ActiveConsciousness.com -- Active Consciousness: The groundbreaking book by Amy Lansky on consciousness, meditation, and synchronicity, named as one of The Top 5 Books That Will Change the Way You Think! Ongoingness: Sarah Manguso on Time, Memory, Beginnings and Endings, and the True Measure of a Life Filled with Aliveness by Maria Popova “Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments — an inability to accept life as ongoing.” Some of humanity’s most celebrated writers and artists have reaped, and extolled, the creative benefits of keeping a diary. For John Steinbeck, journaling was a tool of discipline and a hedge against self-doubt; for Virginia Woolf, a way to “loosen the ligaments” of creativity; for André Gide, a conduit to “spiritual evolution”; for Anaïs Nin, who remains history’s most dedicated diarist, the best way to “capture the living moments.” Joining the canon of insightful meta-diarists is Sarah Manguso with Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (public library) — a collection of fragmentary, piercing meditations on time, memory, the nature of the self, and the sometimes glorious, sometimes harrowing endeavor of filling each moment with maximum aliveness while simultaneously celebrating its presence and grieving its passage. I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention.
The Well of Being: An Extraordinary Children’s Book for Grownups about the Art of Living with Openhearted Immediacy by Maria Popova A lyrical invitation to awaken from the trance of the limiting stories we tell ourselves and just live. “This is the greatest damn thing about the universe,” Henry Miller wrote in his magnificent meditation on the meaning of existence, “that we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can’t grasp it.” That’s what French-born, Baltimore-based artist Jean-Pierre Weill explores in The Well of Being (public library) — an extraordinary “children’s book for adults,” three years in the making, that peers into the depths of the human experience and the meaning of our existence, tracing how the stories we tell ourselves to construct our personae obscure the truth of our personhood, and how we can untell them in order to just be. Our existence is not an accident but a mystery… We can entrust ourselves to this mystery, for we are part of it. Weill writes: We organize our circumstances into stories, stories we pick up along the way and carry with us.
amazon amazon The Believer Logger - Reading Bhanu Kapil — Reading Bhanu Kapil Reading Bhanu Kapil In honor of the publication of Bhanu Kapil’s newest book Ban en Banlieue, just published by Nightboat Books, the writers Amina Cain, Douglas A. Martin, Sofia Samatar, Kate Zambreno, and Jenny Zhang gathered together in a conversation to talk about the work of the British-Punjabi writer, who teaches in the Department of Writing and Poetics at Naropa University. The conversation will be published in three parts. Day Two Day Three Day 1: Encounters AMINA CAIN: The first book I read by Bhanu Kapil was Incubation: A Space for Monsters, which a friend lent me because she thought I’d like it. From the book: “When I was born, they did not know whether to wrap me in a pink blanket or a green one. JENNY ZHANG: My first Bhanu was a chapbook from the Belladonna* chaplet series, “From The Wolf Girls of Midnapure,” a sort of precursor to the full length book, Humanimal, which I read immediately after. DOUGLAS A. DAM: I met Bhanu when she was brought to teach at Goddard College.
amazon The Tapping Solution: A Revolutionary System for Stress-Free Living: Nick Ortner: 9781401939410: Amazon.com: Books