spirituality

“The Fire Trail” by Maureen Larkin Ustenci

June 4, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: A Mother’s Journey Through Grieving

Recommended to me by: the author

Maureen Larkin Ustenci lucidly shares the raw shock and shattering grief of losing her beloved only son to sudden death in a mountain lake just after he graduated from high school. She also shares joyful stories of raising him in multicultural Berkeley with her Turkish husband. This is a love letter to her son Efejon, to her husband Mustafa, to the city of Berkeley, and to the community that surrounded them and bore them up in their terrible grief.

The book moved me to tears and also delighted me with its depiction of family members, friends, traveling in Turkey, and raising a child who never stopped talking. It dips into the depths and rises again, acknowledging both unbearable pain and the people who reached out again and again to help them bear it with kindness, generosity, and warmth.

Available at Amazon.

“Katarína” by Kathryn Winter

April 16, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Folk dancing with the author

I was chatting with Kathryn at a folk dance party, and explained how my grandparents had to leave Germany because of the Holocaust. She brightened in recognition and said, “I was a hidden child during the Holocaust.” Like Anne Frank, but she lived. I said, “That must have been hard!” She said no, at the time she thought the work camps were like summer camps.

Her lightly fictionalized memoir is beautifully written, a series of child’s-eye vignettes full of details about life in Slovakia at the time. It is also harrowing to read. Kathryn shows difficult events and physical and emotional pain in response, but doesn’t dwell on it. The child Katarína feels both joy and sorrow strongly, and keeps moving forward with fierce resilience. She survived through both inner strength and luck, through care from others and a loving response to care.

Highly recommended. In this time of rising fascism we need to understand fascism’s detailed cruelty to a child. This happened in living memory. We are well along on the road to it happening again. It needs to stop.

Available via Biblio.com

“When the Angels Left the Old Country” by sacha lamb

March 12, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Soph and Becca.

This is a book about an angel and a demon (and some humans). A Jewish angel, a Jewish demon, and Jewish queer humans, emigrating by ship from a tiny shtetl in Poland to New York.

The angel is obviously, essentially Good, and at the same time it can be oblivious, and its actions can have evil effects. The demon is selfish and encourages wickedness, and its actions can have ultimately good effects. They are conflicted within themselves, argue endlessly with each other, and love and need each other deeply. This complexity and debate around questions of good and evil, intent and action, are quintessentially Jewish, in contrast to a single clear polarizing answer.

Of course some immigrants were queer, and of course some of them would fall in love with each other. As a Jewish queer human myself, it was surprising and delightful to feel recognized in the world of this book, permeated with Yiddish phrases and Jewish mysticism.

The prose is a pleasure to read, tumbling from one scene to the next and only occasionally allowing the uncertainty and danger to ratchet too high. The outcome is satisfying neat, even if full repentance is a little unexpected.

Highly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.

“Ask for Horses” by Tina Tau

December 24, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Memoir of a Dream-Guided Life

Recommended to me by: The author is a friend

This book is both honest and kind. It looks directly at hard times and painful emotions, and maintains enough buoyancy and narrative flow to carry the reader forward without getting mired in pain. It holds the tension between personal autonomy and spiritual direction inclusively, without needing to choose one or the other. It looks tenderly at mistakes and stuck places, holding compassion for younger selves that were doing the best they could.

The included dreams are brief, powerful, mysterious. They are interpreted with gentle curiosity, an eye toward word play, and a willingness to explore new paths. “Dreams tell you something you don’t already know.” There are no fixed interpretations of dream symbols, and the dreamer is always in charge. Other people helping with a dream say, “If this were my dream,” offering rather than imposing interpretations.

The book pulled me through it, and I felt accompanied in some of my own life struggles. Recommended!

Available at Kelson Books and bookshop.org.

“As We Have Always Done” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

June 13, 2021 by Sonia Connolly 2 Comments

Subtitle: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resurgence

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist who has taught and lectured across Canada. With story and analysis, she carefully lays out how Nishnaabeg ways of living, learning, and experiencing are intrinsically suited to reestablish their communities and place-relationship that have been intentionally disrupted and stolen by colonialist settlers.

A single quote out of context doesn’t do justice to the way she steps out of whiteness to center the Nishnaabeg way of thinking and doing, but here is a taste.

Governance was made every day. Leadership was embodied and acted out every day. Grounded normativity isn’t a thing; it is generated structure born and maintained from deep engagement with Indigenous processes that are inherently physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Processes were created and practiced. Daily life involved making politics, education, health care, food systems, and economy on micro- and macro-scales. […] The structural and material basis of Nishnaabeg life was and is process and relationship—again, resurgence is our original instruction.

The book addresses kwe – the embodied experience of being an Indigenous woman – and the ways capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy have suppressed and damaged that experience. It also includes 2SQ – people who are Two Spirit and Queer.

I feel changed by reading this book. It affirms that there are right ways, sustainable ways of living, and Indigenous people still know and practice those ways. It supports my own search for connection to place and right ways to live. It reminds and teaches me that Indigenous people are brilliant modern thinkers and doers, interrupting the stereotypes of “primitive,” “lost,” and “in the past.”

Highly recommended!

Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation (pdf), an article by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson published in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson website

Available at bookshop.org.

“Mindful of Race” by Ruth King

April 30, 2021 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Subtitle: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out

In the Introduction, Ruth King shares the effects of race on her own body and her own family as a Black woman living in the south of the US. Insight meditation has helped her manage the effects of racism, and she has created trainings that help others cure the heart disease of racism.

Part 1, Diagnosis, analyzes racism. Her writing is direct and clear. Here is how racism affects Black people. Here is how it affects white people. We have dominant and subordinated identities, like a white woman who is also chronically ill, or a Jewish person who passes as white. Here is how we can begin to get honest with ourselves and others about race.

Part 2, Heart Surgery, teaches the basics of mindfulness meditation. Here is how to invite the body to settle. Here are many specific phrases to say silently to ourselves or others in metta (kindness) meditation. For example, “When you feel deep sorrow, hopelessness, and despair, I will stay with you. I will breathe with you.”

Part 3, Recovery, gives tools for creating racial affinity discussion groups and making progress in dislodging racism from our hearts. Throughout the book, she gives examples of how listening deeply and making time for our emotional responses allows us to move through them and reach our vulnerable hearts.

Unlike The Inner Work of Racial Justice by Rhonda Magee which moves very slowly and seems to be trying to convince skeptical white people, this book lays out the truth and assumes people will do the work to absorb it.

Highly recommended.

Ruth King’s website with more about her Mindful of Race training program.

Available at bookshop.org.