Gratitude for what I’m reading this month
This month, gratitude has been harder to hold—but I’m leaning into the practices that help me stay grounded. Gratitude doesn’t mean bypassing tough emotions or forcing toxic positivity. Instead, it’s about creating space for clarity and reflection. I’m grateful for clarity in my work and what I want to be putting out to others which right now is focused on cultivating slow working practices.
Two slow-working practices are guiding me as 2024 winds down: reading and writing (more on writing next month). Reading, especially books, feels like an act of resistance against purposefully shortened attention spans and a way to reconnect with depth and purpose.
I’m reviving my pre-pandemic tradition of sharing what’s on my nightstand and would love to hear what you’re reading, too. This round I’m adding in some reflection questions that I’m inspired to think about through this reading.
Let’s exchange inspiration. Here’s what I’ve been diving into this month.
When Women Were Birds: 54 Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams
I’m reading this one as part of a writing workshop lab with the wonderful geologist therapist out of the UK, Ruth Allen. I’m still in the process along with the workshop, but this is an intriguing exploration of women’s voices told through a memoir of sorts, in fragments, which as a literary form is fun to explore. The author’s mother, on her death bed, told her she was leaving all her journals to her only to be opened after she died. When the author finally opened them, she found them all blank! So far it’s a beautiful exploration of what was her mother’s voice that she didn’t write down, how do you reconcile your own relationship with your mother after she dies, and what even is her relationship with her own voice. Right now I’m journaling with one of her ideas that we, especially as women, have many voices over the course of our lives and that “each voice belongs to a place.”
What then is the voice I need for this time and space in place?
What is the voice within you that needs you to speak it for this time in your life, in the world?
What voices are still with you but belong to another time that has passed?
Preventing and Healing Climate Traumas: A Guide to Building Resilience and Hope in Communities by Bob Doppelt
This one is a book for my Climate Aware Therapy course I just completed with Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. The book is very textbook-like and for an audience of public health and mental health providers. He calls out the limits to western therapy and psychological approaches, especially given climate, racism, and sexism are all systemic and no amount of individualized approach can address those alone. The author offers what he calls Transformational Resilience, which is a very similar approach to my own Awaken Resilience model. He moves it from the individual into a whole-community initiative of interventions. I appreciate that he names the Traumacene, which are the individual, communal, and societal distress and traumas that have/will directly and indirectly be generated by our climate emergency. As we know with trauma that is unhealed, folks are more inclined to adopt denial, disconnection, and disengagement as maladaptive coping responses. To change our collective futures then we need individual and community healing of traumas and rebuilding resilience capacity.
What are your most prevalent feelings about the climate crisis?
How can you engage or get curious with perhaps your own defense mechanisms like the common ones of: disavowal (knowing but ignoring), numbing or shutting down (myth of apathy), or all-or-nothing thinking (it’s doom or ideal)?