I thought I’d share these now, rather than waiting to the end of the month. I am juggling several things at once and don’t want the end-of-month report to get lost or too long. Enjoy!
5 stars! I thought this book was amazing… engrossing on many levels, with interesting characters who all come together in the end.
“Every boy has a book in him, but not every boy is willing to listen.” After the death of his father, a boy starts hearing the objects around him speaking. He soon meets a philosopher who encourages him to find his own voice. “The Book” narrates the story, along with communicating the importance of books to a pluralistic society. An important piece is about decluttering (remember the Marie Kondo phase?) Ozeki takes the middle of that name to create the author of “Tidy Magic” and the story of “Ikon,” a Zen nun who explains to us “the impermanence of form and the empty nature of all things.” Ultimately, it’s the connections we feel (and everything and everyone is connected) that power us through.
“Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. The moment I put one word onto an empty page, I have created a problem for myself. The point that emerges is form trying to find a solution to my problem… In the end, of course, there are no solutions – only more problems. But this is a good thing. Without problems there will be no poems.”
“That’s what books are for after all – to tell your stories, to hold them and keep them safe between our covers for as long as we’re able. We do our best to bring you pleasure and sustain your belief in the gravity of being human. We care about your feelings and believe in you completely. But here’s another question: has it ever occurred to you that books have feelings too? As you listen to this romantic tale of two ill-fated lovers, do you ever stop to wonder about what it feels like for us? Because, in truth, if skin marks the border where an “I” ends and a “you” begins, then in these moments of impassioned boundary crossing called love, we envy you.”
“… all these things you saw and felt at once. How is this possible? Because, in the binary, where phenomena are still unbound, stories have not yet learned to behave in a linear fashion and all the myriad things of the world are simultaneously emergent, occurring in the same present moment coterminous with you. Unbound, you could see the universe becoming clouds of Stardust emanations from the warm little pond from who’s gaseous bubbling all of life is born in this unbound state. That night, you encountered all that was and ever could be – form and emptiness and the absence of form and emptiness. You felt what it was to open completely, to merge with matter and let everything in. And thus, you let us in too. And once inside we could access your sense gates and finally understand what it might be to see with eyes hear with ears smell with the nose, taste with a tongue, and touch with skin. And this is what books want, after all. We want bodies. And for the first time, we could imagine what it might be to have one. We were able to perceive the consciousness that body gives rise to. If we gave you the unbound world, this was your gift to us.”
“Disaster can strike at any moment, but we forget this. Distracted by the bright shiny comforts of our everyday lives, wrapped in a false sense of security, we fall asleep and in this dream, our life passes. The earthquake shook us awake and it’s nami? washed away our delusions. It caused us to question our values and our attachment to material possessions. When everything I think of is mine – my belongings, my family, my life – can be swept away in an instant, I have to ask myself, “what is real?” The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature. Already broken, knowing this, we can appreciate each thing as it is and love each other as we are – completely, unconditionally, without expectation or disappointment. Life is even more beautiful this way…”
Such a powerful and tangible account of coming to America. Wow. I enjoyed listening to the author tell his story on Audible. As a 9-year-old, he was a strong person to go through what he did! How can anyone not have compassion for those hoping for a better life or to be reunited with family?
Did you guys hear that the 50 people who Desantis flew up north as a political stunt got Visas? Ha! Good for them.
I seem to have had more free time than usual these past weeks, so I’ve been listening to quite a few books while diamond painting. Some days I sit and watch the squirrels playing in the backyard or read a magazine. This space inside my days is a new, slightly uncomfortable feeling for me. I tend toward the melancholy if given too much of it, so I am watchful over myself and my moods.
This season of the Jewish New Year is one of renewal and evaluation. Have I been my best self this past year? How do I want to be slightly different in the coming year? I am proud of being much more present for my family, of diving into my studies with curiosity and deep interest, and of being open to new ideas and possibilities for the world. I think I’m making a difference in facilitating Mussar groups, opening people’s minds and hearts to a new acceptance and love. And I am open to stretching into new capabilities. I am not at all happy with the extra weight I am carrying around, but am trying to speak gently to myself about it.
Most days, I am content in my own little world. When I listen to a news podcast or read current events, I alternate between despair and hopefulness. I think things come in cycles, and surely our country/world has been here before. Still, I recently read that civilizations last on average for 336 years, so… perhaps our experiment of a nation will last for 80 more years or perhaps democracy is on its way toward the exit doors? I’m very excited about the midterms in 6 weeks. How could there not be ramifications for a president who potentially committed bank fraud, or stole nuclear secrets, or obstructed investigations, or tried to overturn the election, or incited a violent insurrection? Sewing such division in the fabric of our nation is bound to cause ruptures. It’s just so scary to me how far people are taking this! Where is common sense, kindness, humanity?
September went by rather quickly. I started a very interesting class on Jewish views of the afterlife throughout history. I got a 95 on my Hebrew midterm. I have been trying to clear out my email inbox, which seems to fill up more and more every day, so it’s a Sisyphean task. The school year is in its 6th week now, and though my daughter would rather stay home doing nothing all day long, she’s doing well in 8th grade. She and I did a collage workshop for a rehabilitation home for formerly homeless people, which I enjoyed. I also helped the PTO allocate grant funds to teachers last week, and I spoke up much more than before, asking questions and making proposals.
There is a slight reprieve from the heat and humidity in the mornings here, and I finally got to resume outside walks around the neighborhood after I take SG to school. It’s nice to see the houses and gardens again and wish neighbors a good morning. My walking friend moved away and I really miss her!
And I’ve obviously read way more books than usual! There have been quite a few new releases and I’ve also been enjoying Goodreads, looking for recommendations from the community there. In fact, I am going to post these reviews there before I forget. I have passed my goal of reading 85 books this year, so next year’s goal will be higher.
So good!! The timing couldn’t be better since I’m taking a class on Jewish historical views of death and the afterlife. A palliative care doctor describes some of the ups and downs of her job, then the experience of being on the other side of the situation, as a grieving daughter. She is honest and does not hesitate to approach end-of-life moments with tenderness and compassion.
“What dominates palliative medicine is not the proximity to death, but the best bits of living. Kindness, courage, love, tenderness – these are the qualities that so often saturate a person’s last days. It can be chaotic, messy, almost violent with grief, but I am surrounded at work by human beings at their most remarkable, unable to retreat from the fact and the ache of our impermanence, yet getting on with living and loving all the same.”
“I wanted to retain my kindness, my impulse to care, not have it bludgeoned out of me. The spoken word, I had come to realize, could be as delicate and important as any physical intervention, and sometimes equally life-changing. Words are a means through which doctors build trust, assuage fears, signal compassion, resolve confusion, instill hope – and, on occasion, remove it. But they cannot be rushed. Above all, when your focus is people, not body parts, taking time to listen to your patients’ words – seeking truly to understand what matters to them – can have astonishing potency.”
Function over Processes. Do whatever works for you to get things done. And remember that care tasks are morally neutral. A messy kitchen sink doesn’t mean you are lazy – it means you are prioritizing other things, often just to get through the day. Davis has a few excellent ideas for freeing yourself from shame or overwhelm and for getting rest even if things are not completely finished. Great advice for a perfectionist or someone with depression, ADHD, or a newborn.
Elizabeth and William Friedman were two of the best code breakers in our country during the first and second world wars. Elizabeth decrypted thousands of Nazi radio messages and enigma machines, rose to great importance in the Coast Guard, and formed the beginning of what became the NSA. Yet have we heard of her? No, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI manipulated the press and took all the credit! She saved countless lives. I learned about a part of the war I’d never heard of… the Nazi spy rings operating in Argentina and throughout South America, and I was fascinated at the descriptions of exactly how these codes worked. Now solved by computer, they had remarkable patterns and ways inside to get a foothold on part of the message and figure out the encryption patterns. Fascinating.
Hammerman gives us 42 short essays about character and lessons learned throughout his career. He has tried to be a “mensch,” a human of character, through every challenge. It’s refreshing to hear about someone searching for moral clarity and personal growth.
“I can now say, unequivocally, that being a rabbi has helped me grow into a far better human being than I would have been otherwise; a far more caring person, more appreciative of the precious legacy that I’ve been charged to reenergize, and more amazed, every day, at the simple dignity and courage of people, great and small. My sacred work has enabled me to make a small difference in the lives of some, maybe even more than that, but it has undoubtedly enriched my own life to a far greater extent.”
Audiobook from my library. Set in a bookshop at a time when women had very little power, three woman, each with her own story, eventually take over the ownership and running of the shop. It’s an inspiring story.
“She hoped to share the words and ideas of women long gone from this earth; women who could no longer speak. Within their determination to not stay silent could still have an effect even now. Evie believed that her study of the past was worthwhile but wanted what she discovered there to echo forward as well. It was 1950 and the world was once again being given a second chance after another all-consuming war. People had only the past to learn from, yet already they seem to want to forget and move on to the future. But there were no lessons to be found there; only promises instead. Evie had to wonder how empty such promises would turn out to be, not just for her with her hands almost on Jane Webs last book, but for the women freed by war, the men move into new lives in new countries, and all the harmed and hurt survivors left behind.”
What a powerful story! This book took an hour to read and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. In a small Irish town, a struggling yet grateful coal merchant comes across something that isn’t right. He could look the other way, but he ultimately decides to be a quiet hero, putting his own family in a vulnerable place. The story is based on institutions for “fallen women” that the Church in Ireland ran from the 18th-20th centuries.
“…was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian and face yourself in the mirror? How light and tall he almost felt, walking along with this girl at his side and some fresh, new, unrecognizable joy in his heart. Was it possible that the best bit of him was shining forth and surfacing, some part of him, whatever it could be called (was there any name for it) was going wild, he knew. The fact was that he would pay for it, but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this.”
I listened to this on Chirp and enjoyed it. I like most books that Julia Whelan narrates. A young girl/musician with terrible upbringing hits the road and often leaves the people who love her the most, hurting herself and others. Eventually all the strands come together in a satisfying way, showing that we can surround ourselves with the good people in our life.
Wow. This book is absolutely outstanding. Are we facing a critical juncture in the human story? MacAskill, a moral philosopher, takes a very broad sweep of time and human civilization, sharing predictions and concerns for the future. I have so many quotations from it that it will have to be a separate blog post.
“This book is about longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time. Longtermism is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it. If humanity survives to even a fraction of its potential life span, then, strange as it may seem, we are the ancients: we live at the very beginning of history, in the most distant past. What we do now will affect untold numbers of future people. We need to act wisely.”
“…consider the long-run history of humanity. There have been members of the genus Homo on Earth for over 2.5 million years.7 Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved around three hundred thousand years ago. Agriculture started just twelve thousand years ago, the first cities formed only six thousand years ago, the industrial era began around 250 years ago, and all the changes that have happened since then—transitioning from horse-drawn carts to space travel, leeches to heart transplants, mechanical calculators to supercomputers—occurred over the course of just three human lifetimes.”
I couldn’t tell you how I came across this one, but it’s $1.99 on Kindle, and the sample was hilarious, so I read it. I laughed out loud many times and even learned a few tips! A section title, for example: “Household Aesthetics: A Brief Introduction for the Tasteless Man.” Plus, Martin is British and has interesting words for products that I’d never encountered.
Living with a teenager can be an emotional roller coaster, so as soon as a friend mentioned that Wendy Mogel had a book about it, I had to read it. I found it very helpful in terms of understanding what behavior is normal and how best to respond to it, what to do to temper her sense of entitlement, how involved to get with school and homework, and how to live with communication struggles. Generally, Mogel thinks parents should not overreact or worry, and should continue listening and trying to shape as much as they can without helicopter parenting. Emotional days, rude comments, etc. are all part of the game.
On rude comments: “They aren’t thinking about the impact of their behavior or the implications of their words on you (your self-consciousness about your hair, your cooking skill, your parental worthiness); they are telling you about themselves (their easy embarrassment, their finicky and rapidly changing teenage palate, their low mood at the moment).”
“In the world of teenagers, being spacey is normal. Lack of imagination about the consequences of one’s actions is normal. Shifting enthusiasms are normal. Terrible boredom with you is normal. Your child’s conviction that it is a tragedy of earth-shattering proportions that she has been born into the wrong family (so strict! so boring! so ordinary! so lacking in compassion!) is normal. Your daughter’s endless dramas and urgent demands are normal. Your son’s preoccupation with food fights and barfing is normal. Your child sullenly reminding you that Natalie and Natasha and Nora all have parents who are more understanding and cooler than you are is normal.”
The storyline and writing were compelling for sure, but I wish this book were to come out in 5 years. I’d just watched the movie King Richard, and also watched Venessa Williams play her last game at the US Open. This comeback story of a tennis star coached by her father just seemed a little redundant for our times. Still, I couldn’t put it down and read it in 2 days. I loved that she learned to enjoy the process instead of the outcome.
“You could not pay me enough money to go back to being seventeen. When I was seventeen, my talent was all potential and no proof. The world was a giant set of unknowns, barely any past to pull from. I am so grateful, right now, for every match and every win and every loss and every lesson that I have behind me. It feels so good, right now, to be thirty-seven years old. To have figured at least some things out. To know the ground underneath my feet.”
Gorgeous, funky, and utterly different from anything else I’ve ever read. Some of the words Slate comes up with are hilarious as she describes how she moved into a secure place within herself where she is no longer self-defeating and will not allow someone else to define her. She is real, yet unlike anyone else I know. I wish I could meet her because she seems awesome.
I really enjoyed the first of this series about Lucy and her ex-husband William, so I had to read this one. It takes place as the pandemic begins and Lucy and William retreat from NYC to a house in Maine. I think Strout has a poignant way of turning words into little sparks that pierce your heart. And it helped me to recall the beginning of the pandemic… the fears and all the unknowns. This quote helps me better understand the divisions within our country:
“I thought I understand those people who went to the Capitol and smashed the windows… I kept thinking about this. I thought for one hour that day outside of Chicago I had found my childhood humiliation so deeply again and what if I had continued to feel that my entire life? What if all the jobs I had taken in my life were not enough to really make a living? What if I felt looked down upon all the time by the wealthier people in this country who made fun of my religion and my guns? I did not have religion and I did not have guns, but I suddenly felt that I saw what these people were feeling… and I understood them. They had been made to feel poorly about themselves. They were looked at with disdain and they could no longer stand it.”
I knew from reading Station Eleven that this book was going to be a little “out there.” Much of the story takes place outside of the realm of reality, either in a dream state or some kind of in-between place. We have a Ponzi scheme, a few others on various life paths that all intersect, a woman who lost her mother to sea and who ultimately also drowns. We read about each person’s perspective, but at different points in time, so it’s hard to piece it all together until the end. It’s magical and lyrical and touching and very hard to put down. Recommend.
This one was not what I was looking for. Warner’s main point is that parents make these middle school years worse than they need to be, either because they are trying to correct their own past experiences through their kids, or because they are entitled and overly focused on status and achievement. She brings up common assumptions like, “We all knew that middle school was the place where girls’ souls went to die.” Oh please. She urges parent-child boundaries, for the benefit of each side. I found the chapters on the historical trends of 11-14-year-olds interesting, and the parts where educators and psychologists chime in were valuable. Obviously, a parent wants their child to be empathetic and kind, so Warner says parents should be a role model of just that… which is obvious to me.
“We all want to shepherd our kids through this phase of life with as little emotional damage as possible. What we don’t realize, though, is how at risk we ourselves are of being knocked off course by the overwhelming power of our own worry and concern.”
“One driver of all this damage may be the fact that there’s a big glitch in the way the brain develops in the years after puberty: Its different systems don’t all mature at the same time. The “emotional brain”—the limbic system—ramps up fast with exposure to the sex hormones and remains in a state of high alert for years, while the “executive functioning” system, controlled by the prefrontal cortex and tasked with organization, self-regulation, and self-control (of both behavior and emotion), lags far behind. In fact, the latest research suggests that it doesn’t finish developing until the mid-20s. These findings should give new meaning to our notion of early adolescence as an “awkward” age: Behind that face and body that just won’t obey lies a command center at odds with itself.”
Julia Whelan is an amazing audiobook narrator who can do several different character voices and all very effectively. However, she isn’t a writer. I had hoped this was a book about her personal work experiences, but it was not. It was still an ok story. It just should have ended hours before it did.
I did a significant thing (for me). I was asked to lead a 5-minute centering at the start of a workshop on “Bearing the Burden of Another’s Wronging You” for The Mussar Institute’s Elul program. Elul is the Hebrew month we are currently in, and it leads to the High Holy Days, the important 10-day period of renewal and repentance. Thus, Elul is all about inner searching, reviewing our wrongs and finding ways to do better. If we have veered off-course, we can correct the path back toward where we want to be.
First of all, I am not very good at leading centerings or meditations. The purpose is to create a separation between whatever you were doing before the class begins and the sacred space we enter into together. It is a guided meditation toward setting aside your regular life and entering into a communal safe space of growth and learning. They often start with “close your eyes and take some deep breaths” and sometimes include poetry, music, or imagery. I don’t even like participating in them and I usually have my co-facilitator take over that part. I think of them as unhelpful and hokey.
Second, I prefer to exist behind the scenes; if I contribute something, it might be a comment toward the end of a teaching or, better yet, a written piece. Rarely am I comfortable speaking in front of others. I have gotten better over the past couple of years of facilitating Mussar groups, but still I am uncomfortable having all eyes and ears on me. My previous goal of being a professor would have been so scary for me! I have even been focusing on trying to have my voice sound serious and less child-like.
Finally, I know that the purpose of inviting me specifically was to introduce me to the broader community of members in a more serious context. I’m flattered and honored by that. The hidden purpose of asking me to do this was to help me grow into and through my discomfort, to realize that I can do something like this without forgetting to breathe.
And so I had to accept the challenge if I am serious about improving my leadership skills and growing in the TMI community. Besides doing it, I decided to write something that I would actually like to participate in. So it is a centering with a teaching as its main point. I’m including it below in case you’d like to read it.
The comments in the chat after I was finished were very encouraging: beautiful… i would love a copy of that beautiful meditation…. that was lovely… beautiful meditation… beautiful and meaningful… beautifully done… healing… Beautiful words and delivery!… your words brought a smile to my face – they were wonderful thanks for the offering!
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I am honored to be with you today. To be honest, it is a big challenge for me, but as I look at all of your shining faces now, I see many many people who I love deeply and who have touched my life in transformational ways – at a kallah or in a class and definitely on our Israel trip.
I invite you now to close your eyes as we create our sacred shared space. Take a deep breath in and imagine you are breathing in divine light. Let it fill you with optimism and peacefulness. Exhale and relax. Breathe in Menuchat haNefesh, a tranquility of the soul. And exhale. Take another breath, this time of savlanut, of patience; and as you exhale, release any judgment or expectation. Let yourself just be.
Envision this divine light inside you and outside of you, everywhere, beyond time and space. It is unnamable and unknowable and infinite. This light can transform into the divine consciousness that breathes within us and can manifest itself into all the forces in our universe. This sacred light will expand and contract and will be there always.This light and you are one.
These days of Elul grant us the time for turning inward, turning and examining our actions and vowing to work harder at reaching our potential. It means recognizing that we have the ability to change. To grow.
Bring to mind a picture of yourself as you were a year ago. How different you were! Over the last year, your body has changed. Your important relationships have evolved. You have grown in wisdom, gained new knowledge and perspective. Even when you lost your way or you thought you might be moving backwards, you were still moving forward. Life rarely moves in a straight line, and we need to patiently wait to see how a challenge transforms into a blessing.
Everyone’s abilities are limited. Sometimes results are beyond our reach. And yet there is this divine light and love that flows through us and understands each aspect of us and accepts us just as we are. Much of the yamim nora’im is about judgement. But God practices righteous judgment, balancing judgment with Rachamim, knowing our potential and wanting us to reach it, but understanding our limitations.
God generously gives this light to us, yet we exist not just to inhabit it but to let it pass effortlessly from us to others.
Keep picturing this light within you, but now imagine many other people with that same light within them. And imagine your light flowing outward to others as their light does the same. Create in your mind an interconnected web of divine light.
In the course of a year, you encounter an unknowable number of other people, mostly people you interact with only briefly, at a checkout counter or in passing at an airport. Each person is on his own path of growth and limitations. Each has her own story of growing up within a family and all its dynamics, of opportunities taken or lost, and of challenges that hinder or must be overcome. Each person is an entire universe unto himself.
We read in Leviticus, “V’ahavta l’reacha kamocha, Love your fellow as yourself.” The Mishna also tells us not to judge someone until we are standing in their place… which means that we have to judge the whole person, not just what we can see. And who among us can claim that they fully know themselves, let alone another person???
When we move through the world quickly, we are most likely operating from our ego selves and seeing others as hindrances to our own agenda. In this state, we are disconnected from the divine light and we start to make assumptions. We forget that the other person is also a holy soul, a separate being filled with his own light, her own journey toward her potential, his own trials and hopes and goals. How could we possibly know or judge them?
When we can slow down and realize the opportunity we have countless times each and every day to connect with this divine spark within us and to notice it within each human being, we are remembering to imitate God in righteous judgment. Each of us is on a personal journey, but it is our connections with others that shape us.
These days of Elul, may each of us open ourselves to this process of inward searching and of slow, sustainable change.
May we notice and release the impulse to seek fault in others.
May we live with greater wisdom and deeper love.
May God revive us and turn us toward each other. Amen.
August was quite fun. We went on a couple of short trips to get away. Sweet Girl started 8th grade, but not before she helped me re-organize my office bookshelves. 😉 In fact, she helped me get lots of cabinets and drawers organized around here too! Each of us had doctor and dentist checkups and we celebrated some family birthdays. I’ve been catching up on scrapbooks. I’ve had a little bit of a lull in my classes, which I don’t particularly know how to fill, but not to fear… my next class starts this coming Tuesday. I’m very excited.
Devil Wears Prada meets the digital age. Eh. It did have some nice messages about not falling into the usual stereotypes of beauty.
“For the first time, I looked a little more like myself. Or, at the very least, the image I’ve always had in my head. I realized, then and there, how deeply I’d internalized the Western idealization of beauty, the time and energy and I had wasted feeling trapped inside of my bag of skin. But the fat, the blood, the bones—none of it mattered. Appearances are easy to fake. I could mold myself into whatever I wanted to look like. I could become anyone I wanted to be. But first, I had to figure out what feeling like myself meant. That would be the real challenge.”
I wanted to read an earlier book that King wrote (1999 I think). I can’t say it was my fave, and I had a little trouble understanding the plot and timing shifts, but it was good. Her writing is almost lyrical.
“Across the water, streetlamps blinked on, then hung unsuspended and haloed pink in the fog. Grainy daylight drained out slowly through the long kitchen window. This was the start of the devastating time of day, when, if you turned on the overhead, the texture of the walls and the edges of objects became too vivid and you found yourself straining to remember one thing that had ever brought you any joy, but if you didn’t and just let the window continue to blacken, sick and slow, it felt like being lowered into a grave. It was the moment when all pleasure of solitude vanished and you needed a body beside yours—or at least a voice calling your name.”
OK Sachdeva is an incredible writer. Truly impressive. 5 stars. I had to ration these stories out one per night as a treat for myself because they are just so good. Some are more realistic than others, but each is an entire world in itself.
“The mermaid sank down into a hollow of it and began to sing. Her voice had a deep, liquid sound like a separate current within the water. The shark could hear it but it meant nothing to him, and he paid no attention to it. The fish heard it, too, though, and they were entranced by it. The song was the sound of joy without depth, of clear waters and warm blood and the sunlight that pierced the tops of the waves. Fish were drawn from miles away. They orbited the mermaid in a slow swirl of fins and scales, and she could think only that the shark would be well fed, that she could be close to him more often.”
I found this whole book incredible. Each animal lives within its own unique sensory bubble, only accessing some of the sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, and electric and magnetic fields. Every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness, including humans. We think we have all the information, but we would have a sharper sense of hearing if our ears were at different heights, like an owls is, or if we could sense vibrations in the air, like ants can. The world is filtered for us through our senses. Yong helps us visit each creature’s perceptual world and understand it. I have so many highlighted parts of this book that I honestly can’t decide which to share here.
“Life exists within that planetary electric field and is affected by it. Flowers, being full of water, are electrically grounded, and bear the same negative charge as the soil from which they sprout. Bees, meanwhile, build up positive charges as they fly, possibly because electrons are torn from their surface when they collide with dust and other small particles. When positively charged bees arrive at negatively charged flowers, sparks don’t fly, but pollen does. Attracted by their opposing charges, pollen grains will leap from a flower onto a bee, even before the insect lands.”
That’s it… but I am reading a bunch of books right now. Faves so far are:
12 books is a lot for one month, but many of these were just so engaging that I read through them quickly. My favorite was The Measure, followed by Remarkably Bright Creatures.
Nothing monumental happened this month… we’re just enjoying the leisurely summer days. I finished some scrapbooks I’ve been wanting to complete. I’ve had a small amount of success getting Sweet Girl to read, and I’ll keep trying. We are going to have a few days at a beach soon, and what’s a beach without a beach read???
I hope your summer is going well. I can’t believe it’s already ending for us in 3 weeks!
I know the photos are not showing up for email subscribers and I’ve no idea how to correct that, but you can click the title of the post to see the web version. Here are some reading quotations I liked on Facebook, and some diamond paintings I’ve recently completed.
My little assistant doesn’t realize she gets in the way!
“…perhaps for their world-altering outcomes—but each contains an insight about what helps radical ideas come into being. We will bear down on this element in these histories, zoom in on the inkpot sitting on the writing desk of a seventeenth-century aristocrat, the steam drifting up from a printing press in 1930s Accra, the scissors and glue stick in a teenage girl’s bedroom in the 1990s. The stories are particular, but layered on top of each other, they become a sort of palimpsest through which, peeking out, we can see patterns, and even something like truths, about what allowed the most threatening, liberating concepts to grow.”
“These pre-digital forms of communication demanded patience. Because they took time to produce and time to transmit from one person to another, they slowed things down, favoring an incremental accumulation of knowledge and connection. They also lent coherence, a way for scattered ideologies and feelings to be shaped into a single compellingly new perspective. Those who joined such conversations, ones that were deliberate and perhaps more labor-intensive to produce, gained a firmer sense of identity and solidarity, which in turn freed them up to imagine how they might order the world differently.”
This was on sale for $1.99 in audiobook format so I figured, why not? As Lisa grew up, her famous father (Steve Jobs) became more and more involved in her life, though never as much as she would have liked. She lived with him for much of middle school. Lisa’s relationship with both of her parents had some major issues, but she explains well the stark contrast between her mother’s poverty and overbearing love and her father’s frugality despite his wealth and unpredictability and lack of affection.
“I began to think of him as a kind of prophet with loneliness and tragedy at the edges. Only we knew how lonely, how tragic. All light and dark. Nothing in between.”
The audiobook would have been better had it been read by Lisa herself but still, I found her “voice” authentic and her flaws very realistic.
“I see now that we were at cross purposes. For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak. For me, it was the opposite. The closer I was to him, the less I would feel ashamed. He was part of the world and he would accelerate me into the light.”
“Having a father, as far as I understood, felt not like being ordinary, but like being singled out. Our time together was not fluid, but stuttered forward like a flip book. How close are you supposed to be with your father? I wanted to collapse into him, to be inseparable. In his presence, I wasn’t sure how to hold my hands, how to arrange my limbs.”
Having read The Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller, I thought this might be a good read too. Bythell has a curmudgeonly affectionate way of describing the (actually eight, including staff) categories of customers he’s come across in his antiquarian bookstore in Scotland.
“This isn’t about us, though, the miserable, unfortunate few who have chosen to try to sell books to make a pitiful living. It is about our customers: those wretched creatures with whom we’re forced to interact on a daily basis, and who—as I write this under coronavirus lockdown—I miss like long-lost friends. From the charming and interesting to the rude and offensive, I miss them all. Apart from the fact that without them I have literally no income, to my enormous surprise I have discovered that I miss the human interaction.“
Once I read the premise of this one, I had to read it asap. The entire world’s inhabitants received a box at their front door containing a string that reveals the number of years you will live. The book follows 8 individuals as they come to accept their fate, their choices and reactions, and the madness that envelops the world as a result. A compelling idea and it really led me to think about whether I’d want to know how long I have left and if that knowledge would change anything. It is a story about living deeply, but not necessarily as long as one might prefer. What is a meaningful life? Why do we Westerners pretend that we will live forever?
“If it wasn’t for the fact that I have colleagues, office life would be bearable.”
This was a quick, light-hearted read about a control freak who lightens up after resolving a family conflict, having a baby, and finding love.
“I experienced a jolt of recognition; it was nothing to do with his appearance—it was something else. The sensation was a little like opening your front door after a long period away; a feeling both that you’re re-encountering something familiar and that you’re seeing it anew.”
No Jewish thinker has had a more significant impact on Jewish religious thought than Moses Maimonides (1138–1204). This biography is outstanding, especially considering that Heschel dashed it off in a couple months in his 20s! Maimonides is one of the major Jewish philosophers and is considered a leading scholar even now, a thousand years after his death. Heschel unfolds his life as a story, beginning with his formative years and progressing slowly, showing how his views and path changed over time. I found the descriptions of philosophy very readable and easy to follow. I have several passages underlined and I’m sure this book will be useful going forward as a reference.
What does it mean to be a human being? What was his account of living as a Jewish person in his times? And applicably to today’s times, what does it mean to live at a time when you disagree with the majority of political decisions being made?
So good! Klein begins with the life-changing, identity-shifting event that is a newborn arriving into your life and continues her humorous reflections through each small stage. She sort of evokes Joseph Campbells’s The Hero’s Journey to talk about how potty changing symbolizes an identity shift and separation for her son, how to relate bad news to a child, etc. A funny chapter was about how “soul-crushingly precise” car seats must be, where an inspector had a wrench and a level and harped on the specificity of the angle to cause Klein to feel more fragile than ever before, like if a strap is accidentally twisted, all manner of calamity and potential disaster could ensue. Add in some stressful plane trips, Halloween costumes, marriage stressors, and body shape challenges (a “general thickness” that wasn’t there before), and you will laugh along in recognition.
“For most of us, it’s not a journey outward, to the most fantastic and farthest flung places, but inward, downward, to the deepest parts of your strength. To the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn’t know was there.”
Klein writes that until recently, the heroism of motherhood entails “swallow[ing] the pain and frustration and keep[ing] everything inside.”
Of course, I’ll read any book about books and reading. This one has been promoted so much lately that I finally threw up my hands in surrender and read it. I loved and identified with the first 3/4 of it, up until she describes falling in love soon after having her fourth child without letting the reader know that she’d divorced her husband! After that, the years she describes fly by and so much is packed into the last few chapters that they feel like an afterthought.
Owens has written other books, many magazine articles, and is the host of the podcast “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.” She authentically narrates growing up finding herself in her favorite characters in books and aptly describes the impact that reading had on her and her family. I loved the chapters about her college and graduate school years, all about her friendships and then new motherhood. She experienced many losses over her life and turned to books and writing to heal herself. I have read most of the books she is constantly mentioning throughout the narrative. That part started to bother me too (sort of felt like name-dropping).
“The more authors I spoke to on the podcast, the more I realized that being a writer was a trait shared by some of the most amazing people on the planet. That need to tell a story, to share, to help others, to use words as memories, as tools, to evoke emotions, reflected a lot about a person, even more than the content they wrote.”
Overall, a lovely exploration of how books, motherhood, love, and loss shape a person.
I listened to about half of this one because the author’s voice started to get on my nerves. I admire that she and her husband took their 3 young kids and traveled around the world for 9 months. What an adventure! They travel to China, then New Zealand, Ethiopia, England, etc. I especially appreciated the side stories of her need for self-care along the way.
“There is something about struggle that changes you in irrevocable ways. I had spent more than a year waiting to feel like myself again, but as I packed my bags the day before Jean was to return from Italy, it occurred to me that I would never again be the version of myself that I had been searching for. Instead, the separation and divorce had reduced me to the very essence of who I was.”
I got this for $1.99 on a Kindle special and it looked like an interesting storyline. Woman’s husband of 30 years divorces her and she must reevaluate her life, put herself first, etc. Rather ordinary, but somehow the characters really drew me in. I can’t say I’d want to read anything else Pagán wrote, but this was a good read.
“It was the knowledge that I no longer needed a guarantee to be happy. I hadn’t wanted to be alone. Now that I was, though, I knew that there was a whole new world out there waiting for me. And within this world happened to be a man whom I wanted to take a chance on. I wasn’t sure if it was too late to take that chance, but like Rose, I was going to have to give it a go.”
I listened to Sedaris read this on audio, which I highly recommend. His droll voice is the perfect way to appreciate the irony and self-deprecation in his essays. I’ve recapped some of these stories to my family, who also find him delightful.
“As one gets older life becomes all take and no give. One relies on other people for the treats and things. It’s like being an infant again.”
Eccentric widows become residents of the Claremont and live their days together, one much the same as another. The reader observes Mrs. Palfrey get adjusted to life there and watches as she meets a young writer, which contrasts just the right amount with her life as to show the difficulties of aging. A humorous yet touching character study.
SUCH A great read. I couldn’t put this down and read it in a day. I enjoyed reading about how Marcellus the octopus ingeniously connects the other main characters. It’s a unique story with charming, easily-relatable characters.
“IF THERE IS ONE TOPIC OF CONVERSATION HUMANS never exhaust, it is the status of their outdoor environment. And for as much as they discuss it, their incredulity is . . . well, incredible. That preposterous phrase: Can you believe this weather we’re having? How many times have I heard it? One thousand, nine hundred and ten, to be exact. One and a half times a day, on average. Tell me again about the intelligence of humans. They cannot even manage to comprehend predictable meteorological events. Imagine if I were to stride over to my neighbors, the sea jellies, and, while shaking my mantle with disbelief, make a comment such as: Can you believe these bubbles these tanks are putting out today? Preposterous. (Of course, this would also be preposterous because the jellies would not answer. They cannot communicate on that level. And they cannot be taught. Believe me, I have tried.) Sun, rain, clouds, fog, hail, sleet, snow. Human beings have walked their earth on two feet for hundreds of millennia. One might think they would believe it already.”
This is a book that starts in the past in order to ask us to imagine a different future. It’s about how social movements form as new ideas that percolate in small, quiet spaces, unlike today’s high-speed, social media explosion that prevents deep ideas from unfolding over time. Beckerman, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, takes us on a journey from letters in 17th century France to social media today (a forum for scientist’s early discussions about Covid, identity politics leading up to Charlottesville, and the ups and downs of the Black Lives Matter movement). According to Beckerman, the incubation of radical new ideas needs certain conditions: a tight space, passionate dialogue, and freedom to work toward a common aim. His book is well-written and a delight to read. I found that I was learning about events in my own lifetime that I didn’t even know about.
I found the book relevant considering the social disconnection we’ve experienced lately with the pandemic. The medium we use for conversation (letter-writing, petitions, manifestos, newspapers, zines) molds the kinds of conversations we can have, and even sets the boundaries of our thinking. Transitioning from oral to written to electronic culture “brought along a shift in the way human beings processed reality.” We have moved toward the internet and social media, with online mediums (Facebook, Discord, twitter DM’s, email chains, and hashtags) that hinder authentic transformational movements.
He begins with a profile of a man in 1635 France who connected Europe’s greatest minds through letters (“thoughts in process”) in order to document an eclipse from various locations on earth. He also attempted to calculate longitude and the length of the Mediterranean by having many people stare up at the sky on the same night. “For Peiresc, letters were unites of intellectual exchange. Sitting in his study like a contented spider in the middle of an expansive web, he wrote and dictated about ten a day. They were also his only legacy… when he died, he left behind 100,000 pieces of paper in the form of dispatches, memoranda, and reading notes, which represented his life’s work.” Ultimately, the very slow movement of letters at the time led to many unsuccessful attempts at scientific breakthroughs.
“Letters turned out to be quite useful in this conversion process. The medium was a conduit for slow thinking. Letters acted like oil in the gears of idea production: the throat-clearing pleasantries, the lines upon lines where a mind could wander, an informality that didn’t demand definitiveness yet gave space for argument to build lightly. These were the qualities that made letters so critical to the community of proto-scientists. But they also worked well for introducing a new worldview. The ruminative aspect of letters, the embedded patience of them, avoided what might otherwise feel like the locked-horn confrontation of one system of truth trying to overtake another.”
Beckerman then takes us to 1839 Manchester and the very first petition circulated to give commoners more rights, ultimately uniting the populace and leading to many more petitions and reform bills granting rights to the working class.
Chapter 4 describes an African independent newspaper writer and eventual owner whose ideas sparked radical change over 25 years, leading up to Nigeria’s independence from Britain. Chapter 6 is about independent zines in the 1990s that caused cohesion for several women’s rights issues.
There’s a chapter on the first use of cyberspace to form a citizen community called the WELL. Managing this new community is a challenge in itself (“how they were built and how they were managed would determine how useful they could actually be and for what“) and it was ultimately overtaken by one of its users, who began a profitable version called America Online.
“Their ability to converse in this way mesmerized them as they watched the flickering green letters on a black screen accumulate, expressing personality, wit, genuine friendship, affinity for the same eccentric hobbies. It led to some big dreaming about what this space that was no real physical space at all—cyberspace—could be for, what it could achieve, what capacities it could offer its users, whether it had the ability as a medium to improve on all those petitions and local newspapers and manifestos of the past.”
“… in the same way that a car was never really just a faster horse, talking online was not just a virtual café. No metaphor could really grasp what it was. And yet metaphor is perhaps the WELL’s greatest legacy.”
Chapter 7: Cairo in 2011 and the Arab Spring:
“Social media never made it easier. It was only ever able to point them back to Tahrir Square, the tried-and-true method. When the moment clearly called for protest—when they demanded Mubarak be put on trial, or when the Justice Ministry proposed a law banning all demonstrations—they knew what to do. They could zero in on a point of outrage and motivate people to gather around it. It was as if social media had replaced their revolutionary project with a single instinct. Their greatest strength was the ability to resuscitate the magic and power of Tahrir, to pull off a millionya, a million-man march. But it was becoming a limited tool, a lever turned crutch. And while the activists did regularly return to the square, enamored with their own ability to quiet all the voices on Facebook for a day or two, the more politically savvy and deeply connected forces in the country, like the Muslim Brotherhood, did what they had long known how to do: set an agenda and impose order in their ranks. The revolutionaries never got quite organized enough.”
“But Ghonim (Wael Ghonimn, author of 2012 book Revolution 2.0) now treated Facebook like a spurned lover. “The Arab Spring revealed social media’s greatest potential, but it also exposed its greatest shortcomings,” he said from the stage in Geneva. Facebook, he saw, was indeed a tool, but it was designed with a specific purpose, one that hadn’t suited the needs of his vanguard. On the WELL, even when the conversation involved only a couple thousand people and the stakes were much, much lower than replacing an entrenched regime, a great many guardrails were needed to keep it a productive space, a home for talk that could build and not just destroy. What happened when you scaled those numbers up into the millions, removed those guardrails, the guiding moderators, and then introduced algorithms that kept people on the platform longer by elevating the loudest, most emotional voices? What you got was an incredible amplification system that also proved extremely ineffective at allowing people to focus, to organize their thoughts, to become ideologically coherent, to strategize, to pick leaders, and to refine a message.”
Now we come to Charlottesville in 2017, where alt-right white supremacists rebranded themselves on the online platform Discord. Their private discussions there they debated their differences and worked them out and get stronger. A group that infiltrated their chats from June to August revealed that their talk resembled the WELL more than a social media platform since it was about huddling together and coming to consensus.
My favorite chapter of this book was about the early scientific community’s discussions about monitoring and analyzing data from Covid in February and March of 2020, before the US had a single case. This took place via emails among public health officials and scientists, a group they called Red Dawn. “…doing it together, in addition to making them more productive, allowed them to feel as though they weren’t alone in their total commitment to science. The email chain provided the conditions for this feeling, for this work.”
“Red Dawn was a sanctuary at a moment of confusion and dread—a place to talk honestly and away from the public, to prepare a strategy, a battle plan… Other similar groups formed and became a place to talk honestly and away from the public, to prepare a strategy, a battle plan… In the absence of much official guidance or a national plan, these private networks activated like new radio frequencies, suddenly crackling with concern and advice… The quiet felt necessary and useful because, just as for the Red Dawn participants, so much was unsure and they needed a way to develop their thinking.”
A network of New York City doctors formed a private group “to band together even more tightly so they could coordinate their messaging.” One group was called the Brain Trust. “This is where we would develop a strategy for all the prime-time cable news programs so that we could tell people the truth at a time when the government was downplaying the virus.”
“The scientific method is about being wrong so that adjustments can be made. It’s about tweaking a hypothesis by a few degrees. And the only way, many of these experts told me, to respect that process, while also providing useful information to the public, was to come together, like the ER doctors in their DM groups, in a closed network with people they trusted.
“In those first months of the pandemic, science was happening very publicly. Starting in the 1990s, in the field of physics, researchers in an increasing number of fields had been posting their papers to special online servers before they went through the peer-review process, which could take months. The pressures of a pandemic and the need to rapidly share new information made it even more necessary for research to get out before undergoing the strict vetting of a top-tier journal. And prestige publications like Science and Nature didn’t want to look as if they were holding back important findings, so even they began asking their contributors to post on these online repositories first to give the public and other scientists immediate access. And still it didn’t seem quick enough—there could be a week’s lag time after submitting—so some scientists were just sharing their papers directly on Twitter. This is how, on February 29, the first sequencing of a COVID-19 genome in the United States came to be presented to the world: as a tweet.“
The final chapter of this book is about the Black Lives Matter movement. After many years of failing to get the hashtag to take off, the three founders realized that they were operating from crisis point to crisis point. Two years of nonstop protesting in Minneapolis had led to very little change; activism would swell and then subside, and in spite of all this expended energy, their objectives would come to seem too small in the face of more foundational problems.
A group called the Dream Defenders began to really connect with their community. They decided to disconnect from online interactions for several months. “They started listening. And what they heard surprised them. For one thing, as Rachel went door-to-door to talk to people in the poorer neighborhoods of Miami, she quickly found that the dream of defunding or abolishing the police was not a shared one.the work would have to be local and would have to start with showing people there was another way. They had to actively collect and build a constituency, as opposed to waiting for a moment of outrage.
“Phillip, the Dream Defenders founder, had a similar insight. For him, the experience of the Blackout had been a lesson in the varieties of power. Borrowing a concept from Joseph Nye, the political scientist, he now came to understand social media as a form of ‘soft power,”’a force that shapes culture through argument and story. But there was also ‘hard power,’ which Nye, in assessing the capacity of different nation-states, characterized as military and economic might. For movements, hard power was the ability to lobby for legislation, elect sympathetic political leaders, get resources allocated toward your cause. Social media, Phillip now saw more clearly, was good at building soft power. But when it came to hard power, it could do very little.
“Phillip, once he emerged from the Blackout in early 2016, even saw the advantage of cultivating a more secluded space for conversation and planning. Social media was about ‘followship and diffusion of responsibility.’ Real leadership would come off-line.”
* * *
We need a table where we can come together and share ideas.
Social movements are ultimately “limited in their actions and their ability to evolve and adapt because they rely on tools that only deal in binaries. When you can discern shades of difference, new strategies and alliances open up.”
“You have certain experiences in this world, they produce certain desires, those desires reproduce the world. Our reality today just keeps reproducing itself. If you can create different experiences that manifest different desires, then it’s possible that those will lead to the production of different worlds.”
“Radical change—change that strips off the stucco and gets to the girders, that offers a chance to see ourselves and our relationship to nature or to others in new ways—doesn’t start with yelling. It starts with deliberation, a tempo that increases, a volume set first at a whisper. How else can you begin to picture what doesn’t yet exist?
“… the internet, this network of networks, is where we live our lives in the twenty-first century. It has almost completely annihilated all those other modes of communication. So we need to ensure the possibility of those spaces apart, especially in a flattened, too-loud world that perceives dark corners only as dangerous. They are where the first inflections of progress can—and almost always do—occur. Change seems hard to conceive of otherwise. Because it is the act of entering into those closed or semi-closed circles that alters identity in a fundamental way. Facing that gray unending slab of reality seems less lonely, and chipping away at it less foolish. You become something else: a person at a table.”
Welcome and thank you for visiting! I’m Naomi – a mother, writer, creative soul, and avid reader. I aim to share my thoughts and ideas to inspire positive change that will help you live an authentic and caring life.
Poetic Aperture is for me and for you. I often write just to process the swirling activity inside, but I also hope to inspire COMPASSION, COURAGE, and WONDER in you and support you on your journey of elevating the everyday.
I am a rabbinical student at the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York. I am fortunate to have an amazing 15-year-old daughter and a supportive husband of 22 years.
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… reading in bed, candles, diving into a new project, learning something new, crisp crunchy leaves underfoot, hearing my daughter laugh, starting a new book, finishing a book, organizing, floating on my back in the pool and staring at the sky, writing, craft supplies, photography, poetry, a good massage, knowing smiles, singing along to the radio, getting things done, comfy bedding, hot chocolate, paying attention to the details, libraries and bookstores, campfires, astronomy, finding beauty in the everyday, impromptu road trips, quiet, journaling, learning about myself, waking up and reading in bed (preferably with coffee), home, interesting flowers, affection, Sleepytime tea, capturing a moment in time with my camera, true laughter, soft rain.
“There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart. Pursue those.” ~ Michael Nolan
