More good books

Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life, Eric Greitens

Forager's Harvest, Samuel Thayer

Restoration Agriculture: Real World Permaculture for Farmers, Mark Shepard

Stanford Rape Letters

https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra?utm_term=.bgdzlXxzE#.fv802xO0M

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2852614-Letter-from-Brock-Turner-s-Father.html

http://johnpavlovitz.com/2016/06/06/to-brock-turners-father-from-another-father/

Mansplaining

Mansplaining video.

So funny and so spot on.

How do we as women interrupt the cycle?

good books

Before I forget to document them, I want to write down some good books I've been reading.

Fire Logic, Laurie Marks

Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks

Moghul Buffet, Cheryl Benard

10% Human: How Your Bodies Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness, Alanna Collen

Back in Control: A spine surgeon's roadmap out of chronic pain, David Hanscom, MD

Gandhi the Man:How one man changed himself to change the world, Eknath Easwaran

Songs of the Humpback Whale

I recently read a very thought-provoking book titled Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult.  It is a story about trauma told in the five voices of five different main characters including four who interweave to tell the story chronologically and one who starts at the conclusion and tells the story in reverse chronological order until she gets to the beginning of the timeline while everyone else's narrative is concluding.

I haven't really digested it all.  Hearing the story from five people's perspective, one in reverse, is fascinating as is the theme of unresolved trauma.  Perhaps all trauma remains at some level unresolved.  Perhaps that's what makes it traumatic- our very lack of ability to digest it completely or to fully understand each other or ourselves in it.  Listening to these five characters struggling to understand themselves and engage with each other exposed them- their vulnerabilities, their hopes, their griefs, their best attempts at living well.

This is a book which I will want to read again.

On Freedom

"Now that we're finally free,
I get why we fought so hard.
The real gift isn't freedom.
It's what we get to do with it.
I don't know about you,
but I never could just sit on a beach anyway."
-Nikita, S4:E6

Daughter, Have I Told You?

Met an author, Rachel Coyne.  Both our sons were playing in the same basketball practices.  I checked out her books and was taken with her poem, Daughter, Have I Told You?

Daughter, have I told you?

You are of women whose words are wildflowers.
Whose stomachs are soft hills 
and whose shoulders are the river's marshy end.

You are of women with feet as heavy as the gray stones of the riverbed,
and hair as thick and tangled as the prairie.

Our arms are the tree trunks
and our faces are the horizon
where wheat will coax the sun to sleep.

Daughter, have I told you?

You are of women whose hands are the harvest.
Whose hearts are the deep, deep lakes
and whose voices are the silver birch of the woodland.

You are of women with tongues long like the river winding out tales as old as the Mississippi.

Our lives are the solid earth beneath you feet
and our embrace. like the paths of the buffalo, circles the heart's land.

Daughter, have I told you?

These women, like your momma and grandmama, 
will stretch up from the earth, dark and strong like trees.

And you, little one,
will sit in our branches
and feel cool wind blow.