This month has been busy with spirit-work seminars, kin-keeping, garden-building, and the affects of Jupiter return energy (more on that later), so book reading time has been at a premium. Regardless, still have three titles to share with you. What have you been reading? Tell me, please in the comments!
Making It: How Love, Kindness and Community Helped Me Repair My Life
By Jay Blades
I once had a friend who told me that the one thing he appreciated about me was that I made his life look good. Yeah, it wasn’t a compliment, but I felt that sentiment while reading Making It. Gratitude. Yet, hope has seemingly always powered Mr. Blades through his life. And it gave me gratitude and hope reading this.
I also have a whole new perspective on the person many of us may have first met through the cozy show The Repair Shop. As a couple, my partner and I love treasure hunting in thrift stores, garage sales, and curb-side garbage picking. So I deeply appreciate Blades and by default also The Repair Shop for saving what was important to the last generation. To me, this feels dutiful and appreciative for the those who came before.
But like the layers of dirt and slapshod paint that Blades has removed from countless pieces of furniture, there’s more to this man than what one tv show portrays. I respect him even more having read this memoir, especially given all the bullshit he’s been through – As an American, to hear that Britain is just as bad as the United States in regards to young black men is bitter. Why did I think the UK was more progressive?
Regardless, the memoir is certainly inspiring and the call for anti-racism, expressing emotion from men, especially in interpersonal relationships, as well as de-stigmatizing mental illness and behavioral health treatment, is threaded throughout his personal story. By the last chapter, I was left with the reassurance that if you just keep trying, keep showing up, the Universe makes sure the opportunities come forward. You just have to keep trying. You can’t give up.
Well worth the read, or a listen if you’re into audio books.
Gathering Moss: A Natural & Cultural History of Mosses
By Robin Wall Kimmerer
Up front, I need to tell you that I love listening to Professor Kimmerer while working the Land. So this book was definitely an audio listen. But, like all her books, I’ll listen, and then I’ll get the book for reference for my shelves. Each essay in Gathering Moss is peppered with wisdom inspired by the author’s indigenous worldview and of different types of mosses. They break down the science into stories and that’s some of my favorite reading. Kimmerer looks at mosses in this book not just scientifically but shows us the spirit within the moss, too. The fact that a PNW university helped publish this book is just a bonus for the collective culture of the Land where I reside as well. I’m shoving this book into my insurance companies face when they say I need to remove moss from my roof. It’s a capitalistic lie. I think I’ll take an Environmental and Forest Biology professor’s word for it and not yours.
The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss
By Cody Delistraty
Checked this one out of the library, because I’ve been doing a personal exploration of loss and grief, especially in the context of the culture of the United States. This book fit the bill, since the writer of this book explored an array of perspectives, actions, and events to deal with their grief, from trying to figure out if they had a disorder over their grief to trying to expand neural pathways with psychedelics. It’s clear this book was born of deep feelings. And reading it you will likely have lots of feelings about the author’s journey. I certainly did.
The author was desperate to find the end of the feelings of loss they endured after their mother’s death. All of us have endured some sort of loss that produced grief, and the author’s situation is clearly relatable. They tried therapy, talked to AI, did mushroom therapy, laughter therapy (which made him have to force laugh in a very public place), visited shamans, did bibliotherapy (which I didn’t know was a thing, but might check into it), etc. They wrote, “There is a difference, too, between closure on the one hand and memorials and rituals on the other. Memorials and rituals, I think, are healthy and helpful. It is the belief, however, that they signal the end to grief and reflection that can prove shortsighted.” As a person who has always side-eyed western funerals, this comparison between closure and grief’s end made so much sense. Portions of the book feel a bit too self-centered on the author, but moments like that kept me reading.
Much that hampered the author’s journey with the grief over the loss of his mother, is our own society. Our own hang-ups, societies dictation, or even how loss and death presented itself in our lives. They write: “What a society chooses to grieve is ultimately its way of “posing the question of who ‘we’ are,” writes the philosopher Juidth Butler. “By asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable.” Yet Delistraty concludes quickly through half of the actions, therapies, and coping mechanisms, that: “In death and grief, there may be no singular truth at all, only what we tell ourselves.”
One of the interesting things is that the author themselves recommended text within the prose about other books on death and grief we should read. This includes: Mrs. Death Misses Death by poet Salena Godden; R.K. Narayan’s The Guide, which sound like more fodder for this Scorpio Stellium’s relationship with loss and death. Like the author of this grief exploration, it’s not how grief affects us, but what we do with it. “How easy it is to be engulfed by grief, drowned in it. To retain the positive memories is to be its master. To some extent that is the great experiment of life: to not become your loss, to alchemize it into wisdom.”