sabbatical reflections: reading
16 Jan 2024while on sabbatical, i read way more than i had in a long time. grad school may have been the last time i read this much, but even in grad school, i’m not sure i read this much in this way. reading academic articles and books is really different than reading like this.
ok but the point is: i. love. reading.
i think i have loved reading ever since i could read and having so much spaciousness to read while on sabbatical reminded me of some parts of my love of reading i’d forgotten.
reading as a portal to other worlds
in my normal life, the most i read in a day is about an hour. i’m typically more in the 15-30 minute range. while at DR, i was reading typically 2 hours minimum, and sometimes in the 4-5 hour range. there is absolutely nothing like reading at that volume. reading, depending on what you’re reading, can often be a portal to other worlds (even if it’s just someone else’s experience of the world you already live in). this can happen regardless of how much you read.
but i find that when for a big portion of my conscious hours in a day, i can really end up swimming in another world. my view on the world i’m physically living in can take on some of the characteristics of the one i’m reading about. i begin to see things through the lens of the other world. i start to make connections between my world and the other world in ways that don’t have access to when so much of me is based in the physical world i’m living in. it’s honestly just a very cool experience.
making connections across books
in my non-sabbatical reading life of doing 15-60 minutes a day [see post about my winter reading practice], i’m typically reading one book a day. even though i try to be working my way through a fiction book, a non-fiction book, and a book of poetry all at once, i usually am only in one of them a day. on a good day, i’ll read one poem first and then get into my fiction or non-fiction.
on sabbatical, even though i was only typically only reading one book a day, because i was moving through books so quickly, the proximity of the worlds and insights of the different books was just way closer than it usually is. similar to the way swimming deeply in the world of a book allowed me to make more connections to the world i live in physically, when i read multiple books in close proximity, i’m able to make connections between them in new and deeper ways. there’s so many examples of this but i feel more excited right now to share about the actual books i read than get into a specific example about this. and who knows, maybe by sharing about all the books i read, an example of this interweaving will show up naturally.
the books i read on sabbatical
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown (still working on this one)
- Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others by Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky
- Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage by Paulo Freire
- Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung by Richard Katz
- The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry
the thread between the books i chose to dig into was the weaving together of land, trauma, healing and liberation. in the application letter i wrote for the fellowship, i was particularly excited about getting to reclaim some of my connection and closeness to land. at some point i hope to rekindle that connection to african (whatever that means(https://www.ft.com/content/c7e5e492-40ec-11e3-ae19-00144feabdc0)) soil, but land is still land and i wanted to begin to reconnected on the soil (at least the cultural soil) that raised me. and in that reconnection i hoped to find healing, as land does. and the healing needed is from trauma and the wounds of oppression (aka the opposite of liberation).
reading the books as fast as i did (about 1000 pages in a month), given what i was talking about with how the different worlds can blend together, was really supportive given my intention. i won’t get all the way into it, but here are some of the takeaways (in no particular order):
- land is living, just like the beings that live on/in it
- living is a traumatizing act
- the wounds of the european settlers that came to this soil is very much still being felt, both directly and indirectly. and it’s felt by everyone, including their descendants. and in some ways, it’s felt most intensely by their descendants because they lacked and lack sufficient healing techniques for healing from the traumatizing act that is being alive
- at first, i thought land only heals. but it doesn’t. it quakes and floods and dries up and gales. and it also heals, itself and others/us.
- there is healing possible on this soil for everyone who touches it
- the greatest healing is possible when people who know the land best are in right relationship with it. the rest of us will be better off if we can create as much room as possible for that to happen
- there is some healing that is only possible on the soil that your ancestors knew. and some of us will never have direct access to that healing. and that’s totally ok.
- being present to other people’s trauma can over time become its own type of trauma. that includes being around other people who are in a trauma bond with the land they live on
- contemporary western cultural healing modalities tend towards individualism, hierarchy, and exclusivity. at least this one african healing tradition, the dances of the kalahari desert’s kung people, tends towards collectivism and mutual relationality.
ok there is definitely more to share about all the reading i did but, yet again, now is the time to pause.
<- back to the full sabbatical reflection table of contents
words / writing / post-processing
1032w / 17+22min / 9min