This has been an exhausting year and it’s not over yet! I’m trying to find small ways to find comfort and restoration. If you are feeling overwhelmed and exhausted too, maybe you need a good book — a literary bubble bath or book blanket?
For me, one of those books is “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” by Amy Tan. She has developed such an intense love and knowledge of the birds that visit her yard. Her wonder and awe at every new bird she encountered was palpable as was the sadness over any loss. And Amy Tan’s artwork is just as incredible as her writing. I happened to get this book at one of those perfect moments when my daughter was home from college and we discovered the free Merlin app for identifying bird songs and calls in our own backyard. We also got the game Wingspan as a gift. Suddenly our whole world was a comforting veil of birds with the rest of life and politics a distant (albeit persistent) murmur. And this was just one of several comforting bird books on my stack with others including “The Comfort of Crows” and the novel, “Crow Talk.”
“If there is anything I have learned these past six years, it is this: Each bird is surprising and thrilling in its own way. But the most special is the bird that pauses when it is eating, looks and acknowledges I am there, then goes back to what it was doing.” ~”The Backyard Bird Chronicles” by Amy Tan
I have also been trying to step away from gadgets, screens and social media to be more present in the real world. A great help in this endeavor has been the book “Inciting Joy” by Ross Gay. He spoke last year as a keynote speaker in conversation with Patrick Rosal at the Unbound Book Festival. I had read Gay’s “The Book of Delights” and “The Book of (More) Delights,” but he sparked something in me when he read out loud from “Inciting Joy” which is a book of essays that he wrote daily to explore the practice of “care” for one another. His writing is so beautiful even when writing about, or maybe especially when writing about, mundane things. His sense of the poetic comes through even in his essays.
“The luminous, mycelial tethers between us, our fundamental connection to one another, the raft through the sorrow, the holding through the grief joy is, reminds us, again and again, that we belong not to an institution or a party or a state or a market, but to each other. Needfully so.” ~”Inciting Joy” by Ross Gay
Another comforting book to take me out of my head and out of my world is “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” by Becky Chambers. This is the first of Chambers’ sci-fi series, Monk and Robot. Hundreds of years in the future, well after the human-built robots gained sentience and left the human cities for the wild, neither robots nor humans have seen each other. When one human (Dex) sets off on their own journey to discover what they long for, they encounter a robot (Mosscap), and the two set off together to find some answers. In this near-utopian sci-fi setting, Chambers explores what it really means to have a life of meaning and purpose. This is just such a nice read, like a warm cup of tea.
“Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I — we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?” ~”A Psalm for the Wild-Built” by Becky Chambers
These are just some of the things I find comfort in. What comforts you? If you would like to find more comforting reads, you can check out this list.
