Creativity, Brilliance, and Dreams by Debbie Ford

The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children by Shefali Tsabary

What writing this has taught me about myself and my current reading patterns:

·      I love books that prompt me to reflect on my own memories and how I have chosen to make meaning of them! And then it allows me to do some internal work to think about if I need to reframe those meanings.

·      I see connections about unlearning patterns from school, family, and childhood all to learn how to truly love one’s self in order to truly love others. Everyone. Everything. Is. Love.

·      If you’ve noticed, I don’t read many authors who aren’t womxn or non-binary these days. It’s their voices I want to hear and learn from and with in order to unlearn my conditioning and write myself a new paradigm for living and loving.

Enjoy! Let me know what you’re reading right now! I’m always on the lookout for good stuff!

All the reads as I go into autumn…