Friends,

I woke up this morning (bravo) and immediately thought about the books I’ve returned to in my life. Some books live on shelves and collect dust over the years, while others sit in the center of my living room. These books are here to keep me on track. They serve as a reminder that I am more than a consumption machine and algorithm junkie, but instead a living and breathing human being with a system of morality built into it. Yes, I forget this some days. New York will do that to a person.

For a few years now, I’ve practiced returning to my living room book collection. In the same way I read old journals, I flip through the pages of these books to find underlined sentences and notes. If I’m lucky, I’ll grab a book passed down to me and find someone else’s handwriting with excerpts they thought I must read.

Taking the time to do this allows me to become more aware of my circumstances and springs me into a space where I can begin the work of reflection. Recently, I watched an episode of Lessons in Chemistry where the character Calvin Evans said, “A book never changes, but we do.” Since our circumstances and change are at the heart of our ability to create and share, I thought I’d begin to archive excerpts from my living room collection.

In 2021, a dear friend recommended the book, Women Who Run With the Wolves by Carissa Pinkola Estes. Through the commotion of life, I return to these excerpts often.

• Stop running the milk train. Do the work of turning toward home. […] It is not exactly the rightness of a person or thing or its wrongness that causes the theft of our soulskins, it is the cost of these things to us. It is what it costs us in time, energy, observation, attention, hovering, prompting, instructing, teaching, training. These motions of psyche are like cash withdrawals from the psychic savings account. The issue is not about these energic cash withdrawals themselves, for these are important of life’s give and take. But it is being overdrawn that causes the loss of the skin, and the paling and dulling of one’s most acute instincts. It is lack of further deposits of energy, acknowledgment, ideas, and excitement that causes a woman to feel she is psychically dying.

• A great philosopher prince named Shotoku Taishi lived in Japan at the turn of the sixth century. He taught, among other things, that one must do psychic work in both the inner and outer worlds. But even more so, he taught tolerance for every human, every creature, and every emotion. The balanced valuing of emotion is certainly an act of self-respect. […] All emotion, even rage, carries knowledge, insight, what some call enlightenment. Our rage can, for a time, become a teacher … a thing not to be rid of so fast, but rather something to climb the mountain for, something to personify via various images in order to learn from, deal with internally, shape into something useful in the world as a result, or else let it go back down to dust.

• Even if you had the most wonderful mother in the world, you may eventually have more than one. As I have often told my own daughters, “You are born to one mother, but if you are lucky, you will have more than one. And among them all you will find most of what you need.” Your relationships with todas las madres, the many mothers, will most likely be ongoing ones, for the need for guidance and advisory is never outgrown, nor, from the point of view of women’s deep creative life, should it ever be.

What books do you return to often?

Would you enjoy weekly excerpts from my living room collection?

Xx,

Bri